The overall sample design for Understanding Society has been described in an earlier working paper in this series (Lynn 2009). This paper describes the special measures taken to boost the sample of members of five key minority ethnic groups in Great Britain. A new method was developed to...

Pre-election polls sometimes fail to reach the purpose for which they are carried out: to provide accurate predictions of electoral out-comes. By looking at the 2006 Italian General Elections, this paper aims to assess the role that different factors play in determining the accuracy of the...

The paper studies the impact of ethnic diversity on social participation of young people. We first propose a theoretical model in which the agents choose between structured and unstructured social activities by taking into account the ethnic composition of the groups they join. We test our...

Pre-election polls sometimes fail to reach the purpose for which they are carried out: to provide accurate predictions of electoral out-comes. By looking at the 2006 Italian General Elections, this paper aims to assess the role that different factors play in determining the accuracy of the...

We conduct two large-scale randomised experiments on the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) to study methods of reducing panel attrition. The first experiment compares different strategies for tracing and maintaining contact with sample members. We find that change-of-address cards...

Little is known about the effect of seeking debt advice on borrowers' well-being. To estimate this effect, we designed a randomised encouragement intervention for a new sample of over-indebted people in Britain who had not sought debt advice in the previous six months. Being encouraged to seek...

Using data from a new sample of over-indebted people living in Britain who have not sought debt advice in the previous six months, we estimate the effect of seeking formal debt advice. Our results suggest that there is a negative selection into formal debt advice: people who do seek debt advice...

Students from low socio-economic status (SES) or ethnic minority backgrounds are less likely to enrol into elite universities than high SES or White students. We use student-level university application data from the UK centralised university admissions service to show that these gaps cannot be...

We explore whether teachers have different predictions for the examination performance of ethnic minority students relative to White British students. We exploit an exogenous change in assessment methods to compare grades based on teacher predictions to grades received through actual blindly...