It is dismaying to notice how this term and its abbreviation "SES" is returning to reports and discussions of research in health inequality. I thought we had done away with it at least outside the USA, and adopted "Socio Economic Position" (SEP). The virtue of SEP is that it is a very general term, referring to social class, social status, income and material circumstances. As these measures of life circumstances are often used pretty indiscriminately in research studies, if you want to do some kind of review paper, you often have to use the measure that is present in each paper. But as Nancy Krieger and colleagues pointed out many years ago now, if we are going to get serious about explaining as opposed to describing health inequality, we need to be more precise about what our input variable actually is. Because no one imagines that income, wealth, social status or occupational social class come along and bonk anyone over the head resulting in disease or mortality. If you think about it for one second, you realise that there are always 'proximal' factors like environmental conditions, housing quality, work conditions, psychosocial stresses or health behaviours that do the business for health. But different dimensions of inequality can be shown to have different relationships to these different proximal factors. Social status is most strongly related to the behavioural patterns at the present time (this will not necessarily be the same at all times in all places). Occupational class has the strongest relationship to working conditions. Income is the strongest determinant of housing. And even the income-housing link is different in different countries according to housing policies, for example in Denmark housing is not as segregated as in the UK.
Neither is it useful to talk about "high" and "low" SES (or SEP for that matter). Yes, income can be high or low, but that needs to be explicit before we can make sense of the mediating factors. Social status can also be high or low if we are thinking in terms of caste-like phenomena where members of certain occupations or groups defined in terms of religion, language or skin colour tend to avoid each other's company. Here again, if you think clearly you can imagine how such discrimination might well act according to stress pathways as described by Wilkinson and Pickett. Caste groups in Hindu societies also adopt different behaviours such as diet. A person wishing to pass as a member of a higher caste will need to change these behaviours, and this is what we find in relation to smoking and social mobility. These are real examples of the Black Report's "cultural-behavioural" explanations, that make sense in sociological terms. So one could think in terms of low income or low status if that is what one's explanatory hypothesis for a certain aspect of health inequality entails. But "low" and "high" are of little use as general blanket terms. We know that members of certain ethnic groups such as Catholics in Northern Ireland and The Netherlands, or people or Irish or Caribbean descent in England for example, tend to have suffered historical discrimination and as a result have lower incomes and also worse health than Protestant or Anglo-European groups. But we do not use the blanket terms "higher" or "lower ethnicity" to refer to this. It is clearer to use "more" or "less advantaged" as the more general term.
Recently there has also been a return to using education as a measure of SEP. This makes things even more confusing. As important as education is in the life-course factors that determine what kind of conditions and attitudes a person will have in adult life, it is not in itself a dimension of social position. It is a very strong indicator of where someone will end up (and their resultant exposures). In fact, if policy were so organised that people who started off in a less advantaged social position as children were given extra attention at school, population health might be greatly improved. But even this would not eliminate social inequality which arises from the structure of occupations and the income distribution. We will soon be able to see whether the increasing proportion of graduates who end up in low paid (income) and insecure (employment conditions) jobs will change the relationship between education and health.
The use of education as a measure of social position does give us a hint, however, of the thinking that creeps into research on health inequality. As pointed out by Gordon Marshall (even longer ago than Krieger et al.'s seminal work), there is a sneaky eugenic argument that lurks beneath the use of terms like "lower" and "higher" SES. This is that people with superior personal characteristics have better health. So their success at school, their more advantaged occupations, their higher income and their better health are in fact all consequences of this underlying superiority. The enthusiasm in epidemiology for genetics gives further strength to this kind of thinking. People in "low social positions" tend to smoke? Well, what do you expect, they are not bright enough to figure out the dangers (by the way, what evidence we have points strongly in the opposite direction, that there is no link between social position however measured and the desire to stop smoking).
I do not actually believe that many social epidemiology researchers mean to make this kind of argument. After all, we would put ourselves out of business pretty quickly. There is no point to public health if everything is determined genetically.
Wednesday, 26 March 2014
Thursday, 6 February 2014
University pay: why the bosses are confident
Today we are on strike. Some union members have suggested we should do something active rather than just stay away and not work. As an arthritic retired academic I remember the social media and decided to do this instead.
I think the bosses have a reason to be confident about keeping academic pay so low. When I worked on labour markets in the 1980s there was this idea about the "dual labour market2. I have heard less about it recently but I think academe is increasingly one of these. There is a shrinking "core group" of workers and a growing penumbra or reserve army around it.
Why are university chiefs not more worried about being able to recruit top people at a time when global competitiveness is stronger than ever? I think the solution they have found is simple. There is something called the "labour market adjustment" that allows people they want a lot (including managers) to be paid more or less anything. Need to recruit a top economist? OK, you can offer a competitive wage. But the poor bloody infantry of people to teach English or social sciences, it seems, will do it for far less.
Most academic jobs are done for a "component wage", that is, a wage that will not support a family on its own. Someone asked me the other day "Why are all our students (of social epidemiology) women"? This is because a discipline that focuses on preventing disease as opposed to treating it does simply not pay enough to live on, certainly not in London. Another colleague pointed out that most of her colleagues who had already had children were married to bankers, that is the only way they could do it.
So lets not be too hopeful that university staff will soon be paid a wage that reflects their training.
I think the bosses have a reason to be confident about keeping academic pay so low. When I worked on labour markets in the 1980s there was this idea about the "dual labour market2. I have heard less about it recently but I think academe is increasingly one of these. There is a shrinking "core group" of workers and a growing penumbra or reserve army around it.
Why are university chiefs not more worried about being able to recruit top people at a time when global competitiveness is stronger than ever? I think the solution they have found is simple. There is something called the "labour market adjustment" that allows people they want a lot (including managers) to be paid more or less anything. Need to recruit a top economist? OK, you can offer a competitive wage. But the poor bloody infantry of people to teach English or social sciences, it seems, will do it for far less.
Most academic jobs are done for a "component wage", that is, a wage that will not support a family on its own. Someone asked me the other day "Why are all our students (of social epidemiology) women"? This is because a discipline that focuses on preventing disease as opposed to treating it does simply not pay enough to live on, certainly not in London. Another colleague pointed out that most of her colleagues who had already had children were married to bankers, that is the only way they could do it.
So lets not be too hopeful that university staff will soon be paid a wage that reflects their training.
Friday, 3 January 2014
Is life-course research a political cop-out?
Now, there is something controversial for me to say, of all people. But a couple of thing recently have made me think. First of all there was a book, a really interesting one that I wold actually recommend to life course researchers called "Biological Consequences of Socio-economic Inequalities" (BCSI)edited by Barbara Wolfe and colleagues: https://www.russellsage.org/publications/biological-consequences-socioeconomic-inequalities
We noticed that the editorial group was made up to psychologists and economists. When I read the various chapters of the edited collection I was surprised to find hardly anything about how health inequality is 'endogenous'. This idea is often put forward by economists and as far as I understand it, it means that health inequality is a result of individual characteristics that sort people destined for poor health into less advantaged social and economic circumstances. At one time, my (highly valued) economics colleagues seemed to think these characteristics were genetic. A position rather similar to that of Boris Johnson's Margaret Thatcher Memorial Lecture (or whatever it was). I do not think they meant congenital diseases (or at least not once we had finished discussing how rare such diseases are). Rather it seemed that there was an idea about individual preferences that arose from the genes (what a social epidemiologist would call 'indirect selection' rather than 'direct selection'). A preference for hard work and self denial, for example, would tend to result in both good health and high income.
In the last few years it has become increasingly unlikely that 'genetics' would be able to explain such highly complex characteristics as preferences with any precision. So I wondered if that was one reason for the remarkable consensus between the psychologists and the economists who edited and wrote the chapters for BCSI. Instead, the theory being put forward was based around early life experiences and their consequences for later health. The idea is that early adverse experiences 'get under the skin' by a number of biological pathways: by influencing inflammatory responses, immune responses and, most exciting of all to some people, by 'epigenetic' mechanisms.
The epigenetic mechanism, as I understand it (again) is the way in which the environment (by which people mean everything from the next door cells to the neighbourhood) 'tells' certain genes whether or not to turn on the proteins for which they can act as a template. A gene which doesn't do anything much in most children, for example, may, in abused children, become 'myelinated' and turn on a protein that has a harmful effect. Furthermore, it seems that once this change to the workings of the gene has happened, it not only persists throughout life but even may be passed on to the next generation. So for example, the fact that the children of smokers are known to be far more likely to smoke themselves. Child abuse seems to be similarly 'hereditary' (though I never heard anyone suggest that this was epigenetic).
I am sure people can see where this kind of thing is going. Instead of blaming the individual for their poverty and poor health, we can just blame their parents! There is indeed a lot of evidence in the tradition of 'family stress theory' research to show that, not surprisingly, people find it harder to be 'good parents' under conditions of poverty. The problem is, there are such powerful inter-relations between material adversity, psycho-social adversity and poor health right across life. A person whose childhood was marked by low parental wages and poor housing will have started off with higher exposure to factors that produce inflammation (frequent infections for example) . They may well have done worse in school due to difficulties in studying. So they have a high risk to find themselves in a hazardous occupation and poor housing in their own adult lives. Until these different exposures are isolated from each other and from the child's relationships to its parents we should not jump to conclusions.
Ironically, it would rightly be impossible to do trial-like studies of such processes because no one would randomise children into poverty. But a better idea might be to randomise disadvantaged adolescents into a carefully supported school experience, with free healthy meals and warm, quiet study areas supplied. Even that sounds rather unethical though, when you think about it. How could one justify not providing the intervention to the control group?
We noticed that the editorial group was made up to psychologists and economists. When I read the various chapters of the edited collection I was surprised to find hardly anything about how health inequality is 'endogenous'. This idea is often put forward by economists and as far as I understand it, it means that health inequality is a result of individual characteristics that sort people destined for poor health into less advantaged social and economic circumstances. At one time, my (highly valued) economics colleagues seemed to think these characteristics were genetic. A position rather similar to that of Boris Johnson's Margaret Thatcher Memorial Lecture (or whatever it was). I do not think they meant congenital diseases (or at least not once we had finished discussing how rare such diseases are). Rather it seemed that there was an idea about individual preferences that arose from the genes (what a social epidemiologist would call 'indirect selection' rather than 'direct selection'). A preference for hard work and self denial, for example, would tend to result in both good health and high income.
In the last few years it has become increasingly unlikely that 'genetics' would be able to explain such highly complex characteristics as preferences with any precision. So I wondered if that was one reason for the remarkable consensus between the psychologists and the economists who edited and wrote the chapters for BCSI. Instead, the theory being put forward was based around early life experiences and their consequences for later health. The idea is that early adverse experiences 'get under the skin' by a number of biological pathways: by influencing inflammatory responses, immune responses and, most exciting of all to some people, by 'epigenetic' mechanisms.
The epigenetic mechanism, as I understand it (again) is the way in which the environment (by which people mean everything from the next door cells to the neighbourhood) 'tells' certain genes whether or not to turn on the proteins for which they can act as a template. A gene which doesn't do anything much in most children, for example, may, in abused children, become 'myelinated' and turn on a protein that has a harmful effect. Furthermore, it seems that once this change to the workings of the gene has happened, it not only persists throughout life but even may be passed on to the next generation. So for example, the fact that the children of smokers are known to be far more likely to smoke themselves. Child abuse seems to be similarly 'hereditary' (though I never heard anyone suggest that this was epigenetic).
I am sure people can see where this kind of thing is going. Instead of blaming the individual for their poverty and poor health, we can just blame their parents! There is indeed a lot of evidence in the tradition of 'family stress theory' research to show that, not surprisingly, people find it harder to be 'good parents' under conditions of poverty. The problem is, there are such powerful inter-relations between material adversity, psycho-social adversity and poor health right across life. A person whose childhood was marked by low parental wages and poor housing will have started off with higher exposure to factors that produce inflammation (frequent infections for example) . They may well have done worse in school due to difficulties in studying. So they have a high risk to find themselves in a hazardous occupation and poor housing in their own adult lives. Until these different exposures are isolated from each other and from the child's relationships to its parents we should not jump to conclusions.
Ironically, it would rightly be impossible to do trial-like studies of such processes because no one would randomise children into poverty. But a better idea might be to randomise disadvantaged adolescents into a carefully supported school experience, with free healthy meals and warm, quiet study areas supplied. Even that sounds rather unethical though, when you think about it. How could one justify not providing the intervention to the control group?
Tuesday, 10 December 2013
The price of freedom
For some reason a lot of things lately have been reminding me of an old idea of mine. This was that many of the 'vices' of modern life arise from the desire to escape from oppressive individual relationships. It first occurred to me in relation to the success of the supermarket. The death of the small shops was mourned. But I myself rather like supermarkets. Why is that? Well, one reason is that I like the impersonality. The person at the till is a stranger, they do not know my social, marital or parental status. They probably don't think too much about what I have bought, or habitually buy. And if they did it would not be part of the normal repertoire for their job to make any comment on it. I will not be called "luv" or "dearie".
Similarly for the success of television. How much less oppressive it is to relate to people on the TV than to people in real life! Sociology deals too little with the oppressive nature of face to face interaction, despite Goffman's comment that "interaction is dangerous". How much easier to have the trials and tribulations of various people laid out skilfully before us by script writers. We can talk about these with others, without any personal implications, without blame or even envy.
Hemingway was fascinated by the way in which bullfighters in the 1940s and 1950s were first raised to the stratosphere of praise, and then viciously condemned when, inevitably, they fell short. In this was he foresaw what we do to 'celebrities' today. But, unlike in the corrida, characters in the soap operas do not actually get gored by bulls. They do not actually have to show courage and do not risk the taint of cowardice.
And take the motor car. Why are we driving headlong towards destruction of the earth? Because we would rather do this than share our space with others. I once saw what I thought was a very sad lecture on what people do after retirement. A large number spend their newly acquired free time just driving around. heaven forbid they would engage with other people rather than an internal combustion engine. Other people might judge them. And I don't mean to criticise by saying this. I don't blame anyone for designing their life to avoid the judgements and stereotypes imposed by others. It is just too bad that living this way destroys the planet.
It seems to me that our technology (now we can get on to the internet, social media and so forth) increasingly allows us to escape the tyranny of the judgement of other people. This has been a more or less totally ignored (correct me if I am wrong) determinant of the adoption of new technologies. Women do not have to put up with day to day, low level oppression by men. Children can escape constant judgement by their parents. People of more modest social status can avoid the contempt of those who regard themselves as superior.
But of course this comes at a price. As we detach ourselves from our fellow human beings, in some ways our lives are impoverished and made more precarious. Only in a more equal society will the retreat into virtual worlds be reversed.
Similarly for the success of television. How much less oppressive it is to relate to people on the TV than to people in real life! Sociology deals too little with the oppressive nature of face to face interaction, despite Goffman's comment that "interaction is dangerous". How much easier to have the trials and tribulations of various people laid out skilfully before us by script writers. We can talk about these with others, without any personal implications, without blame or even envy.
Hemingway was fascinated by the way in which bullfighters in the 1940s and 1950s were first raised to the stratosphere of praise, and then viciously condemned when, inevitably, they fell short. In this was he foresaw what we do to 'celebrities' today. But, unlike in the corrida, characters in the soap operas do not actually get gored by bulls. They do not actually have to show courage and do not risk the taint of cowardice.
And take the motor car. Why are we driving headlong towards destruction of the earth? Because we would rather do this than share our space with others. I once saw what I thought was a very sad lecture on what people do after retirement. A large number spend their newly acquired free time just driving around. heaven forbid they would engage with other people rather than an internal combustion engine. Other people might judge them. And I don't mean to criticise by saying this. I don't blame anyone for designing their life to avoid the judgements and stereotypes imposed by others. It is just too bad that living this way destroys the planet.
It seems to me that our technology (now we can get on to the internet, social media and so forth) increasingly allows us to escape the tyranny of the judgement of other people. This has been a more or less totally ignored (correct me if I am wrong) determinant of the adoption of new technologies. Women do not have to put up with day to day, low level oppression by men. Children can escape constant judgement by their parents. People of more modest social status can avoid the contempt of those who regard themselves as superior.
But of course this comes at a price. As we detach ourselves from our fellow human beings, in some ways our lives are impoverished and made more precarious. Only in a more equal society will the retreat into virtual worlds be reversed.
Thursday, 24 October 2013
Problems about "Impact"
A lot is being written now about the upcoming REF and its associated demand for impact. At the same time, independently, our research centre ICLS has started off its second 5 years with a great deal more attention to impact matters than that with which we started out in 2008. I had developed an idea about what used to be called "dissemination" during the ESRC Resilience Network that I co-ordinated between 2003 and 2007. I called this "targeted dissemination". It was perhaps closer to what then became "user engagement". I figured that if we as a research group were going to be any use to our non-academic partners, we needed to get to know each other. The project leaders needed to come to understand the interests and needs of the partners. The kind of thing I wanted to avoid was exemplified when one of my old friends from my Civil Service days said "Oh, Mel, I would love to be able to help you but I am just snowed under with work". This was not the idea at all! I had not meant to ask for her told help me by agreeing to "engage with me as a user". So I said , look, the idea is that I am supposed to help you out, not the other way around.
Nowadays I hear similar things from people in 3rd sector groups that I still relate to. They are wise to the reason they suddenly receive a lot of messages from academics asking if they are interested in some project or other. They know this is because a call for proposals has gone out on a topic that is relevant to them (ageing, child health, etc). And other civil service friends told me they had a kind of standard paragraph they could shell out to importunate academics without taking too much trouble over it.
So over the years I have made myself available to our non-academic partners in whatever way they find useful. It might be advising on a tender they are drawing up to get some research done. It might be reviewing applications they have received. It might be a friendly chat. I always answered my own phone (retired now) which people used to like, though it surprised them. I always wrote personally to people.
One of our partners is a private firm. When I tried to involve them in an ESRC co-funding scheme, however, this did not work. They took one look at the forms we would all have to fill out and were horrified. "We don't pay you people to fill out forms" they said "we pay you to do research on the questions we are interested in. Can't we just agree a task and pay you?" They could not understand that getting a joint project co-funded was a competition where ESRC had to judge who should get the award. They knew what they wanted and they wanted us to do it, end of. And "overheads", forget it. Now we do things their way.
But this is not the main point of this blog. The main point is rather more serious. In the race for impact, I do not think enough attention is paid to the quality of the science. The literature is now filling up with stories about un-replicable research in any case. What quality control is in place to make sure that "impact" is not being attained with poor science? You have a 3 or even 5 year research programme and within that time impact must be demonstrated. what time does that allow for your results to be tested, replicated, critically discussed? Even clinical medicine finds itself under fire for prescribing useless drugs and procedures that have been thrust forward without full enough evaluation. This happens even in a field where clinical trials are supposed to stand as a guarantee; now we know that many negative results are hidden. One can see here where financial incentives play a powerful role. But do we want a situation in social and policy sciences where, in the absence of the profit motive, the "impact motive" threatens to create a similar form of corruption?
Nowadays I hear similar things from people in 3rd sector groups that I still relate to. They are wise to the reason they suddenly receive a lot of messages from academics asking if they are interested in some project or other. They know this is because a call for proposals has gone out on a topic that is relevant to them (ageing, child health, etc). And other civil service friends told me they had a kind of standard paragraph they could shell out to importunate academics without taking too much trouble over it.
So over the years I have made myself available to our non-academic partners in whatever way they find useful. It might be advising on a tender they are drawing up to get some research done. It might be reviewing applications they have received. It might be a friendly chat. I always answered my own phone (retired now) which people used to like, though it surprised them. I always wrote personally to people.
One of our partners is a private firm. When I tried to involve them in an ESRC co-funding scheme, however, this did not work. They took one look at the forms we would all have to fill out and were horrified. "We don't pay you people to fill out forms" they said "we pay you to do research on the questions we are interested in. Can't we just agree a task and pay you?" They could not understand that getting a joint project co-funded was a competition where ESRC had to judge who should get the award. They knew what they wanted and they wanted us to do it, end of. And "overheads", forget it. Now we do things their way.
But this is not the main point of this blog. The main point is rather more serious. In the race for impact, I do not think enough attention is paid to the quality of the science. The literature is now filling up with stories about un-replicable research in any case. What quality control is in place to make sure that "impact" is not being attained with poor science? You have a 3 or even 5 year research programme and within that time impact must be demonstrated. what time does that allow for your results to be tested, replicated, critically discussed? Even clinical medicine finds itself under fire for prescribing useless drugs and procedures that have been thrust forward without full enough evaluation. This happens even in a field where clinical trials are supposed to stand as a guarantee; now we know that many negative results are hidden. One can see here where financial incentives play a powerful role. But do we want a situation in social and policy sciences where, in the absence of the profit motive, the "impact motive" threatens to create a similar form of corruption?
Monday, 29 July 2013
Almost 20% of working age men are already inactive
More talk today about how we need to extend healthy life expectancy to get people to work longer before they retire. The little graph below updates the one I posted before. I wanted to see how the economic inactivity rate was getting on. And lo and behold, it has not fallen along with unemployment. Now, I do realise that a lot of the inactive men (there are fewer inactive women, that is another story) are now 'students'. But shouldn't this have created more jobs, i.e. the spaces that would have been filled by young men who are now in full time education?
Monday, 15 July 2013
RCUK Policy on Data Access: Disappointing
A couple of days ago I was alerted on Twitter by, I think, Simon Hodson, to the publication of the Research Councils UK policy on access to research data. I had not been anticipating this with too much anxiety as so many conversations I have had, in person and via social media, assured me that the default position was going to be open access. I was even more reassured by an editorial by David Stuckler and John Lynch with the great title "In God we trust, all others must bring data" in the International Journal of Epidemiology that I wrote a blog about on 1 January this year. In making a case for their new initiative to bring together a depository of health data they point out that:
"Available data often go unused because they are not well enough documented, lack accessible how-to guides for their use, or knowledge about the resource is passed on informally within research groups or collaborations. Some data may also require analytical skills that are in short supply; or people may simply be unaware of their existence or unable to access them."
The UK Data Archive has, for decades, been working to make sure that this does not happen to publicly funded (and even some privately funded such as the Health And Lifestyle Survey) social science data. Any project funded by the ESRC is obliged to deposit its data in the Archive within a short period (I think it is 6 months). The UKDA practices for data curation are well established. Most of the large and complex data sets can be downloaded in abut 2 minutes by any bona fide academic who has registered the title of the project for which the data will be used. The safeguards for individual confidentiality reside in the anonymisation of the records, and one of the few restrictions to this open access comes when the research requires information on area of residence. Nowadays it is possible using Geographic Information Systems to link things like temperature, rainfall, the location of certain kinds of facilities and property values to individual data. But the Archive judges that for example adding the Postcode Area to the openly available data is too risky, so this has to be done under more restrictive conditions. In all this time (at least 30 years) there has never been one single case of any individual's privacy being threatened.
However, what is clear from the recent policy document from RCUK is that it is no longer the threat to confidentiality of data that forms the major barrier to open access. This won't come as a huge surprise to a lot of people, but the big barrier is what RCUK term 'intellectual property'. I have often been asked "why should we sweat our guts out collecting data when we just have to give it away?". And this is what a lot of people who work in epidemiology feel.
Why is there this difference in attitude between people who work in the social sciences and in epidemiology? People in both disciplinary areas collect data. It is always hard work. In economics individual academics don't so often collect their own data as the 'classical' economic data is collected routinely. But economists also do a lot of 'micro-economics' using data from the British Household Panel Study and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing as well as birth cohort studies. I have never heard one of my economics colleagues after participating in the design of these studies claim 'intellectual property' over, for example, the data on income, wealth, pensions and so on.
I have fought several battles (mostly unsuccessful) to get measures of physical functioning into various birth cohort and panel studies. But it would never cross my mind that I own 'intellectual property' in the data. The ideas behind my desire for these measures might be regarded as 'mine'. But when you know why you want to collect a certain measure you have the most enormous flying start. As long as you get going on the research question in a timely way no one is gong to steal your 'property'. And if you don't get going in a timely way then other people must be allowed to do so. Anything else is a misuse of public money. The ethical underpinning of health research is that we promise the people who allow us to stick pins in them and make them blow into tubes that the results will be used to improve public health, not to advance our own careers.
So I strongly disagree with the position taken by RCUK that those who collect data should have sole ownership of it "until their major research questions have been answered". That is a charter for slowing down the use of new information for the public good.
"Available data often go unused because they are not well enough documented, lack accessible how-to guides for their use, or knowledge about the resource is passed on informally within research groups or collaborations. Some data may also require analytical skills that are in short supply; or people may simply be unaware of their existence or unable to access them."
The UK Data Archive has, for decades, been working to make sure that this does not happen to publicly funded (and even some privately funded such as the Health And Lifestyle Survey) social science data. Any project funded by the ESRC is obliged to deposit its data in the Archive within a short period (I think it is 6 months). The UKDA practices for data curation are well established. Most of the large and complex data sets can be downloaded in abut 2 minutes by any bona fide academic who has registered the title of the project for which the data will be used. The safeguards for individual confidentiality reside in the anonymisation of the records, and one of the few restrictions to this open access comes when the research requires information on area of residence. Nowadays it is possible using Geographic Information Systems to link things like temperature, rainfall, the location of certain kinds of facilities and property values to individual data. But the Archive judges that for example adding the Postcode Area to the openly available data is too risky, so this has to be done under more restrictive conditions. In all this time (at least 30 years) there has never been one single case of any individual's privacy being threatened.
However, what is clear from the recent policy document from RCUK is that it is no longer the threat to confidentiality of data that forms the major barrier to open access. This won't come as a huge surprise to a lot of people, but the big barrier is what RCUK term 'intellectual property'. I have often been asked "why should we sweat our guts out collecting data when we just have to give it away?". And this is what a lot of people who work in epidemiology feel.
Why is there this difference in attitude between people who work in the social sciences and in epidemiology? People in both disciplinary areas collect data. It is always hard work. In economics individual academics don't so often collect their own data as the 'classical' economic data is collected routinely. But economists also do a lot of 'micro-economics' using data from the British Household Panel Study and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing as well as birth cohort studies. I have never heard one of my economics colleagues after participating in the design of these studies claim 'intellectual property' over, for example, the data on income, wealth, pensions and so on.
I have fought several battles (mostly unsuccessful) to get measures of physical functioning into various birth cohort and panel studies. But it would never cross my mind that I own 'intellectual property' in the data. The ideas behind my desire for these measures might be regarded as 'mine'. But when you know why you want to collect a certain measure you have the most enormous flying start. As long as you get going on the research question in a timely way no one is gong to steal your 'property'. And if you don't get going in a timely way then other people must be allowed to do so. Anything else is a misuse of public money. The ethical underpinning of health research is that we promise the people who allow us to stick pins in them and make them blow into tubes that the results will be used to improve public health, not to advance our own careers.
So I strongly disagree with the position taken by RCUK that those who collect data should have sole ownership of it "until their major research questions have been answered". That is a charter for slowing down the use of new information for the public good.
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