Study title

This data is the companion to the SCID project's Voter Model (an agent-based simulation model of voting behaviour). The data is a subset of the 1992 wave of the BHPS data, in which respondents/households have been anonymised and responses have been inputted. The data allows researchers external to the SCID team to run the model with the original data source. This data can be used to initialise the simulation model and add new agents to the model. Ours has been dubbed the 'age of migration'. Immigration is a major political issue, with increasing media coverage, rising anti-immigration sentiment and the rise of anti-immigration political parties. The issue of migration sits centrally within the wider debate about ethnic and religious diversity and its effects on social cohesion. We are still, though, a long way from understanding these issues and their potential consequences. They seem to rest on beliefs about national identity and ethnicity, but cannot be divorced from the effects of social class, education, economic competition and inequality, as well as the influences of geographical and social segregation, social structures and institutions.This project will integrate the two very different disciplines, social science and complexity science, in order to gain new understanding of these complex, social issues. It will do this by building a series of computer simulation models of these social processes. One could think these as Serious Sims programmes that track the social interactions between many individuals. Such simulations allow 'what if' experiments to be performed so that a deeper understanding of the possible outcomes for the society as a whole can be established based on the interactions of many individuals. A difficulty with the computer simulation of complex systems is that if they are made realistic (in the sense of how people actually behave) it becomes very complex, which makes the simulation hard to understand, whilst if they are made simple...