A single person’s experience of being, say, British-Pakistani or Irish in the UK can look radically different depending on whether they are first, second, or third generation, and on where they live. This project digs into six decades of survey data and new interviews in Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff, and Newham to map how ethnic inequalities and identities have shifted across generations, economic contexts, and policy eras. The problem it tackles is that current policy often treats ethnic inequality as a static snapshot, when in fact it is a moving target shaped by migration rules, labour markets, and the very categories—like “mixed” or “Polish”—that society uses to label people. If successful, the research will give policymakers and advocacy groups a clear, evidence-based picture of which inequalities persist across generations and which fade, allowing them to target interventions—such as employment support or anti-discrimination enforcement—at the points where they will actually matter. The work is fundamentally about social understanding rather than a specific technology, but that understanding directly feeds into how public services, hiring practices, and race equality legislation are designed.
View original technical description
This project will address questions that are central to policy and academic understandings of the dynamics of ethnic inequalities and ethnic identity: -How have the experiences of migrant generations changed over time and as they have grown older? -To what extent are these experiences different between first, second and third generations? -How have these processes operated across different ethnic groups, including in relation to factors such as gender and socioeconomic position? -How do experiences and perceptions of ethnic identities unfold over the life-course? -In what ways has the patterning of ethnic inequalities and the social and cultural meaning of ethnic identities changed over time and place, in relation to economic context, migration policies, political context, legislation in relation to race equality, and social change? -How do we understand this in relation to changes in the meaning of particular 'ethnic' categories (such as Irish or Muslim) and the emergence of new categories (such as mixed and Polish)? The core agenda of this research is to transform our understanding of the contemporary patterning of ethnic inequalities and how this relates to the ways in which ethnic identities are perceived, acted upon and experienced. To understand current and future dynamics of ethnic relations, we need both to examine current data and to understand how and why the patterning of ethnic inequality has changed over time, in relation to changing patterns of migration to the UK, underlying economic and political contexts, and social dynamics. To do this the research will bring together an interdisciplinary team using quantitative and qualitative approaches to understand how ideas of, and responses to, ethnicity have changed and what impact this has on contemporary ethnic identities and inequalities. The value of the work will result from the project team's ability to bring together data from across disciplines, across topics and over time, in a usable form in order to enable a careful and methodologically innovative interrogation of this information through: -The interlinking of existing quantitative, qualitative and documentary data; -The generation of new data to complement existing data; and -The historical contextualisation of the data and the ethnic categories used. The quantity and quality of survey data collected on ethnicity has increased and improved over time, providing a unique opportunity to address these issues. We will examine data that have been collected since the 1950s in the UK in order to understand changes in the ethnic make-up of the population, the dynamics of ethnic inequality and identity over this period and the factors that may be driving these changes. We will then relate this to analyses of contemporary data and analyses of the pattern and drivers of change at an individual level using newly available data from surveys that interview the same individual repeatedly over time. In addition, we will conduct studies in four selected localities (Glasgow, Manchester, Cardiff and the London Borough of Newham) to obtain in-depth accounts of changes in the experience of ethnic identities, the ethnic composition of the local population, the patterning of inequalities, and how these relate to the questions of generation, age and period we have described above. These areas have been identified for in-depth study because we have access to relevant data for them and because there are important differences between them in their histories, socioeconomic profiles, patterns of migration, ethnic make-up and national context. Our findings will be communicated directly to relevant policy and advocacy organisations through a combination of electronic (interactive web pages, blogs, twitter), novel (political conference participation, summer schools for GCSE students, museum exhibitions) and more traditional (newsletters, conferences, seminars, policy forums academic papers) forms of dissemination.
Andrew Smith (Co-Investigator)Bridget Byrne (Co-Investigator)James Nazroo (Principal Investigator)Ken Clark (Co-Investigator)Laurence Brown (Co-Investigator)Louis Kushnick (Co-Investigator)Nissa Finney (Co-Investigator)Robert Ford (Co-Investigator)Satnam Virdee (Co-Investigator)Yaojun Li (Co-Investigator)
Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.
Is something wrong? Let us know