We are delighted to announce Stuart Campbell as one of our #DataImpactFellows for 2019.
Stuart is a Research Associate in the Department of Social Science at the UCL Institute of Education. He has an MSc in Economics from the University of Sussex, and a PhD in the Economics of Education from the UCL Institute of Education. His PhD was funded by an ESRC Advanced Quantitative Methods scholarship. Stuart previously worked as a Research Associate in Economics at the University of Sheffield and fulfilled a shorter research contract as a Research Assistant at the Institute for Fiscal Studies. He is a fellow of the Global Labor Organization.
During his doctoral studies, Stuart completed an ESRC Internship in Migration and Border Analysis at the Home Office, and was employed as a Postgraduate Teaching Assistant in Economics at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies. He also gave lectures on the Economics of Identity and the Economics of Sport while working as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. In his current role, Stuart has lectured and led tutorials at both the undergraduate and postgraduate level, on a range of courses in economics and applied statistics, and has also supervised postgraduate research.
Stuart has presented his work at invited seminars and at a number of international conferences in population and labour economics, as well as at the Royal Economic Society annual conference in the UK. He has worked with a wide range of data supplied by the UK Data Service, including the Labour Force Survey, the Millennium Cohort Study, Next Steps (also known as the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England (LSYPE1)), the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), and Understanding Society.
Stuart’s research
My research covers a broad range of topics in applied microeconomics, including education, social mobility, migration, and identity. This work is informed by research from across different social science disciplines. My doctoral thesis focussed on labour market experiences and feelings of national identity among international migrants in the UK. I recently published my first paper based on this work: “National identity among economic and non-economic immigrants”. In this paper, I examined differences in the uptake of a British national identity among groups of migrants who originally came to the UK for different reasons. I showed that those migrants who arrived as refugees or for family reasons are the most likely to report a British national identity, even in comparison with otherwise similar migrants from the same origin countries. I wrote about this work for the Conversation. This project used the Secure Access version of the Labour Force Survey, which is available via the UK Data Service.
Also on the topic of identity, I have recently published a working paper on “Parental ethnic identity and child development”, with co-authors from the University of Sheffield and the University of Edinburgh. This paper explores how and why parental identity could affect cognitive development in ethnic minority children, for example through an influence on parenting behaviour or by mediating access to social support. This paper used the Millennium Cohort Study. I hope to develop my work on identity in the future.
Much of my research in my current role has focussed on social mobility and education. My work on social mobility includes a cross-country comparison of the degree to which parental unemployment or economic inactivity influences the employment prospects of their children, and a new project on intergenerational income mobility for women. Both of these projects are with co-authors in my own department, as well as researchers from other institutions. We use a variety of international datasets, alongside the BHPS and Understanding Society, the 1970 British Cohort Study, and the National Child Development Study.
My work on education includes a study of ‘undermatch’ at universities in the UK, which considers whether low socio-economic status students are more likely to end up on less prestigious university courses than higher socio-economic status students with similar A-level grades. This paper also considers whether women end up on less prestigious university courses than similarly qualified men. This study is joint work with co-authors in my own department and abroad, and uses a combination of administrative and survey datasets from the UK, including Next Steps.
Stuart’s plans
I hope to share more of my work on social mobility and education via discussion papers in 2019 and 2020.
The Data Impact Fellows award will help me to develop this work by attending and presenting at academic and policy-oriented conferences in my field. Such events will help me enhance both academic and policy impact. The award will also enable me to develop more work with colleagues at other institutions.
Follow Stuart on Twitter: @_stuartcampbell