Attending the British Society for Population Studies Annual Conference

Winchester Cathedral

By Charlotte Sturley, PhD Student

Earlier this month I attended the British Society for Population Studies (BSPS) annual conference at the University of Winchester. The theme for this year’s conference was demography, inequality and social policy.

Along with presenting some initial findings from my PhD research in the health and mortality session, I talked about social and spatial variations in colorectal cancer mortality in England and Wales, in particular trends by socio-economic deprivation and geographical area. There were some useful comments from the audience particularly around linking the mortality data to cancer screening data which is something I hope to explore in future work.

The conference covered a broad range of topics. I attended presentations about the impact of partnership status on health, the life expectancy gap for Indigenous Australians and a talk by the Office for National Statistics on the use of administrative data in official statistics. Professor Danny Dorling gave a thought-provoking plenary talk on the current “health crisis” in the UK, characterised by the recent rise in mortality rates.

I also took part in a practical training session on handling large datasets in the statistical software package R. These skills will be particularly useful when I come to analyse cancer registration data in the next phase of my research.

In the evening there was an opportunity to explore Winchester, which I had not visited before. It is a beautiful city with lots of historical interest, including a stunning cathedral.

Image credit: Winchester Cathedral Nave by Diliff CC BY-SA 3.0