Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Quantitative)

About us

IOE is UCL Faculty of Education and Society.

Founded in 1902, IOE has been shaping policy and helping government, organisations and individuals navigate a changing society for the last 120 years. We embrace collaboration and excellence to create a future that is inclusive and just, and have been ranked number one for education every year since 2014 in the QS World University Rankings by Subject.

The Department of Education, Practice and Society (EPS) has specialists from a wide variety of disciplines including history, sociology and philosophy who undertake research to support education throughout the life course by contributing to economic, social and political debate as well as development in societies, nationally and internationally. The department pioneers research collaborations with external partners to diversify the contribution that educational research can make academically, professionally and practically for individuals and communities. The work of the department strives to provide solutions to current and emerging pressure points in societies, such as economic change and social injustice, by creating networks and partnerships to support knowledge transfer between education, work and communities.

The Department of Education, Practice and Society has an exciting research portfolio of projects.

About the role

We are looking for a quantitative sociologist with experience of longitudinal data analysis and an interest in place-based inequality and the intersection of geography, sociology, and youth life chances. The postholder will be part of a mixed method research team and will play a pivotal role in the policy impactful Coastal Youth Life Chances project. The central aim of this project is to examine whether growing up in coastal towns can impact young people’s life chances; that is, their likelihood of having good outcomes in adulthood in terms of education, work, housing, and health and wellbeing. The study will draw on theories from sociology of youth, place-based inequalities, and life course research to increase our understanding of youth life chances.

The postholder will play a critical role in the quantitative strand of the project and, under the direction of the Principal Investigator and Co-Investigators, will be responsible for preparing and analysing statistical data from longitudinal cohort studies, day-to-day management of the quantitative strand, and writing up and disseminating findings from these analyses through conferences, peer-reviewed publications, and non-academic outputs. In the first instance, the postholder will focus on analysing youth life chances in the Education and Work domains.

This is a fixed term post, funded for 18 months from 01/06/2024 – 31/12/2025.

About you

The postholder will have PhD degree in Sociology or related social science discipline (e.g. Social Statistics, Population Geography, Social Epidemiology). You will have excellent research skills in a range of advanced quantitative methods (particularly longitudinal analysis using cohort studies, and preferably using birth cohort studies). In addition, the successful candidate will have knowledge and understanding of theories and debates in place-based inequalities, life chances and the sociology of education and youth employment, and will evidence of scholarship in quantitative social science, with a record of peer-reviewed publications.

Your application form should address all the person specification points and should clearly demonstrate how your skills and experience meet each of the criteria.

It is important that the criteria are clearly numbered and that you provide a response to each one.