1st meeting a.k.a. the beginning

My first meeting with John (Hills - http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/j.hills@lse.ac.uk) and Tim (Newburn - http://www2.lse.ac.uk/researchAndExpertise/Experts/t.newburn@lse.ac.uk), my supervisors for the next few years, went well. I work with John on the National Equality Panel (http://www.equalities.gov.uk/national_equality_panel.aspx) as the main analyst and we built up a good relationship. It’s intimidating though; both men are pretty experienced, to say the least, at delivering research and see straight through the bullshit. Was an eye opener, made it feel real – and despite the long time scales involved, pretty urgent.

We started with a little chat about my current thinking. I described how I have a vague want to look at how group membership, transitions between groups and the exclusion that that can cause may be some form of underlying factor that leads certain groups of offenders to carry on offending, or desist. I also talked about how the Ministry of Justice was treating me, explaining the precarious nature of the data that I had written about in my proposal

So we talked about how I’m too approach this problem. Leaving aside my feeling of being out of my depth we discussed what transpired to be a 2 prong attack on the issue. At this stage I need to do two things, 1) a literature search focusing on both the subjects of social exclusion and criminal behaviour and 2) a data review looking at which of the many, many surveys that exist have criminological dimensions. I need to do these simultaneously as the two pieces, what has been done against what can be done from existing sources, will obviously complement each other.

Data sources that we discussed:

• The various government datasets that are, might, be available to me.
• British Crime Survey
• NCDS 58, the British Cohort Study (70), maybe the older one from 46 that is apparently held by a chap at the IoE. Maybe even the Millennium Cohort study to see how that is going.
• British Household Panel Survey
• ALSPAC
• Edinburgh Study
• Farrington’s Cambridge study – although this has been some what mined to death
• The Peterborough Study held by the Cambridge Institute of Criminology, although they are apparently (and understandably) protective of it.
• The census?
• Other stuff?

Reading that we discussed:

• Obvious general reading about social exclusion definitions and criminological policy developments
• Works by Moffit (although I am vaguely aware of her theories and have read some stuff)
• More Gottfredson and Hirschi stuff
• Wikstom, Loeber i.e. Peterborugh researchers, similarly Farrington or anything written really from existing data source mentioned above
• Jane Waldfogel – What Children Need. Has some evidence on Head Start that may relate
• David Halpen, stuff from the Centre for Social Jusitce and

Tim and John agreed to send me through some stuff to get me started…

Alongside this, and from a geeky type perspective I was told to speak to Ben Baumberg about some form of Bayesian importation techniques that can be used to simulate variables in surveys otherwise missing information, based what can be found in other ones. Which seems a sensible idea, thoroughly achieveable, and could be some welcome technical detail to get away from the real world. Apparently Imperial have a group working on this stuff…

Next meeting early December!