Roger Jowell

NatCen Social Research's founding director, Professor Sir Roger Jowell has died.

It is with great sadness that we learned that Professor Sir Roger Jowell CBE died on 25th December.

Roger founded and led our organisation for more than 30 years and he will be greatly missed. With Gerald Hoinville, he founded Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) in 1969. SCPR became the National Centre for Social Research in 1999 and he remained its Director until 2001. He started and directed the British Social Attitudes survey in 1983 and edited its first 19 annual reports.

In 2001, Roger turned to comparative research, co-founding and directing the European Social Survey, a 34-nation comparative study of changing social values throughout Europe which was awarded the Descartes Prize in 2005. He joined City University London as a Research Professor in 2003 where he set up the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys. He was Deputy Chair of the UK Statistics Authority and continued to write and lecture widely on substantive and methodological issues in social research.

Roger was awarded the CBE in 2001 and was knighted in 2008 for services to the social sciences.

Read our tribute to Professor Sir Roger Jowell here.