Case studies

Thanks to data analytics, the Business and Local Government Data Research Centre enabled Essex County Council to identify needs and opportunities to enhance green infrastructure across the county and inform strategic planning in Essex.

ECDA is a partnership between the University of Essex, Essex Police and Essex County Council. Our Centre provided a series of interactive training sessions to the analytics teams to enhance their knowledge of R as well as data science more wlidely. As a result, the council are applying the methods learnt to give meaning to mental health data.

By applying advanced techniques learnt during the training sessions delivered by our Centre, the council's analysts have created a physical inactivity dashboard, allowing greater understanding of the county's health. This model is now being applied to identify communities most at risk of COVID-19.

We're taking part in a series of projects that will help Essex County Council address the challenges faced by adult and child social services in a post-pandemic work.

In a new analysis of 1.7 billion tweets, we worked with the universities of Edinburgh, Utrecht, Cambridge, Oxford and The Alan Turing Institute to measured semantic change in 348 emoji, using computational techniques which have only previously been used to study more standard written language.

Innovation is often concentrated in certain geographic areas or ‘creative clusters'. Is creativity driven by wealth, by specific features of local institutions, or by mere chance? New research supported by the Centre showed that creativity tends to precede economic prosperity, and that city institutions that protect personal and economic freedoms are conducive to radical innovation in a variety of domains.

Gender inequality is observed in all spheres of life. In new research by Dr Smruti Bulsari she uncovers the curse of violence faced by women since the ages and the clear inequalities between men and women that still exist today. In our latest research, we look at how social inequality eventually translates into discrimination in access to education and health care, which eventually has bearing on employment.

In November 2021, our Centre joined Healthwatch Suffolk and leading men's health charities in the UK to explore solutions to the hidden inequalities faced by men as research shows men continue to be more likely to die younger than women with one in five not even reaching retirement age.

This work discusses the concept of HR analytics, followed by its application to three HR functions: recruitment, employee engagement, and employee retention, along with the key issues around implementing this process in organisations.