Karen Bell

Navigating the stigmatised identities of poverty in austere times: resisting and responding to narratives of personal failure

Behavioural explanations of poverty and disadvantage have figured heavily in political rhetoric in the era of austerity, as a means to understand trajectories into poverty and subsequent relationships between benefit claimants and the state. These discourses are not restricted to political debate, as previous studies demonstrate they impact upon public consciousness and structure the ways that the general public think about poverty, as well as shaping the ways in which people living on low incomes are treated. Drawing upon the testimonies of 62 people in England and Scotland experiencing poverty, this article seeks to understand our participants’ responses to these discourses, in particular: how these behavioural explanations impact upon their understanding of their own situations, as well as their self perceptions; how these discourses shape their relationships with others, in terms of their experience of disrespect; and how participants seek to dissociate themselves from their stigmatising implications.

Quantitative conversations: the importance of developing rapport in standardised interviewing

When developing household surveys, much emphasis is understandably placed on developing survey instruments that can elicit accurate and comparable responses. In order to ensure that carefully crafted questions are not undermined by ‘interviewer effects’, standardised interviewing tends to be utilised in preference to conversational techniques. However, by drawing on a behaviour coding analysis of survey paradata arising from the 2012 UK Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey we show that in practice standardised survey interviewing often involves extensive unscripted conversation between the interviewer and the respondent. Whilst these interactions can enhance response accuracy, cooperation and ethicality, unscripted conversations can also be problematic in terms of survey reliability and the ethical conduct of survey interviews, as well as raising more basic epistemological questions concerning the degree of standardisation typically assumed within survey research. We conclude that better training in conversational techniques is necessary, even when applying standardised interviewing methodologies. We also draw out some theoretical implications regarding the usefulness of the qualitative–quantitative dichotomy.

Doing Qualitative Fieldwork in Cuba: Social research in politically sensitive locations

Cuba, a country that is often portrayed as an isolated, secretive and bureaucratic dictatorship, would appear to present many challenges for a social researcher intent on eliciting the genuine opinions of the native population. However, in December 2008, I began just such an investigation, researching ‘environmental justice’ (i.e. the social and distributive impacts of environmental policy and practice) in the country, using a mixture of interview and participant observation techniques. As might be expected, much of the fieldwork was dominated by the sensitive political context, creating numerous methodological issues and dilemmas, as well as personal challenges. This paper looks at the difficulties faced, in particular with regard to the problem of attaining reliability and validity, and the strategies that were used to overcome them. It will be of relevance to anyone considering carrying out fieldwork investigations in socialist, and other politically sensitive, locations.

Environmental justice in Cuba

‘Environmental justice’ refers to the human right to a healthy and safe environment, a fair share of natural resources, access to environmental information and participation in environmental decision-making. Some analysts have argued that environmental justice is undermined by the political economy of capitalism. This paper builds on this analysis by evaluating the environmental justice situation in Cuba, a country where there is little capitalist influence. Evidence is based on participant observation and interviews in Cuba, as well as secondary quantitative data. The research findings suggest that Cuba fares relatively well in terms of environmental justice, but still faces a number of challenges regarding the quality of its environment and some aspects of the environmental decision-making process. However, many of its ongoing problems can be attributed to global capitalist pressures.

Bread and Roses: A Gender Perspective on Environmental Justice and Public Health

Gender continues to be a relatively marginal issue in environmental justice debates and yet it remains an important aspect of injustice. To help redress the balance, this article explores women’s experience of environmental justice through a review of the existing literature and the author’s prior qualitative research, as well as her experience of environmental activism. The analysis confirms that women tend to experience inequitable environmental burdens (distributional injustice); and are less likely than men to have control over environmental decisions (procedural injustice), both of which impact on their health (substantive injustice). It is argued that these injustices occur because women generally have lower incomes than men and are perceived as having less social status than their male counterparts as a result of entwined and entrenched capitalist and patriarchal processes. In the light of this analysis, it is proposed that environmental justice research, teaching, policy and practice should be made more gender aware and feminist orientated. This could support cross-cutting debates and activities in support of the radical social change necessary to bring about greater social and environmental justice more generally.

Achieving Environmental Justice: A Cross-National Analysis

This book addresses the topic of environmental justice, conceptualised as the aspiration for a healthy environment for all social groups, as well as fair and inclusive processes of environmental decision making. The work connects the global and the local through evaluating seven diverse countries – United States, Republic of Korea, United Kingdom, Sweden, China, Bolivia and Cuba. It brings together diverse but coherent local stories, from the destruction of a community market on the council housing estate where I live to waste dumping on indigenous Mohawk land in New York State. Rigorous secondary data analysis is integrated with primary fieldwork research, including 140 interviews with a diverse range of politicians, experts, activists and citizens

A photovoltaic panel modelling method for flexible implementation in Matlab/Simulink using datasheet quantities

This paper presents a detailed method for creating an embedded Matlab model in Simulink for any solar photovoltaic panel starting with its datasheet values. It links extrinsic functions to the Simulink embedded model to provide fast and simple iterative solving of non-linear equations. It also provides a method sufficiently flexible to produce a model output based on panel current or voltage such that it can be cascaded with different Simulink elements.

Developing public support for human rights in the United Kingdom: reasserting the importance of socio-economic rights

Public support for human rights in the UK remains limited, partly as a result of misleading media coverage, as well as political hostility. The UK Human Rights Act, in particular, has been under sustained attack and is now threatened by the Conservative Partys drive to repeal it. We analyse recent quantitative and qualitative data on public attitudes in order to learn how to increase public support for human rights practice and principles. The conclusion we reach is that, in order to increase support for human rights in the UK, a central objective should be to shift the focus of human rights discourse so that it better reflects the every-day concerns of the UK public. We consider that this would best be achieved through emphasising socio-economic rights. This could be an especially relevant strategy in the current austerity context which presents both opportunities and threats with regard to mobilising support for human rights.

Achieving environmental justice

Podcast Interview, broadcast by Climate Justice Research Centre at the University of Technology, Sydney. Discusses my work on achieving environmental justice and, particularly, the book of that name.

Using paradata to evaluate survey quality: behaviour coding the 2012 PSE-UK survey

Fahmy and Bell discuss their use of paradata generated when collecting data for the UK Poverty and Social Exclusion Survey (2012 PSE-UK). The authors use the experience of collecting these data as a basis for identifying means of improving the quality of survey design. They argue that the use of paradata, in this case the analysis of actual interviewer and respondent interactions, can better improve survey design than the more traditional approach of survey pre-testing. The chapter focuses on the area of behaviour coding which is a technique used to identify issues affecting questionnaire administration that stem from the behaviours of the respondents and the fieldworker. Using an example from the 2012 PSE-UK, Fahmy and Bell show how paradata collected from interview transcripts can provide survey designers with valuable information enabling the identification of problems with questions and so helping to improve future survey design and enhance the quality of data collected in survey–based research.