Project Partners

Methodology Institute, London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) – London, UK

The Methodology Institute’s aims and objectives are informed by the LSE’s mission to be the “leading academic centre of international excellence in the study and application of the social sciences”. In the context of the School’s commitment to research-led teaching, the mission of the Institute is to promote, support and lead developments in the training of research methodology. But the Institute is also the site for innovative substantive and methodological research in the social sciences. For example, the current Director (Professor Gaskell) was the Coordinator of "Life Sciences in European Society", funded under the European Commission's 5th Framework Programme. This project involved researchers in 14 European countries, with associate teams in Canada and the US conducting a comparative investigation into the reception of modern biotechnologies in the public sphere. Professor Gaskell is also the Coordinator of “Sensitive Technologies and European Public Ethics”, funded under the European Commission’s 7th Framework Programme. The Institute’s academic staff has diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including statistics, criminology, psychology, sociology, political science, management and bio-ethics. The Institute currently has 10 academic staff members and 3 Ph.D. researchers.

The Methodology Institute will contribute both substantively and methodologically to the development and validation of internationally comparable indicators of public confidence and insecurity (WP3, WP4 and WP6), with the following personnel:

Jonathan Jackson (Ph.D. LSE) is Lecturer in Research Methodology in the Methodology Institute and member of the Mannheim Centre for Criminology at the LSE. He has held visiting positions at the University of Oxford and New York University. Within EUROJUSTIS project, he will lead WP6.

George Gaskell (Ph.D. UCL) is Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Methodology Institute. His research is in social, ethical and legal aspects of technological innovation, in particular in the life sciences. He has recent publications in Risk Analysis, Science and Nature Materials.

Jouni Kuha (Ph.D. Southampton) is Lecturer in Statistics and Research Methodology. His research centres on statistical model selection, models with measurement error, misclassification and missing data, and latent variable models. He has been an Assistant Professor at Penn State and Prize Postdoctoral Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford.

Contacts: Jonathan Jackson, j.p.jackson@lse.ac.uk.

Website: http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/methodologyInstitute/Default.htm