Understanding Society home

Conference reflections 2015

For those who couldn’t make it to the Understanding Society Scientific Conference 2015; abstracts, photos and videos from the event are now available.

Picture_credit__anthony_cullen_%c2%a9_ajc8374

In July 2015, Understanding Society held its biennial conference at the University of Essex. The event attracted hundreds of delegates with an interest in longitudinal studies; attendees included survey methodologists, health researchers, policymakers and PhD students.

The three-day event covered traditional parallel sessions as well as drop-in sessions, poster sessions and a youth data consultation. And, for the first time this year, the abstracts were published in the international journal, Longitudinal and Life Courses Studies

Highlights by day

Photo gallery available

All conference photography is on Flickr

Video content now live

All video content can be found on the study’s Youtube channel, but timings have been given to indicate the start of the presentations.

  • David Walker introduces himself as the new Chair for the Understanding Society Governing Board (starts at 8:40)

Presenters and visitors give feedback

Nicky Rogers, Senior Research Officer for the Office of National Statistics (ONS) said, “This is the first time I have been and it has been absolutely fascinating. There has been a very high standard of presentations and it’s been really interesting looking at the results from other longitudinal studies because we rely on Cenus data every ten years. However, Understanding Society has a broad breath of questions which focus on attitudes – which is really useful.”

Dr Ian Shuttleworth, Queen’s University of Belfast said, “I’ve learnt a lot myself by going to see other presentations and I am looking forward to feeding this information back to my own researchers and post-graduates. Social mobility was of the main areas that I was interested in at this conference.

Dr Vanessa Gash from City University said, “This conference has been very well organised; I got a good amount of feedback for my presentation because there was enough time for questions. I also think the facilities have been really good this year. It’s been in a space where everyone can interact with each other during the breaks.”

Professor Lucinda Platt from the London School of Economics said, “I really like the conference this year because there have been a variety of activities and think the plenaries occurring at the beginning and the end gives the event a nice shape. The sessions have been very coherent and the existence of the drop-in sessions is an innovative idea. The poster session room has had a nice atmosphere and I like the fact that is a scoring sheet and poster prize.”

Tobias Schmidt of Deutsche Bundesbank commented, “A nice addition to this conference has been the drop-in sessions, workshops and consultations. I work for the German Wealth Survey and its conference tends to solely focus on how the survey is run and set up. However, this event gives users more chances to see how they can use the data in the best way.”

Antje Jantsch who travelled from the Martin Luther University of Halle said, “This is the first time I have attended this conference and think the event has a welcoming atmosphere. It has been a good opportunity to present my poster which shares my research about the subjective wellbeing of regions in the country.”

Workshop presentations

During the conference, there were a collection of workshops delivered by specialist trainers.

To stay in touch about future conferences and events, you can: