Malcolm Brynin

Communication Technology and Friendship During the Transition from High School to College

Within social networks, relationships are “enacted.” They grow or decline through communication and the exchange of social resources. Although geographic distance can inhibit enactment, telecommunication technologies (e.g., phone, email, IM) are increasingly being used to maintain relationships over long distances. In this paper, we examine the role these technologies play in maintaining friendships. Taking advantage of a natural situation in which friendships are at risk of ending, we follow students in their transition from high school to college. When students move away from home, they reduce both their communication with their old high school friends and their sense of psychological connection to them. Longitudinal analyses show that communication slows the decline in psychological closeness, but psychological closeness does not slow the decline in communication. E-mail and IM are telecommunication technologies that are especially useful among these students for maintaining friendships. The usefulness of these technologies may stem from arbitrary pricing decisions, which allow students to use them frequently, rather than from their intrinsic features, such as media richness. Unlike the phone, pricing of e-mail and IM does not depend on either message length or the distance the message must travel.

Overqualification in Employment

There is widespread evidence that many workers have higher qualifications than are needed for their job. This finding of a substantial degree of overqualification should not be the case if, as has often been argued, there has been a consistent upgrading of the skills of the labour force as a result of technological change. It might also be argued that even if overqualification exists, this is a result of a new emphasis on flexible employment and therefore increased labour-market uncertainty: people start careers at a level below the traditional start, and so are initially overqualified. In this case overqualification is only a temporary, life-course phenomenon. Evidence is presented here using BHPS and LFS data to suggest, first, that an upgrading of labour does not adequately describe recent change in employment and, second, that overqualification is not a temporary factor resulting from changed employment practices. We should therefore view overqualification as having some sort of structural causation. One tentatively given explanation is that the social demand for education is causing a bunching of qualifications at the higher levels, which means that employers cannot easily discriminate between different apparent skill levels. As a result they reduce the rewards for such skills.

Occupational change in Britain and Germany

We use British and German panel data to analyse job changes involving a change in occupation. We assess: (1) the extent of occupational change, taking into account the possibility of measurement error in occupational codes; (2) whether job changes within the occupation differ from occupation changes in terms of the characteristics of those making such switches; and (3) the effects of the two kinds of moves in respect of wages and job satisfaction. We find that occupation changes differ from other job changes, generally reflecting a less satisfactory employment situation, but also that the move in both cases is positive in respect of change in wages and job satisfaction.

Understanding the ethnic pay gap in Britain

The pay gap between white British workers and other ethnic groups is largely in favour of whites, which suggests that discrimination might be a factor. However, discrimination can occur at two points, at entry to the job and within the job. In the former case non-whites might find it difficult to work in well-paid occupations; in the latter they obtain the same sorts of jobs as whites but receive less pay. There is therefore predominantly either job or wage discrimination. We use the British Labour Force Survey 1993–2008 to show that much of the pay gap is explained by occupational segregation while within occupations the ethnic pay gap is far less substantial. Occupational segregation therefore has strong negative effects, but if minorities are over-represented in occupations with a positive wage gap, then there is also a ‘protective’ element to segregation.

The National Press and Party Voting in the UK

The difficulty with resolving the classic problem of whether newspapers influence voting patterns is self-selection: readers select a paper to fit their politics, and newspapers select particular types of readers. One way round this chicken-and-egg problem is to compare the voting behaviour of individuals whose politics are reinforced by their paper, with those who are cross-pressured by their paper, and to compare both with those who do not regularly read a paper. Using the British Household Panel study to analyse voting patterns in 1992 and 1997, this study suggest that newspapers have a statistically significant effect on voting, larger for Labour than Conservative sympathizers, and larger for the 1992 than the 1997 election. The broader implications of these findings for British politics and democracy are discussed.

Individual Choice and Risk: The Case of Higher Education

The expansion of higher education raises the risk environment for school-leavers as more occupations become partially graduate with the result that occupational signals are fuzzy. This makes the educational decision more difficult and more risky, especially with more of the cost of higher education being transferred to the individual. After a discussion of the nature of risk, derived from Beck, and of the role of government policy and of economics in obscuring this, the analysis uses simple quantitative techniques, based on British Labour Force Survey data, to demonstrate the increased fuzziness of graduate work. It is also shown that a rising proportion of graduates receive only average pay, thus raising the risks associated with educational investments even further.

Broadcasting Finance and Programme Quality: An International Review

This article was originally a report for the British governments Peacock Committee on Financing the BBC. Comparative conclusions concerning the impact of different funding arrangements for the range and quality of television programming are drawn from analyses of broadcasting systems in Britain, the United States, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and West Germany. Common trends and pressures are identified. Prime-time television schedules are compared. British programme performance is evaluated. A purpose for public service broadcasting in a period of telecommunications change is proposed. The principal options of broadcasting finance are reviewed in the light of international experience: full advertising; limited advertising; sponsor-ship; co-production finance; and the licence fee.

Graduate density, gender, and employment

The expansion of higher education is often viewed as reflecting increased demand for skills, whether related to technological change or the growing complexity of the economy. It is also linked to widening pay differentials between the poorly and highly educated. There are reasons, however, to question these associations. Even if demand for graduates is growing the supply of graduates might as a result of the status derived from having a degree still exceed this. The demand for graduates itself need not be wholly tied in with upgrading of the labour force. Graduates could be part of a more flexible workforce who increasingly undertake non-graduate work, thus downgrading their labour-market position. LFS (Labour Force Survey) and BHPS (British Household Panel Study) data are used to show that there has been no major shift in the distribution of graduates in the British labour market, that career starts are increasingly at a lower status point, and that there is a negative effect of graduate density on wages. There are also redistributional effects. There has been a large increase in the social demand for higher education by women, and they have gained from this expansion while men have lost out. In addition, graduate density is positive for non-graduates, who gain from the reduced rewards accruing to graduates. The results call into question the simple idea of a trend towards a demand for increasing levels of skills and qualifications. More attention should be paid to the distribution of skills and to complex interactions within this.

Mapping the Household

This article describes the development of a new form of household enumeration for use in the British Household Panel Survey. We first briefly describe the data-collection methods tested to fix household membership and then their value as data-processing tools. Finally a household relationship variable derived from these new methods is included in a multivariate analysis of financial allocative arrangements within the household. This shows distinctive patterns for households containing step-children or other non nuclear extensions. (EXCERPT)

Using CASMIN: the effect of education on wages in Britain and Germany

Measures of educational achievement in surveys are not difficult to interpret. Qualifications need to be transparent because they are common currency in the labour market, sometimes also in the marriage market, and are widely accepted as indicators of social status. Although there are problems of transparency in some highly credentialist systems, for instance in Great Britain with its complex array of vocational qualifications and poorly defined vocational system (Mason, Prais, and van Ark 1990; Department for Education and Employment 2000), in general this is not the case: someone with a specific certificate is in principle expected to have a capability at a level that can be clearly understood. It is reasonable to assume, therefore, that survey data which report qualifications can be analysed unambiguously. However, the analytical relationship between different levels of qualification is far from transparent. There is no means of knowing a priori how much a degree is ‘worth’ relative to a school-leaving certificate, and this value will itself vary across domains: for instance, in wage equations, mobility studies, analyses of children’s educational performance, voting studies, and so on. Moreover, there is no external source which can unequivocally validate the meaning of credentials.