We must rescue social science research from obscurity

The evolving conversation around fake news and potential solutions

The unique challenges of making qualitative research more transparent

Being into the arts improves wellbeing and makes us more generous

The experts strike back! How economists are being proved right on Brexit

The way politicians use language has always been of interest to linguists.

A decade on from the collapse of Northern Rock which heralded the financial crisis in the UK, the productivity trends are still alarming.

There’s a huge debate going on in social science right now.

Facilitating mobility from non-regular to regular employment is key to sustainable economic growth. This truth was recognized in the revitalization plan announced by the Prime Minister’s Office in 2014, which included specific measures to improve the working conditions of nonregular workers and help them shift into regular employment.

Those working in the education profession, or associated with it, know that teachers have always had to wear many hats.

Most social scientists in the ad world work in market and consumer research or strategy and collect and analyze qualitative, quantitative, demographic and psychographic data for their clients to target campaigns or find out what will appeal to certain people.

Ensuring that UK-based researchers can continue to work closely with European partners after Brexit has been described as a “very high priority” by the chief executive designate of the country’s new funding body, but he warned that it was “too early to speculate” about what the future framework for collaboration might look like.

In his robust defence of the current fee regime on 20 July, universities minister Jo Johnson returned to the accelerated degrees which he last mentioned in February.

Our lives benefit from social networks: the contact and dialogue between family, friends, colleagues and neighbours.

When it comes to health, a new study suggests that marriage no longer gives you much of an advantage.

Pseudo-public spaces – large squares, parks and thoroughfares that appear to be public but are actually owned and controlled by developers and their private backers – are on the rise in London and many other British cities, as local authorities argue they cannot afford to create or maintain such spaces themselves.

For the first time ever the BBC has revealed just how much it pays its pool of celebrity talent.

Brits working for firms like Uber and Deliveroo in the so-called gig economy could soon be afforded some key employment benefits following the publication of a Government-ordered review on workers' rights.

British businesses must break their silence on the under-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic groups (BAME) in key roles, according to new research from professional management body the CMI and the British Academy of Management.

Joy might appear to be my counsellor or my life coach, but the conversation I'm having is actually with a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to track emotions and provide mental health support - all through Facebook Messenger.

Sometimes we look at social change as a grand idea where we visualise change in global categories of climate and class.

Scientists are increasingly recognizing a moral imperative to collaborate with the communities they study, and the practical benefits that result.

Jack Grieve, a linguist at Birmingham University, uses Twitter to study regional patterns in English.

Imminent developments such as self-driving vehicles, 5G and virtual reality will require a radical shift in the way our networks perform and how they are maintained.

Britain’s recent general election has been the first step towards a long-overdue public debate on the social consequences of austerity and growing socio-economic inequality.

Previously, most social science was based on little more than informed guesswork given the messiness of the world and the imperfections of underlying data.

Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber are the authors of “The Enigma of Reason,” a new book from Harvard University Press.

The cost of higher education is rising perilously.

Over the past decade, most researchers have trended away from climate doomsdayism.

The word "millennial" has become synonymous with the young - but evidence suggests that they are starting to reject it.

With billions of users and hundreds of billions of tweets and posts every year, social media has brought big data to social science.

PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and lobby group TheCityUK published a blueprint for transforming the UK's financial sector post-Brexit on Thursday.

The surprising results of the 2017 election were strongly related to both age and education, with university students one of most heavily Labour-leaning groups.

The June general election in the UK has put student finance squarely back on the political agenda. The Labour Party’s election promise to abolish tuition fees proved popular with young voters, presumably particularly with young students and graduates.

On the fourth floor of London’s 1 Victoria Street, a science-based start-up is in the throes of being born. Under the watchful eye of Sir Mark Walport, its CEO-designate, and Rebecca Endean, its strategy director, a twenty-strong team of BEIS officials and secondees from existing funding agencies are hard at work translating part three of the freshly-minted Higher Education & Research Act into operational reality.

A new research project led by academics at the University of Sheffield will examine potential sustainable solutions to the ongoing crisis within the UK’s social care system.

Britain’s vote to leave the EU was the result of widespread anti-immigration sentiment, rather than a wider dissatisfaction with politics, according to a major survey of social attitudes in the UK.

Starting on July 1, the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS) will no longer give ministers and officials a sneak peek at its statistics before they are made public.

You know those police dramas, where the detective stares at a clue for ages before suddenly realising he was looking in the wrong place and missing the real story?

Wacky job titles aren’t new.

The need for decisive action to tackle online extremism is clear.

Social media can be an invaluable source of information for police when managing major disruptive events, new research from Cardiff University has shown.

About three million EU citizens living in the UK would be allowed to stay after Brexit, Theresa May has proposed.

The results of the 2017 teaching excellence framework (TEF) have been released, with more than 130 UK universities and other higher education institutions being awarded gold, silver or bronze ratings for the quality of their teaching.

In his forthcoming book, The Case Against Education, economist Bryan Caplan argues that most education does not really add human capital or skills commensurate with its time or cost.

Whilst there has been much debate on the ethics of using social media posts in research, a comprehensive search of studies from around the globe only identified 11 that have explored the views of social media users on employing such research methods, and as few as six which considered the views of researchers.

police commissioner has suggested that civilians with gun licences could be allowed to use private weapons to defend their community against terrorists, in comments that have been rejected by a senior officer.

This has been a strange election. First, it was ruled out; then it was called.

Government talk about an economy that “works for all” skims over how that can be achieved. It rarely means “for all regions”, since the UK’s social and economic structure is not evenly spread across the country.

Alexander Peysakhovich is technically a behavioral economist, but he bristles a bit at being defined that narrowly.

The cost of childcare can be crippling for families, with an average part-time nursery place now costing up to £6,000 a year.

A new pilot project, designed by a Cambridge researcher and supported by the Nature family of journals, will evaluate the value of sharing the code behind published research.

Universities should encourage their academics to patent rather than publish their research so that it has the greatest impact on society, according to a university vice-president.

The Conservatives have used “sleight of hand” to justify grammar school expansion plans in their party manifesto, a senior academic has claimed. According to the election manifesto, credible research shows “slightly more children from ordinary working class families attend selective schools as a percentage of the school intake compared to non-selection schools”.

The Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats have all announced commitments for NHS spending in their manifestos.

New research shows how reducing carbon emissions can prevent billions of people from being exposed to unheard-of changes in climate in the coming decades.

If you took Psychology 101 in college, you probably had to enroll in an experiment to fulfill a course requirement or to get extra credit. Students are the usual subjects in social science research — made to play games, fill out questionnaires, look at pictures and otherwise provide data points for their professors’ investigations into human behavior, cognition and perception.

UK scientists worried about how Brexit will affect their funding received a boost this week, when the country's three main national parties pledged long-term targets to raise research spending.

Azerbaijan is undergoing a protracted economic crisis, which its authoritarian Aliyev regime is having difficulty tackling.

Should PhD supervisors publish with their students? Should PhD students include their supervisors as co-authors on articles emanating from their PhD projects?

The spread of false information has always been with us, but it is something we face every day in the digital age.

Measurements at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory showed that the concentration of heat-trapping CO2 in the atmosphere had exceeded 410 parts per million.

The sixth graders at Newton Bateman, a public elementary school here with a classic red brick facade, know the Google drill.

Table football, ping pong and hammocks are no substitute for job security or work satisfaction and actually annoy many staff, a leading academic has warned.

New social science research shows a correlation between illegal gold mining and the spread of malaria.

Is the selfie culture coming into serious academic research?

Citizens receiving a basic monthly income as part of a radical Finnish pilot scheme have seen a reduction in their stress levels, an official leading the trial has said.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former research assistant of mine, would not strike most people as a revolutionary.

In attempting to reduce human rights abuses, both academics and practitioners focus on two mechanisms that can, at least at times, lead to respect for human rights.

A person of true culture, with a steady vision of the ideal of the good society, would probably loathe the notion of spin, find himself appalled by the pressure exerted upon him by special interests, be nauseated by the corruption of his colleagues who enrich themselves while claiming to be wily for the public good.

In her first statement as Prime Minister, Theresa May sympathised with those ‘ordinary’ families who ‘just about manage’, with mortgages, the cost of living, and job insecurity, recognising these families’ struggle for control over their lives. In this way, the ‘jams’ became the new ‘squeezed middle’.

We all like to think we are in charge of the decisions we make.

Researchers will today begin a three-year project to design housing for refugee camps in extreme climates where temperatures range from 45C to -10C.

Studies show that people who spend more time on social media sites feel more socially isolated than those who don't.

Politics has always been vicious. “War without bloodshed,” Chairman Mao called it, but Theresa May has seen a chance for a political bloodletting at least, calling a snap election in June that promises to significantly increase the Conservatives’ parliamentary majority and could rout Labour altogether.

Netflix’s new talk show, “Bill Nye Saves the World,” debuted the night before people around the world joined together to demonstrate and March for Science.

Theresa May is under mounting pressure to remove foreign students from the immigration figures after MPs warned that her refusal to do so is damaging Britain’s world class universities.

Awkward people are neither better, nor worse than anyone else — they simply see the world differently and have to exert more effort to master social graces that come intuitively to others.

The idea of analysing culture seems irritatingly vague and slippery to anybody who normally uses a spreadsheet to study the world.

For decades, many social scientists have promoted the view that conservatives are particularly closed-minded—that people on the political Right are more tribal in their thinking patterns, more vulnerable to propaganda that confirms their pre-existing ideas, and more skeptical of inconvenient facts.

When Per Espen Stoknes looked at polls going back to 1989 assessing the level of public concern about climate change in 39 different countries, he found a surprising pattern in the data.

A group of academics believes it has found a means by which to quantify how successful, or unsuccessful, Britain's final Brexit deal is, once talks conclude in March 2019.

In recent weeks, tensions over European immigration and liberal values have culminated in a direct attack on the Central European University in Budapest.

Children who spend more time social networking online feel less happy with a number of different aspects of their lives, according to new research by the University of Sheffield.

New social science research looks at how to get more low-income students into college.

When Hungary’s government passed a law last week which was effectively intended to shut down Budapest’s Central European University, it surely anticipated that there would be a backlash.

“Latino immigration is generally associated with decrease in homicide victimization,” Purdue University sociologist Michael Light writes in the journal Social Science Research.

Artificial intelligence (AI) will bring about huge innovation to several sectors of the economy, including health care, predicts Aaron Levie, the co-founder and CEO of enterprise cloud company Box.

He’s been called “punctuation’s answer to Banksy”. A self-styled grammar vigilante who spends his nights surreptitiously correcting apostrophes on shop signs and billboards.

With an ageing population, a rise in long-term conditions, growing health inequalities, and a lack of political will to ensure that funding is increased in line with demand, the UK's National Health Service has been brought to breaking point.

Essays will be marked down unless they use 'gender-sensitive language', students at a British university have been told.

A study led by an Engineering Doctorate student at the University of Surrey has found that the carbon footprint of crime over the last 20 years has fallen.

The accusation that academia is disproportionately left-wing and liberal is not a new one.

The concept of love at first sight is the subject of sonnets and songs dating back centuries, and remains a popular trope in rom-coms and on television.

People exposed to entertainment television are more likely to vote for populist politicians according to a new study co-authored by an economist at Queen Mary University of London.

Growing up in a hungry household in the first couple of years of life can hurt how well a child performs in school years later, according to a new study.

The government’s focus has been on making a success of a small number of big cities – but there are 36.1 million people who don’t live in them, on the outside looking in.

Policy makers throughout the world, guided by behavioral scientists, are devising ways to steer people toward decisions deemed to be in their best interests.

Abundant social science evidence on everything from global warming denial to moon landing conspiracy theories shows that simply giving people more information won't make them change their minds when they have strong preexisting beliefs.

Data is an enabler.