Ellen Stewart and Alistair Brown have produced a SIPHER Info Pack which explains in simple terms what the Consortium is, what each of the eight workstrands are doing, and also includes a glossary of terms. It was developed for our Community Panel members who told us that the research can be difficult to understand, and they provided lots of useful feedback on drafts of the content. We plan to keep updating and improving the Info Pack as time goes on so please do share any feedback with Ellen Stewart.

SIPHER Info Pack>

To examine the complex relationships between upstream policies and wellbeing, economic and equality outcomes, SIPHER needs a common set of wellbeing indicators from different domains such as health, income, employment status, and so on. We need a measure that combines the indicators into a single index by applying relative weights to them. This was achieved by eliciting the relative preferences of members of the public across different domains of wellbeing, to be used as the weights. The seven indicators that form the ‘SIPHER-7’ were selected through a consultation process outlined in this report.   

Becky Field has written a blog about using online methods to find out what members of the public think about these wellbeing indicators, and how they value the aspects relative to each other.

Read the blog>

We are delighted to announce that An Thu Ta (Anna) has passed her PhD viva with minor corrections. Anna is a PhD student in the Department of Economics at the University of Sheffield, supervised by Aki Tsuchiya (Workstream 6 lead) and Dr Bert Van Landeghem. Her thesis is titled “Essays on Measuring Wellbeing". The third study in her thesis was conducted as part of workstream 6, which has made an important contribution to the work of SIPHER. 

SIPHER’s Scientific Advisory Board had their second meeting at the end of November 2021. The board meet annually to review and provide input to SIPHER’s developing research and outputs, and to make recommendations for further work. At this meeting, the workstrand leads all delivered presentations on the  progress they have made during the 2nd year of the project. There was a consensus amongst the board members that SIPHER has made significant methodological advances over the last 12 months. We welcomed a new member to this meeting; Dr Diane Finegood from Simon Fraser University, Canada.

Meet the Advisory Board>

We are advertising for a funded SIPHER PhD student to be supervised by Aki Tsuchiya and Robin Purshouse at the University of Sheffield. The proposed PhD, ‘Aggregating multi-domain wellbeing across individuals’,  will explore the following questions:

1. Do relevant decision makers have different inequality aversion for overall wellbeing and the domains of wellbeing, and for what reason(s)?
2. Do relevant decision makers value the two allocation possibilities above differently, and, if so, for what reason(s)?
3. Are the differences between the individualistic approach and the domain-specific approach large enough to affect actual policy decisions?

The closing date for applications is 31st March 2022.

Find out more>

This short report led by Colin Angus and Petra Meier describes the process and outcomes used to develop a set of ‘health indicators’ for use within SIPHER. The agreed primary outcome measure is Quality-Adjusted Life Expectancy (QALE) with the following supporting measures:

• Mental and physical health/self-reported health
• Receipt of benefits due to inability to work through ill health
• Hospital admissions for Non-Communicable Diseases
• Emergency admissions to hospital for any cause

SIPHER health indicators report>

For the latest podcast, Petra Meier speaks with one of the founders of modern computational sociology, Prof. Nigel Gilbert. Nigel Gilbert has a Distinguished Chair in Computational Social Science at the University of Surrey.  He is Director of the Centre for Research in Social Simulation, Director of the Centre for the Evaluation of Complexity Across the Nexus (CECAN), and Director of the University's Institute of Advanced Studies.

Listen to the podcast>

• David Innes, Consortium Manager, University of Glasgow (pictured)
• Helen Thompson, Consortium Administrator,  University of Glasgow
• Anne Cunningham, PhD student, University of Sheffield
• Shreya Sonthalia, PhD student, University of Glasgow
• Karen MacNee, Head of Health Improvement Division, Scottish Government
• Anita Morrison, Deputy Director, Health and Social Care Analysis, Scottish Government
• Katherine Myant, Scottish Government
• Jennifer Rickard, Economic Policy Officer, Sheffield City Council
• Diana Buckley, Head of Economic Strategy and Economic Commissioning, Sheffield City Council

Meet the SIPHER team>

Fiscal and monetary policies: the cutting edge of advocacy and research on population health and climate change published in Perspectives in Public Health

A synthetic population dataset for estimating small area health and socioeconomic outcomes in Great Britain published in Scientific Data

Governance of Intersectoral Collaborations for Population Health and to Reduce Health Inequalities in High-income Countries: A Complexity Informed Systematic Review published in International Journal of Health Policy and Management