Sharon Fae Witherspoon, Lady Jowell MBE FAcSS (born 1956) [1] is a British statistician, serving as Head of Policy of the Academy of Social Sciences and the Campaign for Social Science, and as a member of the Review Body on Senior Salaries of the British government. [2] She is also Vice President for Education and Statistical Literacy of the Royal Statistical Society. [3]
Witherspoon went to high school in the United States, and earned a degree in sociology at an American university, before her postgraduate study of historical sociology at the London School of Economics. [4] [5] She worked for a market research firm before becoming a researcher at Social and Community Planning Research, which later became the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). [4]
At NatCen, Witherspoon was one of the initial researchers of the British Social Attitudes Survey. [6] She worked for the Nuffield Foundation from 1996 to 2015, and was director of the foundation from 2012 until 2015. She moved to the Academy of Social Sciences in 2016. [2] [7] [8]
Witherspoon is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2010). [9] She became a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 2008. In 2011 she was awarded the President's Medal of the British Academy. [7] In 2015, University College London gave her an honorary doctorate. [9]
Witherspoon married one of her collaborators on the British Social Attitudes Survey, [6] statistician Sir Roger Jowell (as his third wife) in 1996; he died in 2011. [10]
Sir David Roxbee Cox was a British statistician and educator. His wide-ranging contributions to the field of statistics included introducing logistic regression, the proportional hazards model and the Cox process, a point process named after him.
Sir Roger Mark Jowell, CBE was a British social statistician and academic. He founded Social and Community Planning Research, now known as the National Centre for Social Research, and the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys at City University.
The Academy of Social Sciences (AcSS) is a representative body for social sciences in the United Kingdom. The academy promotes social science through its sponsorship of the Campaign for Social Science, its links with Government on a variety of matters, and its own policy work in issuing public comment, responding to official consultations, and organising meetings and events about social science. It confers the title of Fellow upon nominated social scientists following a process of peer review. The academy comprises over 1000 fellows and 41 learned societies based in the UK and Europe.
The International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) is a collaboration between different nations conducting surveys covering topics which are useful for social science research. The ISSP researchers develop questions which are meaningful and relevant to all countries which can be expressed in an equal manner in different languages. The results of the surveys provide a cross-national and cross-cultural perspective to individual national studies. By 2021, 58 countries have already taken part in the ISSP.
Sylvia Theresa Walby is a British sociologist, currently Professor of Criminology at Royal Holloway University of London. She has an Honorary Doctorate from Queen's University Belfast for distinction in sociology. She is noted for work in the fields of the domestic violence, patriarchy, gender relations in the workplace and globalisation.
The European Social Survey (ESS) is a social scientific endeavour to map the attitudes, beliefs and behaviour patterns of the various populations in Europe. The average duration of an ESS interview is 60 minutes in British English and data is deposited in the Registry of Research Data Repositories re3data.org.
Sir John Kevin Curtice is a British political scientist and professor of politics at the University of Strathclyde and senior research fellow at the National Centre for Social Research. He is particularly interested in electoral behaviour and researching political and social attitudes. He took a keen interest in the debate about Scottish independence.
Denise Anne Lievesley is a British social statistician. She has formerly been Chief Executive of the English Information Centre for Health and Social Care, Director of Statistics at UNESCO, in which capacity she founded the UNESCO Institute for Statistics, and Director (1991–1997) of what is now the UK Data Archive.
Sara Lynne Arber is a British sociologist and Professor at University of Surrey. Arber has previously held the position of President of the British Sociological Association (1999–2001) and Vice-President of the European Sociological Association (2005–2007). She is well known for her work on gender and ageing, inequalities in health and has pioneered research in the new field of sociology of sleep.
Sir Ian David Diamond FLSW is a British statistician, academic, and administrator, who served as Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Aberdeen until 2018. He became the UK's National Statistician in October 2019.
The Campaign for Social Science was launched in 2011 to advocate social science to the UK Government and to the public, at a time of significant change in the higher education system. It campaigns for the restoration of the post of Government Chief Social Science Advisor, promotes social science in the media and on the web, and organises roadshows and other events to emphasise the value of social science.
Anthony Francis Heath, CBE, FBA is a British sociologist who is a professor of sociology at Oxford University and a professorial fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford.
Barbara Jane Elliott is a British sociologist and academic. She is Professor of Sociology at the University of Exeter. From October 2014 to September 2017 she was chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council. Her research uses longitudinal, qualitative and quantitative methodologies to explore issues of gender and employment.
Melinda Mills, is a Professor of Demography and Population Health at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College where she is Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science and Demographic Science Unit. She also holds a part-time position as Professor of Data Science and Public Health Policy, Department of Econometrics, Economics and Finance, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Anthony Teasdale, FAcSS, is a visiting professor in Practice at the European Institute of the London School of Economics (LSE) and an adjunct professor at the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University in New York. He was previously the founding Director General of the European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) - otherwise known as the Directorate-General for Parliamentary Research Services - in the permanent administration of the European Parliament, a role he performed from 2013 to 2022.. Teasdale has also worked as a Special Adviser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and HM Treasury in Whitehall, and is co-author of The Penguin Companion to European Union.
Jane Green FAcSS is a British political scientist and academic. She is Professor of Political Science and British Politics at the University of Oxford and a professorial fellow of Nuffield College. She is a specialist in public opinion and electoral behaviour, and has co-directed the British Election Study. She is the president of the British Polling Council.
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) is a registered charity and is the largest independent social research institute in the UK. The research charity was founded in 1969 by Sir Roger Jowell and Gerald Hoinville with the aim of carrying out social policy research to improve society.
Angela Dale is a British social scientist and statistician whose research has involved the secondary analysis of government survey data, and the study of women in the workforce. Formerly Deputy Director of the Social Statistics Research Unit of City, University of London, and Professor of Quantitative Research and Director of the Cathie Marsh Centre for Census and Survey Research at the University of Manchester, she is now a professor emerita at Manchester.
Dame Jennifer Dixon is the chief executive of the Health Foundation, a large independent charity in the United Kingdom. Her work has been recognised by several national and international bodies for her significant impact in driving national health policy making.
Alison Macdonald Park is a British social scientist and professor who served as executive chair of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) from 2021 to 2023. Her research has focused on longitudinal data collection and social attitudes. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2019 New Year Honours for services to the Social Sciences.