Overview
Social justice is the societal movement and view that everyone should be treated fairly, equally and have the same human rights and opportunities regardless of social, ethnic and cultural backgrounds. Our goal is to produce impactful and policy changing research by reporting and raising awareness of inequalities, and to advocate for equity of access to healthcare, education, and opportunities across the lifetime to support a progressive Wales.
The research team will prioritise research areas with policy makers to ensure research outputs are policy relevant and that inclusion and equality are embedded as part of ADR Wales outputs.
Our research agenda will cover inequalities in health outcomes, treatment, accessibility to services, opportunities, and education for the population of Wales, and will utilise linked routinely-collected anonymised, individual-level, population-scale demographic, health, environmental, administrative and social data held in the Secure Anonymised Information Linkage (SAIL) Databank. We will define person characteristics and categorise social groups to ensure marginalised and vulnerable people are represented in the research to reduce inequalities and unfairness.
Social Justice Research Areas
- Research into the current descriptions and characteristics of the population of Wales
- Research into the interrelation and inequalities between socio-economic, ethnic and marginalised groups and health outcomes
- Research into major societal challenges in Wales and the impact on vulnerable and marginalised individuals
- Using data to evaluate, inform and refine interventions and care to tackle health inequity
- Using data to inform and refine accessibility and equity to services and opportunities
- Surveillance of violence against minority ethnic groups, LGBTQIA+, females and vulnerable individuals
The research under this theme will support priority areas identified in the Welsh Government Programme for Government 2021-26, Anti-racist Wales Action Plan, Advancing Gender Equality Plan, LGBTQIA+ Action Plan for Wales, Locked out: liberating disabled people’s lives and rights in Wales beyond Covid-19, The Co-operation Agreement and the Welsh Health Equity Status Report initiative.
Priorities
This cross-cutting research theme will focus on covering inequalities in health outcomes, treatment, accessibility to services, opportunities, and education for the population of Wales. Policy relevant research outputs will provide evidence to help identify, better understand, and eliminate inequality in all its forms.
ADR Wales contributed to the new Equality, Race and Disability Disparity Evidence Units strategy and priorities (2022-2027) which recognises the value of data linking to address challenges around the visibility of minority populations. We expect to continue to work closely together to better understand and characterise the population of Wales in terms of social justice.
We will look at disadvantaged groups and health outcomes, identifying the interrelation and inequalities between socio-economic, ethnic and marginalised groups and health outcomes. We will use data to evaluate, inform and refine interventions and care to tackle health inequalities. We will look at inequalities in treatment between groups of people and the equity of access to treatments. We will use data to inform and refine accessibility and equity to services and opportunities, and we will look at inequalities in education and inequalities in work and progression.
We will look at the impact of major societal challenges in Wales and the impact on vulnerable and marginalised individuals. We will explore the impact of the cost-of-living crisis on struggling families and individuals, the impacts of fuel poverty by different population subgroups and evaluate the cost-of-living crisis in Wales using fuel poverty data. We also aim to evaluate national interventions and schemes that promote equity and well-being such as the Basic Income Scheme for care leavers.
Further, we will examine reported violence against minority ethnic groups, disabled people, LGBTQIA+, women and non-binary people.
Projects
Population inequalities in Wales
Using existing and new health, demographic and administrative data, this project aims create foundations from which future research on the characteristics of the Welsh population can be based. This work will help researchers to profile and categorise the population for future inequalities research.
Deprivation and chronic diseases
This project seeks to compare trajectories of chronic diseases by area-level deprivation for the population of Wales. Researchers will seek to find out if individuals living in more deprived areas accrue diseases at a faster rate than individuals living in the least deprived areas.
Instances of assaults presenting to health services among minority groups in Wales
This project will utilise health, demographic and survey data to investigate if people from minority ethnic groups, disabled people, LGBTQIA+, women and non-binary groups experience higher rates of assaults than other people in the population.
Health service utilisation in Wales
This project aims to create a desirable health service utilisation indicator to characterise the distribution of the population who do not use the health service as a measure of health resilience. The project will look at what proportion of the population of Wales meet the indicator criteria and how this varies with deprivation and protected characteristic groups.
Inequalities in career progression
This project will look at workers in Wales with the aim of identifying if it is possible to measure equity within progression pathways particularly by ethnic groups.
Publications
Report: Supporting People data linking project: update
This project follows on from, and is informed by, the Supporting People data linking feasibility study and Supporting People data linking emerging findings report, using legacy Supporting People data from five local authorities in Wales (from 2003 to 2020). The Supporting People programme was replaced by the Housing Support Grant in 2019.
This report analyses the demographics of Supporting People to understand who received support from the programme. In addition, it outlines findings from analysis that linked Supporting People data with healthcare data in the SAIL databank to understand the healthcare utilisation of Supporting People clients before and after they received support.