Big data in official statistics

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Barteld Braaksma and Kees Zeelenberg: “In this paper, we describe and discuss opportunities for big data in official statistics. Big data come in high volume, high velocity and high variety. Their high volume may lead to better accuracy and more details, their high velocity may lead to more frequent and more timely statistical estimates, and their high variety may give opportunities for statistics in new areas. But there are also many challenges: there are uncontrolled changes in sources that threaten continuity and comparability, and data that refer only indirectly to phenomena of statistical interest.

Furthermore, big data may be highly volatile and selective: the coverage of the population to which they refer may change from day to day, leading to inexplicable jumps in time-series. And very often, the individual observations in these big data sets lack variables that allow them to be linked to other datasets or population frames. This severely limits the possibilities for correction of selectivity and volatility. Also, with the advance of big data and open data, there is much more scope for disclosure of individual data, and this poses new problems for statistical institutes. So, big data may be regarded as so-called nonprobability samples. The use of such sources in official statistics requires other approaches than the traditional one based on surveys and censuses.

A first approach is to accept the big data just for what they are: an imperfect, yet very timely, indicator of developments in society. In a sense, this is what national statistical institutes (NSIs) often do: we collect data that have been assembled by the respondents and the reason why, and even just the fact that they have been assembled is very much the same reason why they are interesting for society and thus for an NSI to collect. In short, we might argue: these data exist and that’s why they are interesting.

A second approach is to use formal models and extract information from these data. In recent years, many new methods for dealing with big data have been developed by mathematical and applied statisticians. New methods like machine-learning techniques can be considered alongside more traditional methods like Bayesian techniques. National statistical institutes have always been reluctant to use models, apart from specific cases like small-area estimates. Based on experience at Statistics Netherlands, we argue that NSIs should not be afraid to use models, provided that their use is documented and made transparent to users. On the other hand, in official statistics, models should not be used for all kinds of purposes….(More)”.

How to use evidence in policymaking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Inês Prates at apolitical: “…Evidence should feed into policymaking; there is no doubt about that. However, the truth is that using evidence in policy is often a very complex process and the stumbling blocks along the way are numerous.

The world has never had a larger wealth of data and information, and that is a great opportunity to open up public debate and democratise access to knowledge. At the same time, however, we are currently living in a “post-truth” era, where personal beliefs can trump scientific knowledge.

Technology and digital platforms have given room for populists to question well-established facts and evidence, and dangerously spread misinformation, while accusing scientists and policymakers of elitism for their own political gain.

Another challenge is that political interests can strategically manipulate or select (“cherry-pick”) evidence that justifies prearranged positions. A stark example of this is the evidence “cherry-picking” done by climate change sceptics who choose restricted time periods (for example of 8 to 12 years) that may not show a global temperature increase.

In addition, to unlock the benefits of evidence informed policy, we need to bridge the “policy-research gap”. Policymakers are not always aware of the latest evidence on an issue. Very often, critical decisions are made under a lot of pressure and the very nature of democracy makes policy complex and messy, making it hard to systematically integrate evidence into the process.

At the same time, researchers may be oblivious to what the most pressing policy challenges are, or how to communicate actionable insights to a non-expert audience. This constructive guide provides tips on how scientists can handle the most challenging aspects of engaging with policymakers.

Institutions like the European Commission’s in-house science service, the Joint Research Centre (JRC) sit precisely at the intersection between science and policy. Researchers from the JRC work together with policymakers on several key policy challenges. A nice example is their work on the scarcity of critical raw materials needed for the EU’s energy transition, using a storytelling tool to raise the awareness of non-experts on an extremely complex issue.

Lastly, we cannot forget about the importance of the buy-in from the public. Although policymakers can willingly ignore or manipulate evidence, they have very little incentives to ignore the will of a critical mass. Let us go back to the climate movement; it is hard to dismiss the influence of the youth-led worldwide protests on world leaders and their climate policy efforts.

Using evidence in policymaking is key to solving the world’s most pressing climate and environmental challenges. To do so effectively, we need to connect and establish trust between government, researchers and the public…(More)”.

Cities vs States: Should Urban Citizenship be Emancipated from Nationality?

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Introduction to Special Forum by Rainer Bauböck: “Since the first decade of the millennium – for the first time in human history – more people are living in urban areas than in rural ones. According to UN projections, in 2050 the share of urban populations could rise to more than two thirds of the world population. Will this demographic change also lead to a decline of nation-states and a rise of cities as the dominant arenas of politics, democracy and citizenship? My response will be ambivalent.

Yes, cities should play a greater role in addressing global problems, such as the climate crisis or international refugee protection, where sovereign states have failed dismally precisely because their sovereignty hampers cooperative solutions. Yes, cities should experiment vigorously with democratic innovations that could diminish the severe legitimacy crisis experienced by representative democracy in many countries around the world. Yes, cities should determine who their citizens are independently of how states do this.

No, contrary to the catchy title of the late Ben Barber’s book (2013), mayors should not rule the world. No, cities cannot replace nation-states and supranational institutions as political arenas that need to be filled with democratic life and to whom citizens can feel to belong. No, national citizenship should not be based on the same principle of membership as urban citizenship.

We need a new citizenship narrative

There are two reasons for my ambivalence. The first is my belief that the global problems that the international system of sovereign states is unable to address require a multilevel political architecture, in which supranational, regional and local political authorities play different but complementary roles. The European Union, in spite of its many structural weaknesses and policy failures, shows how state sovereignty can be pooled. Multilevel democracy beyond the nation-state is a European idea that is worth promoting in other world regions. Yet multilevel democracy requires also that citizenships at various territorial levels must be complementary and not substitutive.

The second reason has to do with the ‘democratic recession’ (Diamond 2015) and the rise of populism. According to many diagnoses these threats result from new political cleavages that cut across the traditional one between left and right (Kriesi et al. 2008). The new divisions are between attitudes in favour of more open or more closed states and societies; between those embracing cultural and gender diversity and those asserting conservative national and religious values; between those who worry about the climate crisis and those who worry about their traditional ways of life. The former are overwhelmingly concentrated in metropolitan regions and university towns, the latter are more widely dispersed across rural areas and declining industrial towns as well as working class neighbourhoods of larger cities. This divide is also closely associated with patterns of increasing geographic mobility among younger urban populations that disconnects their spaces of opportunity and imagined identities from those of sedentary majority populations whose life worlds remain predominantly local and national ones.

Liberals and democrats may hope that the growth of urban populations and the persistence of more open attitudes among younger cohorts will eventually swing the political pendulum towards greater openness (Lutz 2012). However, current electoral systems often give greater weight to voters outside the big cities (Rodden 2019), enabling political victories of illiberal populists who can wreak havoc by destroying democratic institutions and the capacity of states to tackle the global challenges of our time. The response cannot be just to politically mobilise those who are already in favour of more open societies – although it is certainly very important to do so. Radical democrats (Mouffe 2005) emphasize the need for partisan mobilisation and radical urbanists (Bookchin 1987; Harvey 2008) pitch the city as a site of struggle against neoliberal capitalism or a laboratory for emancipatory democracy and ecological utopias against the nation-state. Beyond mobilisation that articulates and deepens the new cleavages, there is, however, an urgent need for new narratives that can bridge them.

Such narratives have been successfully told in the past when democracies faced new challenges. And they focused on the idea of a common citizenship – as a status and bond that is able to support a sense of equality and unity in difference. After World War Two the British sociologist T. H. Marshall (1949/1965) justified the effort to build a welfare state in response to intolerable inequalities of social class, the acceptance of which had been undermined by the sacrifices of ordinary British people during the war. His story was that after the emergence of universal civil rights in the 18th century and political rights in the 19th, 20th century democracy needed social citizenship, i.e. a floor of social equality provided through public services and redistribution that could provide legitimacy for the inequality of social outcomes in capitalist markets….(More)”.

Barriers to Working With National Health Service England’s Open Data

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Ben Goldacre and Seb Bacon: “Open data is information made freely available to third parties in structured formats without restrictive licensing conditions, permitting commercial and noncommercial organizations to innovate. In the context of National Health Service (NHS) data, this is intended to improve patient outcomes and efficiency. EBM DataLab is a research group with a focus on online tools which turn our research findings into actionable monthly outputs. We regularly import and process more than 15 different NHS open datasets to deliver OpenPrescribing.net, one of the most high-impact use cases for NHS England’s open data, with over 15,000 unique users each month. In this paper, we have described the many breaches of best practices around NHS open data that we have encountered. Examples include datasets that repeatedly change location without warning or forwarding; datasets that are needlessly behind a “CAPTCHA” and so cannot be automatically downloaded; longitudinal datasets that change their structure without warning or documentation; near-duplicate datasets with unexplained differences; datasets that are impossible to locate, and thus may or may not exist; poor or absent documentation; and withholding of data for dubious reasons. We propose new open ways of working that will support better analytics for all users of the NHS. These include better curation, better documentation, and systems for better dialogue with technical teams….(More)”.

UK citizens' climate assembly to meet for first time

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Sandra Laville in The Guardian: “Ordinary people from across the UK – potentially including climate deniers – will take part in the first ever citizens’ climate assembly this weekend.

Mirroring the model adopted in France by Emmanuel Macron, 110 people from all walks of life will begin deliberations on Saturday to come up with a plan to tackle global heating and meet the government’s target of net-zero emissions by 2050.

The assembly was selected to be a representative sample of the population after a mailout to 30,000 people chosen at random. About 2,000 people responded saying they wanted to be considered for the assembly, and the 110 members were picked by computer.

They come from all age brackets and their selection reflects a 2019 Ipsos Mori poll of how concerned the general population is by climate change, where responses ranged from not at all to very concerned. Of the assembly members, three people are not at all concerned, 16 not very concerned, 36 fairly concerned, 54 very concerned, and one did not know, organisers said.

The selection process meant those chosen could include climate deniers or sceptics, according to Sarah Allan, the head of engagement at Involve, which is running the assembly along with the Sortition Foundation and the e-democracy project mySociety.

“It is really important that it is representative of the UK population,” said Allen. “Those people, just because they’re sceptical of climate change, they’re going to be affected by the steps the government takes to get to net zero by 2050 too and they shouldn’t have their voice denied in that.”

The UK climate assembly differs from the French model in that it was commissioned by six select committees, rather than by the prime minister. Their views, which will be produced in a report in the spring, will be considered by the select committees but there is no guarantee any of the proposals will be taken up by government.

Allen said it was rare for members of a citizens’ assembly to get locked into dissent. She pointed to the success of the Irish citizens’ assembly in 2016, which helped break the deadlock in the abortion debate. “This climate assembly is going to come up with recommendations that are going to be really invaluable in highlighting public preferences,” she said….(More)”.

The Experimenter’s Inventory: A catalogue of experiments for decision-makers and professionals

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by the Alliance for Useful Evidence: “This inventory is about how you can use experiments to solve public and social problems. It aims to provide a framework for thinking about the choices available to a government, funder or delivery organisation that wants to experiment more effectively. We aim to simplify jargon and do some myth-busting on common misperceptions.
There are other guides on specific areas of experimentation – such as on randomised controlled trials – including many specialist technical textbooks. This is not a technical manual or guide about how to run experiments. Rather, this inventory is useful for anybody wanting a jargon-free overview of the types and uses of experiments. It is unique in its breadth – covering the whole landscape of social and policy experimentation, including prototyping, rapid cycle testing, quasi-experimental designs, and a range of different types of randomised trials. Experimentation can be a confusing landscape – and there are competing definitions about what constitutes an experiment among researchers, innovators and evaluation practitioners. We take a pragmatic approach, including different designs that are useful for public problem-solving, under our experimental umbrella. We cover ways of experimenting that are both qualitative and quantitative, and highlight what we can learn from different approaches….(More)”.

Belgium’s experiment in permanent forms of deliberative democracy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by Min Reuchamps: In December 2019, the parliament of the Region of Brussels in Belgium amended its internal regulations to allow the formation of ‘deliberative committees’ composed of a mixture of members of the Regional Parliament and randomly selected citizens. This initiative follows innovative experiences in the German-speaking Community of Belgium, known as Ostbelgien, and the city of Madrid in establishing permanent forums of deliberative democracy earlier in 2019. Ostbelgien is now experiencing its first cycle of deliberations, whereas the Madrid forum has been short-lived after having been cancelled, after two meetings, by the new governing coalition of the city.

The experimentation in establishing permanent forums for direct citizen involvement constitutes an advance from hitherto deliberative processes which were one-off experiments, i.e. non-permanent procedures. The relatively large size of the Brussels Region, with over 1 200 000 inhabitants, means that the lessons will be key in understanding the opportunities and risks of ‘deliberative committees’ and their potential scalability….

Under the new rules, the Regional Parliament can setup a parliamentary committee composed of 15 (12 in the Cocof) parliamentarians and 45 (36 in the Cocof) citizens to draft recommendations on a given issue. Any inhabitant in Brussels who has attained 16 years of age has the chance to have a direct say in matters falling under the jurisdiction of the Brussels Regional Parliament and the Cocof. The citizen representatives will be drawn by lot in two steps:

  • A first draw among the whole population, so that every inhabitant has the same chance to be invited via a formal invitation letter from the Parliament;
  • A second draw among all the persons who have responded positively to the invitation by means of a sampling method following criteria to ensure a diverse and representative selection, at least in terms of gender, age, official languages of the Brussels-Capital Region, geographical distribution and level of education.

The participating parliamentarians will be the members of the standing parliamentary committee that covers the topic under deliberation. In the regional parliament, each standing committee is made up of 15 members (including both Dutch- and French-speakers), and in the Cocof Parliament, each standing committee is made of 12 members (only French-speakers)….(More)”.

Social media firms 'should hand over data amid suicide risk'

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Denis Campbell at the Guardian: “Social media firms such as Facebook and Instagram should be forced to hand over data about who their users are and why they use the sites to reduce suicide among children and young people, psychiatrists have said.

The call from the Royal College of Psychiatrists comes as ministers finalise plans to crack down on issues caused by people viewing unsavoury material and messages online.

The college, which represents the UK’s 18,000 psychiatrists, wants the government to make social media platforms hand over the data to academics so that they can study what sort of content users are viewing.

“We will never understand the risks and benefits of social media use unless the likes of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram share their data with researchers,” said Dr Bernadka Dubicka, chair of the college’s child and adolescent mental health faculty. “Their research will help shine a light on how young people are interacting with social media, not just how much time they spend online.”

Data passed to academics would show the type of material viewed and how long users were spending on such platforms but would be anonymous, the college said.

The government plans to set up a new online safety regulator and the college says it should be given the power to compel firms to hand over data. It is also calling for the forthcoming 2% “turnover tax” on social media companies’ income to be extended so that it includes their turnover internationally, not from just the UK.

“Self-regulation is not working. It is time for government to step up and take decisive action to hold social media companies to account for escalating harmful content to vulnerable children and young people,” said Dubicka.

The college’s demands come amid growing concern that young people are being harmed by material that, for example, encourages self-harm, suicide and eating disorders. They are included in a new position statement on technology use and the mental health of children and young people.

NHS England challenged firms to hand over the sort of information that the college is suggesting. Claire Murdoch, its national director for mental health, said that action was needed “to rein in potentially misleading or harmful online content and behaviours”.

She said: “If these tech giants really want to be a force for good, put a premium on users’ wellbeing and take their responsibilities seriously, then they should do all they can to help researchers better understand how they operate and the risks posed. Until then, they cannot confidently say whether the good outweighs the bad.”

The demands have also been backed by Ian Russell, who has become a campaigner against social media harm since his 14-year-old daughter Molly killed herself in November 2017….(More)”.

Global problems need social science

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Hetan Shah at Nature: “Without human insights, data and the hard sciences will not meet the challenges of the next decade…

I worry about the fact that the call prioritized science and technology over the humanities and social sciences. Governments must make sure they also tap into that expertise, or they will fail to tackle the challenges of this decade.

For example, we cannot improve global health if we take only a narrow medical view. Epidemics are social as well as biological phenomena. Anthropologists such as Melissa Leach at the University of Sussex in Brighton, UK, played an important part in curbing the West African Ebola epidemic with proposals to substitute risky burial rituals with safer ones, rather than trying to eliminate such rituals altogether.

Treatments for mental health have made insufficient progress. Advances will depend, in part, on a better understanding of how social context influences whether treatment succeeds. Similar arguments apply to the problem of antimicrobial resistance and antibiotic overuse.

Environmental issues are not just technical challenges that can be solved with a new invention. To tackle climate change we will need insight from psychology and sociology. Scientific and technological innovations are necessary, but enabling them to make an impact requires an understanding of how people adapt and change their behaviour. That will probably require new narratives — the purview of rhetoric, literature, philosophy and even theology.

Poverty and inequality call even more obviously for expertise beyond science and maths. The UK Economic and Social Research Council has recognized that poor productivity in the country is a big problem, and is investing up to £32.4 million (US$42 million) in a new Productivity Institute in an effort understand the causes and potential remedies.

Policy that touches on national and geographical identity also needs scholarly input. What is the rise of ‘Englishness’? How do we live together in a community of diverse races and religions? How is migration understood and experienced? These intangibles have real-world consequences, as demonstrated by the Brexit vote and ongoing discussions about whether the United Kingdom has a future as a united kingdom. It will take the work of historians, social psychologists and political scientists to help shed light on these questions. I could go on: fighting against misinformation; devising ethical frameworks for artificial intelligence. These are issues that cannot be tackled with better science alone….(More)”.

Human-centred policy? Blending ‘big data’ and ‘thick data’ in national policy

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Policy Lab (UK): “….Compared with quantitative data, ethnography creates different forms of data – what anthropologists call ‘thick data’. Complex social problems benefit from insights beyond linear, standardised evidence and this is where thick data shows its worth. In Policy Lab we have generated ethnographic films and analysis to sit alongside quantitative data, helping policy-makers to build a rich picture of current circumstances. 

On the other hand, much has been written about big data – data generated through digital interactions – whether it be traditional ledgers and spreadsheets or emerging use of artificial intelligence and the internet of things.  The ever-growing zettabytes of data can reveal a lot, providing a (sometimes real time) digital trail capturing and aggregating our individual choices, preferences, behaviours and actions.  

Much hyped, this quantitative data has great potential to inform future policy, but must be handled ethically, and also requires careful preparation and analysis to avoid biases and false assumptions creeping in. Three issues we have seen in our projects relate to:

  • partial data, for example not having data on people who are not digitally active, biasing the sample
  • the time-consuming challenge of cleaning up data, in a political context where time is often of the essence
  • the lack of data interoperability, where different localities/organisations capture different metrics

Through a number of Policy Lab projects we have used big data to see the big picture before then using thick data to zoom in to the detail of people’s lived experience.  Whereas big data can give us cumulative evidence at a macro, often systemic level, thick data provides insights at an individual or group level.  We have found the blending of ‘big data’ and ‘thick data’ – to be the sweet spot. 

This is a diagram of Policy Lab's model for combining big data and thick data.
Policy Lab’s model for combining big data and thick data (2020)

Policy Lab’s work develops data and insights into ideas for potential policy intervention which we can start to test as prototypes with real people. These operate at the ‘meso’ level (in the middle of the diagram above), informed by both the thick data from individual experiences and the big data at a population or national level. We have written a lot about prototyping for policy and are continuing to explore how you prototype a policy compared to say a digital service….(More)”.