Parenting Statistics Summer Placement
Over the last 6 weeks, I have been working at Parenting Across Scotland through the University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Sciences’ Q-Step summer placement programme. My main task was to organise numerical data on topics concerning parents into short briefings. The coverage was data after 2021, post-COVID. Following the literature review on existing qualitative data that PAS had conducted with The Lines Between, this would help PAS build their knowledge on the parents from the numerical side.
The process
The first thing I did was to gather information about the major quantitative datasets in the UK and Scotland. This let me find out what themes the datasets covered.
From there, I started searching for published reports of the datasets. However, here I faced a wall – many of the datasets that I had found in the first step did not include analysis on parents in Scotland. Many UK-wide surveys, such as the Labour Force Survey and the Living Costs and Food Survey, do not provide specific analysis on Scotland, or if they do, the information covers all adults and not parents. On the other hand, there were some dataset reports that included information on topics that I wasn’t expecting, such as Scottish Social Attitudes Survey’s public attitudes to children and young people's decision-making report, which reveal public attitudes concerning some key components of the newly incorporated UNCRC.
Additionally, I searched for relevant reports using keywords such as “parents”, “children”, “poverty”, “child poverty”, “play and leisure”, “children’s rights”, “priority families”, and so on. Through this process, I found reports published by the Scottish Government, as well as independent organisations.
Finally, I found some datasets through having meetings with Amy and Arran, who recommended some datasets that they thought would be useful to me.
With all the data gathered now, the final step was to write four reports on PAS’s four themes of focus: poverty, family support, children’s rights, and play and leisure.
Strengths and difficulties of data
As I was searching for relevant information, I became aware of the difference in density of some themes covered in the data.
Firstly, there were less quantitative sources that covered topics such as play and leisure and children’s rights. In comparison, the data on poverty and family support (i.e. parents’ mental health, support services for parents, childcare) were more extensive. The theme of poverty was particularly prevalent and transcended the four themes we focused on. Differences in financial security had significant impacts on parents’ mental health as well as children’s participation in play and leisure.
However, the scarcity of information on play and leisure (I could only find one dataset that covered topics in play and leisure) reflects wider society’s tendency to disregard children’s play and leisure as less important to children’s wellbeing and development. Truthfully told, when I first started my placement at PAS, I was a little confused why play and leisure was chosen as one of their focuses alongside poverty. But through learning about the UNCRC (where rights to play are treated as equal to rights to an identity, for example), and discussing the importance of play and leisure with Amy and Arran, I came to understand the significance of play and leisure for children’s health and development.
I also found that while many datasets on poverty provide additional analysis that focuses on the six priority families, often there was more data for single parents, families with disabled people, and large families, and less for young parents, families with a baby, and ethnic minority families. This was mainly because the sample sizes for these people were too small to allow estimates.
Moreover, there are families that are not included in the six priority families but still face poverty. For example, we touch on LGBTQI+ people, who are generally more likely to be in poverty, but I was unable to find any quantitative analysis on LGBTQI+ parents. Moreover, children with parents in prison and children with parents affected by drugs and alcohol are also more likely to be in poverty, but were not found in numerical evidence.
A final point to note is that while there is extensive analysis on child poverty in many reports, the ways the authors measure poverty are different across the reports. For example, in the 2017 Child Poverty Act, the Scottish Government uses four measures of poverty: relative poverty, income and material poverty, absolute poverty, and persistent poverty. New measures of poverty continue to be developed, such as the DWP’s Below Average Resources (BAR)(more information here:https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/below-average-resources-developing-a-new-poverty-measure). While this reflects the multidimensional nature of poverty, it has also reminded me of the difficulty of quantifying poverty accurately and the importance of striving to understand poverty in a way that does not leave anyone behind.
Final Words!
While the tasks were interesting on their own, the biggest takeaway of this experience for me has been the knowledge I have gained about third sector organisations in Scotland. It’s been through everyday conversations that I’ve come to see how third sector organisations are managed, what kinds of tasks they take on, and how third sector organisations work together to achieve larger goals. I want to finish this blog by thanking Amy and Arran for creating a lovely environment for me to spend the past 6 weeks in, and to the staff at the University of Edinburgh for making sure everything runs smoothly.
