Professor Sir Roger Jowell CBE

We were very sad to learn that Roger Jowell, NatCen Social Research's co-founder, passed away over Christmas.

Roger's accomplishments in the research world were considerable, but we start by recognising the personal qualities that made him such a fantastic colleague, mentor and friend. He was a tremendously engaging man, with a wide range of interests and considerable curiosity about the social, political, cultural and sporting worlds. His charisma and charm, added to his wit (and what could be a mischievous sense of humour) meant he was able to engage with a wide range of people and invariably left a lasting impression. He was a person of strong principles and values who was not afraid to take a stand. This, coupled with his wide experience and sound judgement, made him a great person with whom to debate challenging research or ethical issues and a valuable champion of a cause.

Roger arrived in the UK in 1964 from South Africa, where he had been active in student politics at a time when opposition to apartheid was growing. He brought with him an enduring commitment to social justice. Although Roger was active in the Labour Party and engaged in anti-apartheid activities over many years, he felt his greatest contribution could be through social science, where impartial research would inform public debate. He began his research career at RSL, mentored by Mark Abrams whom he admired greatly, but Roger was a great entrepreneur and in 1969 he and Gerald Hoinville left their jobs to co-found Social and Community Planning Research (SCPR) and pursue their vision of an institute devoted to social and political research. It is a telling reflection of Roger's values and the nature of his ambitions that SCPR (now NatCen Social Research) was established as a charitable research institute independent of government, academic and commercial interests.

As a labour of love, Roger guided SCPR's growth over the next three decades, overseeing the development of our main areas of specialism: in complex and robust survey design and administration based on rigorous probability sampling, questionnaire design and analysis; in qualitative research, which forged its place in social research and became a vital element in policy evaluation; and in the development of high quality research methods. Throughout, he inspired a unique ethos which continues to this day.

Roger also helped initiate and shape an extraordinary body of social surveys, not least our flagship study, the British Social Attitudes survey, which he started in 1983 and now provides a unique record of changes in our values and beliefs. He was closely involved in the first 19 annual reports on the survey findings, both as an author and an editor, and cared hugely about the results being described as accessibly and engagingly as possible. He co-directed the British Election Studies from 1983 to 2000, and began what was to become a long standing interest in comparative research by acting as the founding chair of the International Social Survey Programme (a cross-national survey collaboration which continues to this day) from 1984 to 1989. Other notable studies include the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (which famously annoyed Margaret Thatcher and which required considerable creativity in meeting its methodological challenges), the series of Deliberative Polls funded by Channel 4 in the 1990s, and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, a great example of interdisciplinary research.

Roger remained a great supporter of NatCen Social Research even after handing over the management reins in 2001.  While still at NatCen he set up the European Social Survey (ESS) alongside a group of leading international experts, and in 2003 he moved with ESS to City University where he became Research Professor and Founder Director of the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys. ESS is an ambitious 34 nation comparative study and has been another of Roger's extraordinary achievements. This is reflected by its exceptional success in securing European funding and by being awarded the Descartes Prize in 2005 for excellence in collaborative scientific research, the first time a social science venture has won Europe's top annual science award.

His impact within the wider research community was also significant. He initiated and made major contributions to the establishment in 1978 of the Social Research Association, and in the 1980s he played a key role in developing a professional code of ethics through the International Statistical Institute, insisting that it should be an 'educative' code that required people to think, rather than a prescriptive recipe book.  His interest in ethics reflected too his own deep personal integrity.  He was recently the Vice President of the Royal Statistical Society and was awarded the Market Research Society Gold Medal. In 2008 Roger became Deputy Chair of the UK Statistics Authority, advising on the promotion and safeguarding of the publication of official statistics across the UK. He was knighted in the 2008 New Year's Honours for services to social science.

Roger was an extraordinary person with an extraordinary career, but perhaps his greatest legacy is the people that he nurtured and developed. He always said his greatest skill was to recruit well, and his personal qualities and research expertise meant he made an enormous impact on the people with whom he worked. He cared greatly about developing people, and took an interest in their careers long after his responsibilities for them had ended. He was always willing to give advice and generations of researchers are indebted to him. Indeed, some of the UKs finest social researchers - across all sectors - started life at what is now NatCen Social Research.

Although Roger worked extremely hard to the end of his life, he had many personal interests, not least cricket, antiques, his home in the Forest of Dean and entertaining a wide circle of friends. He leaves his wife, Sharon Witherspoon, herself a highly respected member of the social science community and his two sons, Marco and Adam, of whom he was enormously proud. A memorial service will be held to honour Roger in the Spring and we will provide further information as soon as we are able on our website.

Carli Lessof and Alison Park on behalf of NatCen Social Research