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Research Profile

Prof Malcolm Williams 


    • Recent projects have focussed on living alone and student attitudes to quantitative methods, both of which were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

    Living Alone

    • The first of these used longitudinally linked Census data from England and Wales to explore living alone over the course of an individual's life.  In the last few decades the numbers of people in European countries who live alone has steadily increased.  In the 2001 Census 16% of adults lived alone.  The increase in living alone has enormous implications for communities, but particularly for social care and housing needs. The 'living alone' study tracked movements into and out of solo living between 1971 and 2001 and found that a range of different patterns emerged.  One irony is that living alone continues to increase, even while marriage remains popular.  This is because people remain in marriage for shorter periods, often remarry and live alone between marriages.  Whilst both men and women, in their middle years, were equally likely to live alone, men tend to live alone ten years earlier.  A key finding was that those who have lived alone at some point in their lives were overwhelmingly more likely to live alone again.  See:Williams, M ; Maconachie, M ;Ware, L; Chandler, J and Dodgeon, B (2008) ‘Living Alone in England and Wales 1971 - 2001’ in Edwards, R (ed) Researching Families, Community and Generational Change. London: Routledge.  

    Student Attitudes to Quantitative Methods

    • The second study explored UK sociology undegraduate attuitudes toward learning quantitative methods.  This study was motivated by a concern that sociology (and social science more generally in the UK) suffered from a shortage of students skilled in quantitative methods going on to graduate study.  Our study found that whilst most sociology students were not overly worried by having to learn statistics and data analysis, on the whole they preferred more discursive work, such as essays.  They saw sociology as more of a humanistic discipline, than a scientific one.  Nevetheless those students with a positive attitude to quantitative methods were more likely to do better in research methods assignments overall (including qualitative methods) than those with a negative attitude. See: Williams, M, Payne, G and Hodgkinson, L  (2008) ‘Does Sociology Count: student attitudes to the teaching of quantitative methods’.  Sociology 42 5 1003-1022