Social Sciences

A new ESRC report, published to launch Social Science Week 2005, uses the seven deadly sins – pride, anger, lust, avarice, gluttony, envy and sloth – as a way of looking at some pressing issues of modern life: religious conflict, rage in kids and adults, sexual behaviour, corporate greed, binge drinking, rising personal debt and political apathy.

Exploring these issues afresh – and often questioning conventional wisdom – demands a look at the evidence, drawing on the wealth of in

What part does envy play in the apparently spiralling stock of personal debt in the UK, which last year passed the £1 trillion mark? New research by Stephen McKay, published in ESRC’s new report Seven Deadly Sins, indicates that people who are envious of what others have, and dissatisfied with their own incomes, do tend to have higher levels of credit and greater difficulties making repayments. But the size of this effect is small compared with the effects of age, income and changes i

The general elections of 2001 and 2005 had the second and third worst turnouts since 1900, falling from 71% in 1997 to under 60% in 2001 and only just above 61% this May. In ESRC’s new report Seven Deadly Sins, published to launch Social Science Week 2005, Professor Charlie Jeffery uses the British Election Study and other surveys of political participation to understand this growing voter apathy.

He argues that the real problem lies not in the voters’ sloth but in the failure

An extraordinary amount of media attention focuses on alcohol consumption and its impact on public order and health. But as Professor Dick Hobbs shows in ESRC’s new report Seven Deadly Sins, while ‘binge drinking’ youths dominate the headlines, it is older drinkers that are most likely to succumb to alcohol-related death.

What’s more, Professor Hobbs argues, it is the logic of the market and not the logic derived from careful data analysis that informs government policy on alc

The Molucca Islands are still suffering from the after-effects of the violence of 1999. That violence between Muslims and Christians started on Ambon in January 1999 and spread to the North Molucca Islands in December 1999. Farsijana Adeney-Risakotta analysed this Moluccan conflict within the broader framework of the changes that the Indonesian district Galela has recently undergone.

She focused on the role of rituals as powerful mechanisms for both creating solidarity and for increas

Absenteeism for sickness is exceptionally high in Sweden, in both historical and international comparisons. Several studies have already been carried out in the field, but many pieces of the puzzle are still missing. In a new dissertation from Växjö University, the economist Maria Nilsson examines some fundamental mechanisms behind this absenteeism.

“Our attendance at work is influenced both by the possibility of being there and the motivation to be there or, more simply put: every