Research Projects
Immigration Attitudes
Principal Investigator: Dr Rob Ford , Institute for Social Change, Manchester University
Co Investigators:
Prof Anthony Heath, Institute for Social Change, Manchester University
Alison Park, Social Attitudes Research Group at NatCen.
Dates:
01 January 2011 to 31 December 2012
Funders:
The City Parochial Foundation,
The Joseph Rowntree Foundation
Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust,
The principal aims of the survey research are
- To track public attitudes to immigration over time
- To explore differences in attitudes towards immigration between subsections of the British population
- To understand how attitudes to immigration relate to wider social values and consumption of the mass media and thereby
- To develop effective positive messages and communication strategies.
The key feature of our proposal is a module of 20 questions in the British Social Attitudes (BSA) surveys for 2011 and 2013. The BSA is a nationally-representative probability sample conducted annually to the highest professional standards of survey research. Its findings are regarded both by academic researchers and by public and government bodies as highly authoritative and every year the publication of its annual report receives extensive media coverage.
The BSA has included questions on attitudes to immigration in the past, and by replicating past questions from the BSA we would be able extend considerably the time series. (See Rothon and Heath 2003, McLaren and Johnson 2004 and Heath, Rothon and Ali 2010 for reports drawing on this past BSA data.)
A further key advantage of including a module in the BSA is that the survey already includes many other questions covering for example the respondents’ demographic characteristics, their social and political values, and their media usage which will in effect be ‘free’ for the current project. These additional questions will be invaluable for pursuing the wider research objectives of the project. In other words the effective number of questions that the research will be able to draw upon will be much larger than the 20 included in the immigration module, thus allowing the module to focus exclusively on attitudes to immigration. The proposed module could also provide the foundation for future repeat waves testing for changes in attitudes over the longer run. We aim to repeat the module on a regular basis at intervals spaced between two and five years apart, depending upon funding availability. By regularly repeating the questions over a fifteen to twenty year time horizon, we will be able to monitor both short term and long term changes in attitudes, and identify factors which contribute to both.