Social Sciences (General)
Research Topic
Language: English
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- How do we design public-serving autonomous systems to be fair and inclusive?
- Promoting a learning culture and maximising learning from challenging experiences
- How can the UK academic sector and policy makers improve connections between those who understand and use analysis and land use decision makers who would benefit from these insights?
- How can we better understand the integrity (i.e. accuracy, completeness, and consistency) and use of Population Movement data?
- What research and social experimentation can quantify harms and impacts of harmful online practices with a view to develop best practice principles and regulation?
- What behavioural and attitudinal considerations can be mapped in this area and how do we encourage good behaviours across organisations?
- What human systems are resilient to impacts from AI and which are less so?
- How can ‘systems science’ be used by government and regulators to improve their understanding, making their policies better targeted and more effective? How can ‘behavioural science’ be used to influence the behaviour of key stakeholders (regulators, businesses and/or policymakers) to achieve better policy outcomes?
- How do we improve representation and diversity of the digital workforce? How do we better understand the challenges and opportunities for inclusion across different social groups, taking into account: ethnicity, gender, age, disability status, regional difference? How do we make policies that support equitable progression and reward across the sector?
- Where ODA intervention outcomes cannot be monetised, can they be quantified?
- How do we better understand the impact of the past, the pressures on the present, and the changes of the future when understanding water and the environment?
- What role does HSE have in assuring the trust of communities in new and emerging technologies in the energy transition?
- How can we design and embed robust, cross-cutting indicators of, and improve our understanding of, human, animal, plant, and environmental health in systems under pressure from climate change?
- What are the likely changes to our agricultural sector following COVID-19 and how can the agricultural system transition be best guided towards a sustainable trajectory while ensuring food security?
- What is the best way to model trade-offs and synergies across multiple environmental, social, and economic goals resulting from land use and land management?
- How can we develop pathways towards net zero that are socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable? What is the range of viable solutions, and what are the associated co-benefits and trade-offs? This includes developing spatially explicit models and tools to inform decisions at the landscape level, including prioritisation of conflicting land use demands
- Equality and diversity: How do protected characteristics and socio-demographic differences impact upon interactions with the justice system? How can we better understand and account for population-level differences, experiences and inequalities in our policies, particularly for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) individuals?
- Data Science and Decisions - How can MOD harness the benefits of data science? How do we build trust in automated systems? How do we integrate multiple sources of information with differing levels of uncertainty and represent this effectively and efficiently to busy decision makers?
- Nature and prevalence of links between SOC and drug trafficking / modern slavery Understanding when and where criminal or terrorist behavior is likely to occur, how to deter it, and associated ethical questions.
- How legal migrant workers are recruited into which markets and their characteristics How the supply of foreign workers interacts with indigenous labour supplies, local skills gaps and retraining programmes.
- Changing world: How have evolutions in our statistical system (such as the greater focus on administrative sources for statistics) influenced how statistics are produced, used, and valued? How may advances in wider society (such as the increasing sophistication of large language models) influence how statistics are produced, used, and valued?
- What can we learn from COVID-19 about helping local areas to be more resilient to economic, and other, shocks? And what is the impact of changes in demand for land, such as office, retail, housing etc in particular locations?
- How will public attitudes be affected? Are individuals, cities or communities motivated by the drop in emission levels resulting from reduced travel? Are they more or less fearful of ambitious decision making to protect the climate? What opportunities does this present the UK
- Space and place: How do the social and material constructs of space affect interactions with the justice system? How can place-based understanding and approaches account for factors that influence human behaviour and decisions?
- How can we develop and exploit new methodologies to ensure cost-effective monitoring of climate change and adaptation actions and impact on climate risk? How do we measure resilience to test the success and cost effectiveness of actions, and incorporate resilience indicators into decision making?
- How can we better understand flows into the courts and tribunals system, reasons for entry, and the impact of external organisations and their activities?
- What are the drivers of life chances which lead to poor life outcomes and what are the opportunity areas in the UK? How do these correlate with traditional proxies for local economic success, such as rates of job growth?
- What further data sources could help us build a more complete picture of the exporter journey?
- What are the underlying drivers of geographical differences in educational attainment?
- What can cognitive science and neuroscientific developments tell us about effective teaching approaches?
- How do we incorporate the full spectrum of natural capital and the value of the benefits it provides into policy development, analysis, and appraisal? What are the tools we need to make use of robust economic values easier for everyone – across government and beyond?
- How do England’s general, technical and academic education systems compare to systems in other developed economies in terms of status, structure, operation and performance? How can the performance of England’s systems be monitored relative to systems in these other countries?
- Improving the use and design of extended producer responsibility schemes in the UK that could yield significant benefits
- What are the competing pressures, trade-offs, and synergies of different land-uses in relation to climate change in a post COVID-19 world?
- What data and evidence are needed to inform policy and delivery and what are the best sources to meet these needs? How can we improve broad access to this data and enhance knowledge exchange across the agri-food industry?
- What is the value of different elements of the natural environment in economic terms and more generally? How can we best capture and integrate intangible values into decision-making?
- What are the emerging drivers of change and what might future change look like? New thinking, analysis, and data can improve our understanding, and our ability to anticipate how economic, social, and environmental drivers might change in the future. How these affect the trajectory of environmental outcomes and the future state of rural communities and businesses?
- Systems analysis that considers human-environmental systems as a complex set of interactions, and the novel use of systems thinking to consider the feedbacks and consequences of action in this system
- What do we know about the public acceptability of necessary restrictions such as counter disease measures? What lessons are applicable from public acceptability of the coronavirus restrictions to the animal and plant health domain?
- What actions would most effectively and efficiently improve the status of the natural environment and secure economic, social, and health benefits domestically and globally?
- How can we encourage or incentivise behavioural change to achieve positive outcomes for the environment, and how can we enable appropriate informed adaptive management with communities?
- Analysis of social and economic interactions with the environment and natural resources. What are the links and trade-offs between biodiversity, climate, sustainable management of forestry, soils and peatland restoration, economic development, food, health, wellbeing, and global poverty?
- Global drivers of declines in nature are well documented but we need to understand how drivers interact in the UK and globally, as well as the global impacts of UK activities. We also need to understand how our actions to address declines (such as policy responses, intervention and environmental management) impact drivers
- How can we best develop an inclusive societal vision for a just transition towards sustainability? At what spatial scale should such visions be developed and how to reconcile across scales? How can we best manage the polycentric governance to implement these visions?
- Development of systems approaches that can be used to inform policymaking. This includes approaches to provide insights into complex systems, identify points of intervention, account for multiple perspectives, and frame policy decisions
- How can we encourage or incentivise behavioural change among businesses, communities, and individuals to achieve positive outcomes for the environment? What models of societal change might be used to underpin these behaviour change initiatives?
- Development of models to support decision making on complex and wicked problems (for example on land use, environmental trade-offs, food systems)
- How will different groups of society, particularly in rural communities, be affected by changes associated with the move towards Net Zero and the goals of the 25 Year Environment Plan? How can positive effects be adopted more widely and negative impacts be mitigated?
- What makes communities resilient to natural hazards and other crises? What can we learn from the coronavirus pandemic about the loss of resilience and protecting vulnerable communities to inform future response to crises? What are the important social dimensions for achieving environmental and infrastructure resilience?
- How can we make the most of participatory/ co-design approaches with different groups in society, including digital engagement, to generate new ideas, learn from existing practice, and build consensus for the future of policy?
- How has the COVID-19 pandemic influenced how people engage with and value environmental systems (including nature, wildlife, and farming and food supply)? What opportunities does this present to lock-in positive behaviour change and secure environmental objectives in the longer term?
- How can we balance devolved responsibilities with the need to avoid a weakening of national guidelines/ standards?
- Which techniques are best for estimating the effects of interacting risks? How do we ensure that communication of risk is relevant and effective? What lessons can we take from the response to the coronavirus pandemic about the communication of risk and of the need for behavioural change?
- What is the role of the consumer in delivering net zero and how can changes be achieved equitably? What are the potential market responses to such changes and how do we avoid unintended consequences?
- How is climate change affecting the emergence and transmission of infectious diseases, and how can we become more resilient to these outbreaks?
- Which actions by communities, civil society groups, and local and central government, would most effectively and efficiently improve the completeness and accuracy of electoral registers for all people?
- What information, data and tools are required to support effective actions?
- How can new and emerging technologies support behaviour and culture change in complex organisations?
- How do we develop public services that allow users to collectively create their own solutions? What role can social movement and network theories play in helping to improve public sector services and drive large scale system change?
- What principles should be used to delegate responsibilities to local communities, and how can these areas be empowered to deliver?
- How can we model existing data from human, animal, plant, and environmental health indicators to better understand the interconnection and potential impacts of climate change?
- How can a One Health approach promote a cultural change to curb the expansion of illegal wildlife trafficking and implement solutions that will ultimately benefit humans and the planet, galvanising the role of protected species conservation and biodiversity on disease prevention and mitigation?
- How can we best understand and measure the relationships citizens have with different layers of UK governance?
- What are public perceptions of the economic, social and cultural links between the UK nations? What is driving these perceptions?
- How can we consistently estimate impacts across different risks, for example through use of subjective well-being indicators?
- Social research methods, particularly qualitative research and ethnographic methods: to give a richer understanding of the experience of, and interactions with, the justice system; advances in ‘big qual’ methodology; quantitative social research methods such as sequence and cluster analysis.
- Experimentation, implementation, and evaluation: including exploring, developing and testing new ideas or methods using innovative pre-experimental and evaluation approaches and randomised control trials; how to measure the impact and effectiveness of public service interventions in a human-centric manner; advances in pre- and quasi-experimental methods; theory-based evaluation and value-for-money evaluation.
- Intersectionality: How do multiple sources of disadvantage combine and reinforce over an individual’s time within the justice system? How does intersectionality affect individual experiences and outcomes?
- How can we better understand drivers of demand in the justice system, so that we support early problem resolution where appropriate, whilst ensuring the formal justice system is accessible to those who need it?
- How do online bystanders respond to viewing perceived online mis/disinformation (e.g. report, share, ignore), and how could their behaviours be influenced?
- Statistics representing society: How well or poorly do statistics represent society, and what are the impacts of this on how they are used and valued?
- Interactions: How does the way that statistics are produced influence the value that users get from them, and how can this be addressed to maximise value? To what degree to statistics need to be directly used for them to provide value (or do people value outcomes from others using them instead)?
- What are the key factors regarding public trust on autonomous systems?
- How can we improve forecasts of case volumes for the courts and tribunals system? How can we better understand future demand and supply, to help plan for the delivery of services?
- What are the long-term impacts on children’s developmental outcomes because of placements made under public law orders in care proceedings? Including care orders, placement orders, and special guardianship orders?
- How can we better understand how problems link, interact, and reinforce, and how people move through different systems as they attempt to resolve them? Including unemployment, debt, housing, or family issues.
- Understanding which individuals are at risk of becoming offenders (and/or victims), for what reasons and at what stages of their lives.
- Impacts of different types of new arrivals on local communities, the economy and public services (monetised and non-monetised costs and benefits).