Ranging from jurisprudence to autism, the loss of a baby to the growth of equality in science education, the work of the finalists in the seventh annual Celebrating Impact Prize competition—announced today — represent a broad cross-section of meaningful work from Britain’s social and behavioral researchers.

How can researchers use social media data in their research? The digitalization of social life offers researchers an unprecedented world of data with which to study human life and social systems. However, accessing this data has become increasingly difficult. Jason Radford here is to help you figure out what approach is right for you.

Niall McLoughlin is a PhD candidate in psychology and arts scholar at the University of Bath, as well as an associate with Climate Outreach. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, McLoughlin discusses the psychological catastrophe that accompanied the natural disaster of the 2015 Cumbrian floods and what that might teach us for addressing climate change.

The American Council of Learned Societies has named its 2019 ACLS Fellows and the inaugural recipients of the Mellon/ACLS Scholars & Society Fellowship.

Alessandro Massazza, a PhD student in the Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, at University College London has received money from the Economic and Social Research Council to research the psychiatric consequences of complex emergencies. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, he explores how the double-edged sword of memory affects us after a traumatic event.

The ability to work with digital research methods and data analysis is opening up a whole new world of research potential for social scientists. No one knows this better than Digital Sociologist Dr. James Allen-Robertson from the University of Essex. For him, these new techniques have enabled multiple interdisciplinary research collaborations and a whole new world of funding and professional opportunities.

Here, James tells us how computational social science has given him and his research output a new lease of life.

Academics are required to not only find effective ways to communicate their research, but also to increasingly measure and quantify its quality, impact and reach. In Scholarly Communication: What Everyone Needs to Know, Rick Anderson puts us in the picture. And in Measuring Research: What Everyone Needs to Know, Cassidy Sugimoto and Vincent Lariviere critically assess over 20 tools currently available for evaluating the quality of research.

Psychologist Abby Dunn is a doctoral researcher at the University of Sussex whose work has focused on parenting, and in particular parenting for those with complex needs. In this shortlisted essay from the ESRC Better Lives Writing Competition, in which PhD students who have received money from the ESRC write short essays about how their research leads too better lives, she examines how mental health practitioners interact with patients who are also parents.

The social science community has a large stake in the accuracy of the U.S. Census for the community’s contued research. Here, law professor Jonathan Entin discusses the legal controversy swirling around the impact a question on citizenship has on the census, something the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing about this week.

In their new video series entitled “Science in the District: Cognitive Psychology in the Real World,” the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences explores different ways in which cognitive science is at play in the world, particularly to keep individuals safe and healthy.

Evidence suggests that one effect of the growing phenomenon of online hate speech is that it fosters varied forms of inequalities (e.g. class, race, gender, and place of origin) and, consequently, also (in)directly undermines important United Nations declarations promoting human rights.

Outsourcing our memories — or actually forgetting once-vital skills that no longer matter in our daily lives — has always been with humanity. But how does the drift to artificial intelligence reflect what’s always been the case versus what should be a special case?