A statistical light goes out

 By Ennor

I returned to work after the holidays to hear that a great statistician of our times had sadly passed away, Roger Jowell. I knew Roger as the Director of the European Social Survey (ESS). The ESS is probably the most well respected international social survey in the world and won the Descartes prize for science in 2005 – the first social science project ever to win it. I had got to know him personally over the past eight years as nef’s National Accounts of Well-being work was all based on ESS data. In fact this past year we have been designing with Roger and others at City University the next well-being module of the questionnaire. So I have seen a lot of him recently.

You can read a full obituary of him in the Telegraph – regrettably I had no idea that he been prominent in the anti-apartheid movement, which is a conversation I would have liked to have had with him. But reading his long list of achievements did give me some insight into why I always found him so personally supportive of me and nef’s work on well-being. I think that he saw in us some of himself. He was a pioneer and an innovator. He believed in the power of evidence and dedicated himself to setting up systems that would create that evidence base.  He was always insistent that data should be freely available to all researchers and was instrumental in creating a revolution in social science. His list of surveys he started or was involved with is remarkable: Social Attitudes Survey, British Crime Survey, Family Resources Survey, Health Survey of UK, Longitudinal Study on Aging and the controversial Sexual Attitudes Survey which the UK Government refused to fund despite the HIV/AIDS implications – it was eventually funded by the Welcome Institute and still is carried out today.

As well as surveys Roger was a co-founder of NatCen, the National Centre for Social Research, and was also deputy chair of the UK Statistics Authority.

Most of all Roger was a really good man. He was a shining example of someone who pursued a meaningful unorthodox career path and through the powerful combination of his intellectual brilliance and sheer determination genuinely made a difference in the world. I feel privileged to have known and worked with him.

Juliet Michaelson, Senior Researcher at the Centre for Well-being adds: I first came across Roger as a guest lecturer on my Research Methods masters at LSE, and then as an employee of NatCen. Although he had left for City University by the time I joined in 2004, his personality still infused much of the organisation, and I learned a huge amount from what he had created. So it was with some trepidation about ‘the great man himself’ that I met Roger as part of our work at nef on National Accounts of Well-being and the European Social Survey. But I soon realised I need not have worried. Despite being pre-eminent in the field of social research, Roger was utterly warm, witty, welcoming and down to earth. He also had an incredible instinct for creating well-designed survey questions and I regarded it as an absolute honour to spend a number of days in his company, collaboratively aiming to improve the questions for our well-being module, witnessing his brilliant mind at work.  We will be keenly aware of his absence as we continue our work.