Research with People published

It's a red-letter day in the Walker household. My textbook, Research with People: Theory, Plans and Practicals has been published. This is a practically based introduction to the issues involved in human testing. It is written to work for anyone who needs to collect information from people - medics, psychologists, sociologists, management types, etc. - and also works for readers who don't carry out research but who want to understand the research process so they can better make sense of what they read. Enjoy!

Road Injury Severity Map of England

Here's something curious. Using the Department for Transport's road accident statistics for 2006, I calculated road accident severity figures for each county in England. The DfT's accident figures include a Killed-and-Seriously-Injured (KSI) statistic, which is the count of the most serious road injuries: those leading to... well, death or serious injury. For each county, I divided the number of road accidents with a KSI outcome by the total number of recorded accidents. The reasoning was that the higher this ratio is, the more severe the outcomes of that county's road collisions tend to be and, in one sense, the more dangerous that county's roads are.

The statistics I computed gave figures ranging from just 5.6% of road accidents having KSI outcomes (in Plymouth, where it seems most road accidents tend to end okay) to 23.7% (in North Yorkshire, where almost one-quarter of all road accidents lead to someone being killed or seriously injured). I then normalized these values to lie on a scale from 1 to 100, converted these into saturation levels of the colour red and filled in the counties on a map. Yes, it took a few hours.

The map reveals a few points of interest:

* We have to work in call centres, but at least we don't get squashed too badly - Former heavy industrial areas around Manchester, Merseyside, the West Midlands and the Potteries stand out as having quite low accident severities.

* Leafy suburbs, dead bodies - the affluent south-western corner of Greater London suffers quite a lot of serious road accidents. It's so tempting to make a link to all the SUVs...

* Mad Crazy Viking Berserkers - North Yorkshire and the East Riding. One in four road accidents in North Yorkshire has a serious outcome. My father lives there. I'd like him to move away now.

* Wiltshire and Northamptonshire are really dangerous - I live in Wiltshire! Can everybody take more care please?

* Odd pockets of safety - Plymouth wins here, but there are other counties that stand out from their neighbours: Surrey, Rotherham, Newham in London.

Sadly, these statistics aren't broken down by county for Wales and Scotland. However, overall Wales is at a similar level to Southampton and Coventry, with just under 11% of road accidents having a KSI outcome. Scotland is somewhat worse, and with 17% of all road accidents ending in death or serious injury is similar to Essex and East Sussex.

My hope in doing this was that novel insights might reveal themselves if I looked at the accident data in a new way. I wondered if there would be a North/South split, or patterns that follow motorways. Perhaps the most striking thing to emerge here is the suggestion of more serious road accidents in rural areas. (Most notably, wherever there is a city that has separate figures from the county that surrounds it -- Reading in Berkshire, Leicester in Leicestershire, Poole in Dorset -- the city always has a lower accident severity score than the surrounding county.) This seems on the face of it to support the idea that higher levels of road crowding and reduced speeds are good for reducing the severity of road accidents, although we must also consider other factors specific to rural areas such as twistier roads which give poorer visibility, and possibly higher levels of drink-driving. But then we have to explain why Devon and Cornwall -- perhaps the most rural and twisty-roaded counties -- aren't particularly bad.

Like all good data explorations, this raises more questions than it answers, but I think it shows the value of looking at data in novel ways.

A mention in the Economist

I just got an email from our university's Press Office to say my work on how drivers' overtaking behaviour gets more dangerous when a cyclist wears a helmet was mentioned in a recent article on risk in The Economist. It's interesting how that project of mine has been viewed and used by different people. One of the main findings was that a behaviour intended to reduce risk (putting on a bicycle helmet) might paradoxically increase one's overall level of risk because drivers react to its presence by changing their behaviour. I've seen this finding used in many discussions -- some people find it a curious datum, others feel it backs up their own experiences, and some people loath my findings, usually because they are starting with the 'common sense' position that bicycle helmets must be a good thing.

But I've also seen that research used in broader contexts. Indeed I've seen it used in relatively extreme right-wing libertarian writing to justify an argument for having no state intervention in people's day-to-day behaviour. It just goes to show that when you do research and put your findings out into the world, you can never be sure exactly what's going to happen to them.

But for all that, I have to say that it's very satisfying that work of mine is being used by people. It's just a shame that any use of one's research by people who are not themselves professional researchers "doesn't count" under our government's Research Assessment Exercise. Academics writing in endless circles about one another's work is "good research"; a grand theory which excites everybody but then proves to be completely bogus after two years is "good research", as there will be lots of papers supporting it, then a second raft of papers slamming it, giving the high number of citations that research assessment focuses on to a large degree. But studies which excite the public, lead to media discussion or even change public behaviour for the better don't count as having had any impact at all -- our research is only "good" if other academics write about it. But we'll moan about that another day. It's far too sunny a Spring day for caviling now. I'm off to walk the dog instead.

Cycling and Society: Putting faces to names

Since I've got a 45-minute wait in Woking railway station before I can squeeze onto what will no doubt be an sweltering and overcrowded train, I thought I'd briefly mention that I've spent the day at the CTC's headquarters attending the annual Cycling and Society symposium. The Cycling and Society group is a loose network of researchers united by an interest in the big issues surrounding the use of bicycles, and I've been a member for about a year. Today was all about sharing our recent work with one another and with the practitioners who make policy, campaign for cyclists or implement cycling initiatives on the ground.

It was a very interesting day - most of the other speakers were from more of a sociological background than me, which meant I was hearing about some quite different ideas and issues than I normally encounter. I couldn't hope to summarize all the talks here, so I'll simply point you at Jake Voelcker's fascinating and readable review of how the legal system treats drivers who kill people, which everyone should read. The only downside was I got the impression the practitioners who attended were hoping they'd get more in the way of "here is something practical you can do tomorrow" rather than "here's a new theory...", which is what they pretty much got. There's a real issue of how we academics can best get our research to people who can use it. We will always need to publish academic papers, as when research is carried out there has to be a record which contains all the detail - all the statistics and the minutiae of how we carried the study out - for others to check we haven't made mistakes. Unfortunately, this need to report in detail means the articles we produce aren't usually suitable for general audiences. Most of us are quite capable of writing accessible summaries, but there's a real lack of places to put them. Perhaps blogging will provide me with an avenue in the future?

The best bit of the day in many ways was finally meeting about a dozen people whom I have known only virtually so far - often for quite a long time. In the case of John Parkin from Bolton University, a quick check of my emails reveals we have exchanged no fewer than 139 messages over the past year, and written a document together, but I've not clapped eyes on him until today! What a strange and interesting way of working we have these days.

Teenage drinking - two interpretations of one finding

There's an interesting contrast in this BBC report on a recent Institute for Child Health study. The study found that people who drank a lot of alcohol as teenagers are more likely to experience a host of personal problems, such as criminal convictions and mental illness, when they are 30.

Now, this is almost certainly a result of what we researchers call the "third variable problem", i.e., it isn't that drinking as a teenager causes your problems later in life; rather, the teenage drinking and the later problems are both the result of other, underlying causes - in this case social deprivation, poor education, lack of opportunities and so on.

The quotes from the report's author suggest he is a careful researcher who understands this.

[Dr Viner said that] policies needed to focus on a range of areas, not just restricting the availability of alcohol to teenagers

Contrast this with the ridiculous yet predictable knee-jerk reaction from the government:

A Department of Health spokesman said the government was determined to reduced [sic] the harm caused by young people drinking.

"We are preventing the sale of alcohol to children by cracking down on irresponsible retailers and working with the industry to reduce underage sales of alcohol, while continuing to educate youngsters about the harm of alcohol abuse.

"Alcohol education now has a higher profile in schools across the country and is a major part of the national curriculum"

Gah! They've merrily taken the findings as proof that drinking per se causes criminality, mental illness, etc. Is it too much to ask that the people who speak for our government have a basic understanding of scientific research and how it should be interpreted before they pontificate on it? The Department of Health may want to send one or two of their people to our Masters of Research in Psychology degree, where they can learn not to make such mistakes again.

Edit: When did our government departments revert to being departments of things? I thought they'd all rebranded themselves as departments for things, subtly suggesting that whilst they're generally in favour of health, transport, education and so on, we shouldn't expect them to go as far as taking responsibility for such matters.