Care and caring in geographical context: what difference does place make?

Working in partnership with the Office for National Statistics (ONS), this project offers an outstanding opportunity for an applicant to apply cutting-edge methods to a superb new dataset to study the impact of care and caring on wellbeing and how this varies geographically. Linked to CIRCLE, the UK's leading research centre on social care based at the University of Sheffield, you will benefit from a multidisciplinary supervision team. The project, developed in collaboration with the ONS, will exploit its new data linkage powers, connecting data from sources such as: Census (2001, 2011 and 2021); NHS digital (e.g. Hospital Episode Statistics; Survey of Adult Carers in England; Adult Social Care Survey); DWP (statistics on health, disability and care); and selected local authority commissioning data. The central research question will be 'How is a person's experience of providing care, or of living with disability / needing care and support, shaped by where they live?' The aim is to utilise cutting edge social statistics and data analytics to explore how far a person's health and wellbeing (material and subjective) is shaped by the local context in which they live (local socio-economic conditions; household and labour market circumstances; access to publicly funded support when providing and / or receiving care). The studentship will focus on differences of ethnicity / culture and/or education and qualifications.