25 MSEK to research about school segregation

Published: 04 November, 2013

The past decades school segregation has become increasingly common in Sweden. Today Vetenskapsrådet (the Swedish Research Council), published information on which projects will get funding for five years of research from SIMSAM (Swedish Initiative for for research on Microdata in the Social and Medical Sciences). Peter Hedström, CEO at the Institute for Futures Studies, and his research programme about the dynamics of school segregation was granted 25 MSEK over five years for research about the causes and consequences of school segregation.

Extract from the abstract
This is an ambitious research program in which Swedish register data is used to radically improve our understanding of the causes and consequences of school segregation. Our focus is on how individuals, through interaction with each other and their social environment, become segregated along lines such as ethnicity, school ability, and parental income and education.

Within this research program we will develop novel methods for analyzing register data. Our research program is highly interdisciplinary. It combines advanced statistical analyses with simulation and visualization techniques emerging from complexity science and applied mathematics. The use of register data is a prerequisite for the research strategy adopted and we expect to build new tools for analyzing these data. A diverse research group, with a mixture of academic backgrounds, will tackle the research problems.