Research Programmes and Projects
At the heart of our current activities is Social policies and distributional outcomes in a changing Britain (SPDO), a major three-year research programme being undertaken by a team of inequalities and social policy experts here and in partnership with research teams at University of Manchester, Heriot Watt University and UCL Institute for Education.
CASE has recently worked on a three-year programme on Improving the Evidence Base for Understanding the Links between Inequalities and Poverty, collaborating with the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the LSE International Inequalities Institute .
Alongside this, the programme of Research on Equality, Capability and Human Rights, is using a set of frameworks based on the capability approach to analyse multidimensional inequality, including specific projects on recipients of social care in the UK, older people internationally, and the development of tools to measure ‘autonomy’.
Among them is the newly launched Multidimensional Inequality Framework (MIF), which provides a systematic, theoretically grounded approach to measuring and analysing inequality. Projects in this programme are funded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the British Academy and a number of NGOs.
At a local level the LSE Housing and Communities group within CASE, is examining the ground-level impact of social and housing policy developments such as benefit and tenure reforms, and of wider economic trends such as rising youth unemployment, deskilling and school failure. Current research projects include assessing the impact of the Olympics on disadvantaged families in East London and evaluating a scheme in West London to refurbish social housing to higher environmental standards.
Our most recent Annual Report 2022 discusses recent research and lists publications and other activities during 2018.
The research conducted in CASE is published in books, academic journals, project reports and in a series of in-house publications, CASEpapers, CASEbriefs and CASEreports. All CASE publications are free to download from this website and hard copies are available from Jane Dickson (Email: j.dickson@lse.ac.uk).
CASE runs two seminar series, the Social Exclusion Seminar Series and the Welfare Policy and Analysis Seminar Series and runs special events and public lectures throughout the year.
Completed Programmes
We recently completed a four-year programme of research Social Policy in a Cold Climate examining welfare spending and outcomes for the final years of the Labour administration and the Coalition administration up to 2015.
CASE has now completed a major programme of research for the Economic and Social Research Council, more details of which can be found under the following headings:
- Generational and life course dynamics
- Poverty, local services and outcomes
- The dynamics of low income areas
- The CASE neighbourhood study
- Education and social exclusion
- Social networks and social capital
- Employment, welfare and exclusion
- Policies, concepts and measurement
- Assessing policy towards poverty
And below are completed programmes funded by other organisations:
- Multidimensional child poverty and disadvantage (Nuffield Foundation)
- Does Money Affect Children's Outcomes? An update (Joseph Rowntree Foundation)
- Early Years Childcare (Nuffield Foundation)
- Money Matters (Joseph Rowntree Foundation)
At an international level, we were leading partners in five projects:
- the EU funded Growing Inequalities' Impacts Project (GINI) is examining how inequalities in income, earnings, wealth and education have evolved over the last 30 years and its impact.
- the IMPROVE project on social policy innovations for poverty reduction in Europe
- a programme examining what has been happening to 'Weak Market Cities' recovering from industrial decline in Europe and the US
- a Europe wide study on sustainable regeneration in suburbs, looking at social integration in deprived neighbourhoods through housing interventions by the European Regional Development FUnd (ERDF)
- a study of the differences in consumption patterns between high and low-tax countries