The Warwick Institute for Employment Research was established by the University of Warwick in 1981. The IER is one of Europe’s leading centres for research in the labour market field. Its work includes comparative European research on employment and training as well as that focusing on the UK at national, regional and local level. The IER is concerned principally with the development of scientific knowledge about the socioeconomic system rather than with the evolution and application of one particular discipline. It places particular emphasis on using social science in the effective development of policy and practice and in collaborating with the policy and practitioner communities to bring this about.

The IER’s research fields involve addressing major issues of socioeconomic behaviour and policy in their local, national and international setting.

Contributions made by the IER to public policy debates include:

tackling shortages of key skills	reform of education and training
extending choices for older workers	promoting employability
enhancing competitiveness	employment and social exclusion
gender and the labour market	approaches to work-based learning
equity and efficiency in education and training	the knowledge-based economy
work-life balance	the European and global context
harnessing the science base for economic development	the impact of training policy on employer attitudes and costs and on access for individuals
extensive involvement in the evaluations of the Jobseeker’s Allowance and the New Deal	the sequence of studies of graduate career expectations and destinations
the role of labour market and social policy in promoting European integration and employment growth	research to provide a deeper understanding of the nature of skills shortages and deficiencies

The distinctiveness of the Institute’s work probably lies most of all in the way it generates and tackles substantive research questions, increasingly bringing together different types of scientific approach, combining quantitative and qualitative evidence. It often works along the boundaries of both academic disciplines and substantive fields, though this is not an end in itself. Thus some projects fall primarily within the mainstream of one discipline (for example, economics or sociology) and some are essentially multi-disciplinary - drawing on collaboration between researchers working from different theoretical and methodological perspectives. Others aim to be inter-disciplinary in that their original research designs seek to create both a theoretical framework and an empirical approach that will yield a coherent and reasonably comprehensive treatment of the subject matter.

The strategy has been to broaden gradually the methodological basis of the Institute’s work in order to deal more effectively with research problems which cross the boundaries of conventional disciplines and the methods of analysis associated with them, while maintaining coherence of the overall programme. Thus, the Institute’s research regularly involves quantitative economic analysis using time series or largescale cross-sectional and longitudinal survey data; survey-based sociological research; and studies of socio-economic behaviour based on in-depth interviews and case studies.