Author Archives: Vicki Bolton

The tax payer buys some data. Now who owns it? A private research company.

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Vicki Bolton

It turns out that when the Government commissions research (including data collection) from a private research company, it is not standard practice to require, as part of the contract, that the data is later placed in the UK Data Archive.  … Continue reading →

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Who should be responsible for policy evaluation?

Posted on January 29, 2013 by Vicki Bolton

The Guardian has published a note by Nick Axford on when a charity might wish to carry out a randomised controlled trial. Axford works for a charity which promotes the use of evidence in designing services for children and families.  … Continue reading →

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First, select your cohort

Posted on January 25, 2013 by Vicki Bolton

The first of the national cohort studies, the one begun one week in March 1946 has been the subject of a series of Radio 4 interviews and a newspaper article this week.  A cohort study follows a group of people (the cohort) … Continue reading →

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“…part of what I call the Big Society…”

Posted on January 14, 2013 by Vicki Bolton

The Prime Minister has gone and brought it up again.  I confess that I’m a little slow off the mark, and this is actually from before Christmas (thank you to George Disney for pointing it out to me) but I … Continue reading →

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Time use surveys and volunteering

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Vicki Bolton

I’ve been reading up on the available (UK) time use data on volunteering and found a short technical paper produced by Kimberley Fisher from the Centre for Time Use Research.  The paper’s interesting in its own right, but here’s what … Continue reading →

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Having trouble funding your longitudinal data collection…?

Posted on May 2, 2012 by Vicki Bolton

My friend Francis Brearley was running into just such a problem and has decided to try crowd-sourcing i.e. asking many people to fund a little of the project.  (If you’re in the US, you’ll be familiar with the technique through … Continue reading →

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Infant feeding again. And peer reviewed journals again. Resulting in an overlong post. Again.

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Vicki Bolton

According to the Guardian (and the Daily Mail, Channel 4 News etc etc) we’ve learned that babies fed on demand ‘do better at school’.  This makes me sound smug but I learned this a year ago when the first author, … Continue reading →

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AntiSocial Science: ‘research has revealed’ that we shouldn’t trust a press release

Posted on November 15, 2011 by Vicki Bolton

Research has also revealed some fairly predictable stuff about the best laid plans of mice and men.  There was briefly the promise that I might get paid to blog, but it evaporated, so my blog gets the benefit.  This was … Continue reading →

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Volunteering, social class and some other things

Posted on September 14, 2011 by Vicki Bolton

The NCVO/VSSN Researching the Voluntary Sector Conference took place in London last week.  Many of the big names were there, but a lot of the stuff I found most interesting came from Jon Dean, a doctoral researcher at the University … Continue reading →

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Peer reviewed article ‘wrong’ shock

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Vicki Bolton

Dave Johns at Slate has written an interesting piece on self-publication and peer review, using a recent study about ‘social contagion’ as a peg.  I wrote a post back in March about some of the pitfalls of peer review.  In … Continue reading →

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