CHASM Interns, Sam and Jessica have had a busy four months exploring their research areas and collecting data, the results of which will be presented in December 2018.
Sam Palmer and Andy Lymer are working together to look at relative levels of financial education post senior/high school comparing the UK and the USA. Sam is a student at University of Connecticut, and having spent a year in the UK last year, has now returned home to complete his final year of study.
A questionnaire exploring relative levels of financial education has been created and now is being sent out to students in the first and second year in the UK and in their freshman and junior years in the USA. The results of this analysis will enable Sam and Andy to draw some comparisons on how students are prepared by their schooling for financial decisions they need to take as they enter the next phase of their lives and are required to take more significant financial decisions than many may have before this point. Results of this work will be available at the end of the year.
Jessica has spent the summer exploring the relationship between social proximity, trust and social cohesion. Her research is looking at the ways in which people may be influenced in their attitudes to different types people by how close they live to them or, conversely, how distant they are. Whereas most previous research on proximity, interaction and cohesion has focussed on ethnic diversity, Jessica has instead been exploring socio-economic diversity.
One of the most important research questions is the ways in which social mix may shape the attitudes of higher-income households to lower-income households, especially those living in social housing. Jessica has been exploring large-scale secondary data to search for possible correlations to explore, but one of the key insights of her research so far is that an institutional and academic preoccupation with ethnic diversity has been at the expense of developing useful data sets on socio-economic diversity.