VOICES JANE ELLIOTT Increasing understanding
The new Chief Executive of the ESRC, Professor Jane Elliott, talks to Society Now about her fascination for research, the priorities and main challenges for the ESRC, and how social science can tell us more about ourselves, our families and societies
What inspired you to go into academia? My main motivation was my love of the research process. I was first introduced to data analysis in my second year at Cambridge by the late Cathie Marsh. She was pioneering at the time in emphasising the importance of students having the chance to analyse real data. Then in my third year my dissertation was on the impact of divorce on children, using a questionnaire to find out the perspective of over 350 students on having divorced parents and their attitudes towards divorce and its impact on the family. My supervisor Martin Richards was very supportive of me doing an ambitious empirical project, which was unusual at the time, and it paid off as I won the University Gladstone Memorial Prize. I enjoyed the process of designing the questionnaire, collecting the data, analysing it using SPSS software and writing it up.
“ I have a longstanding interest in
gender and inequalities – in a family setting and in the work environment
Then towards the end of my third year there was a job advertised at the psychiatry department, again analysing data but with a much larger dataset – the Health and Lifestyle Survey. That really got me started on an applied research career and in the early years I worked on several different projects, including one led by Martin Richards that focused on the impact of divorce on adults and children using both quantitative and qualitative approaches. My involvement with the ESRC goes back
to working on data from the Social Change in Economic Life Initiative in the late 1980s with Jill Rubery, and then in the mid-90s I worked on an ESRC project on ‘Putting qualifications to work’ – led by Angela Dale. It made use of the National Child Development Study as well as the Samples of Anonymised Records from the Census. I registered for a part-time PhD, in parallel with that project. In the early 2000s I applied for an ESRC grant
to lead a study on gender segregation in Britain and the United States. It was very beneficial for my career – it gave me the opportunity to pursue a piece of research and direct it myself. What drew you to the particular areas of research you have specialised in?
I have a longstanding interest in gender and inequalities – both in a family setting and in the
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work environment, which led me to carry out research in these areas. For instance, when I researched divorce I was interested in whether any detrimental impact on children might be due to the poverty that often results from family breakup and the gender differences in the distribution of resources after divorce, rather than a result of potential conflict and lack of continued contact with both parents. As society changes, and possibly as you get older yourself, your interests change. I’ve become interested in issues around successful ageing, as well as looking at narrative and identities – how people construct an identity for themselves around the narratives they tell about their lives. These narratives are shaped and reworked as we live our lives, so it’s important to get an understanding of time, and change through time. Of course, this fits well with my interest in longitudinal studies as well, where time and change is a core concept. Why did you choose to move from being a researcher to your new role as Chief Executive of the ESRC? Over the last ten years my work has become
more focused on creating excellent research resources for other people, and facilitating both qualitative and quantitative research. As part of my role as Director of the Centre for Longitudinal Studies I also needed to keep in touch with the needs of policymakers and analysts in government departments. These elements are actually very similar to the role of the ESRC, so in some ways I don’t feel it’s such a big change. The other thing I think I bring to the ESRC is a real love of data and high quality evidence. We’ll
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