My career: Peter Lynn

Peter Lynn is Professor of Survey Methodology at the Institute for Social and Economic Research, University of Essex.
What was your childhood ambition?

Inspired by the BBC series Animal Magic and the Gerald Durrell books, I wanted to run my own zoo, saving endangered species. By the age of 14 or so I wanted to be a journalist instead.

When did you turn to social research?

I chose physics, chemistry, pure maths and applied maths at A level – just because I was reasonably good at those subjects, not because I had any idea what I wanted to do afterwards. But I was too lazy to keep up with the pure maths, so I swapped the two maths courses for single-subject maths. That left a hole in my timetable. I wanted to fill it with Russian, but there were not enough takers for the course to run, so I opted for O level statistics instead. Statistical analysis methods were applied to all kinds of topics on that course, but it was social issues that I found most fascinating, perhaps not least because I was encountering them for the first time.

What was your first job?

During my second year as an undergraduate studying statistics at UCL, we had a guest lecture from Denise Lievesley on survey sampling. This was the first I had heard about social surveys, and it sounded amazing. At the time Denise was Deputy Director of the SCPR Survey Methods Centre, so I wrote to SCPR (now known as NatCen Social Research) asking if they might have any summer vacation job for a student. They invited me to an interview and then offered me the job of estimating sampling errors for the England & Wales Youth Cohort Study (cohort 1, sweep 1), a task which mainly involved sitting at a Sun terminal in the dusty basement of City University compiling Fortran 77 programmes. The task was expected to take the whole of my three month vacation, but I finished it in six weeks so they had to find other things for me to do. I did telephone interviewing of research company CEOs, sampling by hand from electoral registers and proof-reading of survey reports, all of which opened my eyes to the survey research process. SCPR offered me a job upon graduation, which I accepted (after toying with OPCS!).

Your best professional moment?

A very satisfying moment was getting agreement between the Bosniak and Serb statistical agencies in Bosnia to implement a standardised sampling methodology for a national household survey. This was just a few years after the Bosnian War, tensions were high, and any exercise that might reveal the relative size of the population in the two ethnically-divided entities was highly contentious and politicised. At that moment I felt more like an international diplomat than a researcher!

…and worst?

One of my first interviewer briefing conferences was in Leeds. On the same day, unbeknown to me, an SCPR colleague was going to a meeting in Sheffield. The SCPR administration somehow managed to give me my ticket but the colleague’s seat reservation. This led to me boarding the wrong train and ending up in Sheffield, from where I had to get a tiny local train which crawled over the hills dropping off locals with huge bags of shopping, bicycles, and – memorably – two chickens. Long before the days of mobile phones, the 20 or so interviewers in Leeds had no idea what had become of me until I showed up red-faced.

Do you have a social research hero/heroine?

I hold in awe the achievements of people like Charles Booth and Florence Nightingale. But the biggest personal influences on me have been Roger Jowell and Denise Lievesley.

A favourite quote?

I used to have this pinned on my office door: “Statistical thinking will one day be as necessary for efficient citizenship as the ability to read or write” (H.G. Wells)

What would you say to encourage a young person today considering a social research career?

The demand for quantitative social research is unlikely to diminish. The opportunities provided by new data and new technologies are escalating and appreciation of the benefits of statistical analysis of social issues is spreading. Consequently, there are great career prospects. Social research is also enjoyable and highly rewarding.

Interview by William Solesbury