Professor Roger Tarling
Professor
Qualifications: BSc (Lond), Grad Dip Stat (Inst of Stat), PhD (London)
Email: r.tarling@surrey.ac.uk
Phone: Work: 01483 68 6985
Room no: 26 AD 04
Further information
Biography
Roger Tarling, who is employed part-time, joined the Department in March 1996. Before that he was, for 20 years, a member of the Home Office Research and Planning Unit, the last six years as Head of RPU. Roger is a Chartered Statistician of the Royal Statistical Society.
Research Interests
Roger's research interests cover crime and criminal justice, the voluntary sector and research management. He also maintains an interest in quantitative research methods. Roger has completed research on police crime recording practice, criminal investigation (including the impact of forensic evidence in solving crime), the support and assistance given to prisoners with drugs problems, the effectiveness of intervention programmes for young people at risk and sentencing practice in magistrates' courts. He has also reviewed the sources of statistics on the voluntary sector.
Publications
Journal articles
- . (2011) 'Relations between Government Researchers and Academics'. Wiley-Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice, 50 (3), pp. 307-313.
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(2010) 'The volunteering activities of children aged 8 – 15.'. The Policy Press Voluntary Sector Review, 1 (3), pp. 293-307.Full text is available at: http://epubs.surrey.ac.uk/239150/
Abstract
Despite policies to encourage children's sense of citizenship and to increase young people's participation in the voluntary sector, there has been very little research on volunteering by the under-16s, and scant attention has been paid to existing evidence. This paper uses the United Kingdom Time Use Survey, 2000 to explore the formal and informal volunteering of children aged 8 to 15: their participation rates; the time they spend volunteering; the volunteering activities they do; and the characteristics of child volunteers. It is shown that children are a core group of active volunteers who should no longer be sidelined in voluntary or fourth sector research and policy, and nor should research on children ignore volunteering as an aspect of their lives. The conceptualisation of volunteering can be enriched by a better understanding of children's experience, and the ways in which current conceptions of volunteering may themselves obscure children's contribution.
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(2010) 'Reporting Crime to the Police'. OXFORD UNIV PRESS BRITISH JOURNAL OF CRIMINOLOGY, 50 (3), pp. 474-490.doi: 10.1093/bjc/azq011
Books
- . (2008) Statistical modelling for social researchers. London : Routledge
Teaching
Roger teaches evaluation and quantitative research methods, statistics and statistical modelling to postgraduate students undertaking the MSc in Social Research Methods. He also teaches on the Crime, Criminal Justice and Social Research MSc: topics include evaluating crime and criminal justice, and criminal procedure and sentencing. Roger also runs a one day course on Research Management as part of the Department's Day Course Programme.
Professional Activities
During his time at the Home Office Roger was Chair of the Interdepartmental Heads of Profession Group for Social Research in Government. More recently, Roger has acted as Senior Academic Advisor to the Home Office Director at the Government Office of the South East.
Roger has served on a number of ESRC Committees and Working Groups; including the Research Resources Board, the Crime and Social Order Research Programme Steering Committee, the Analysis of Large and Complex Datasets Steering Committee, the Research Careers Working Group and the Datasets Policy Working Group. He has also served as the ESRC representative on the Data Archive Advisory Board.
Roger was a member of the Executive Committee, and for six years, National Treasurer of the British Society of Criminology and a member of the group developing the BSC's Code of Ethics. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Howard Journal of Criminal Justice and was an Associate Editor of the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Statistics in Society.
Roger served on the Social Research Association Working Group preparing guidance to members on data protection issues.
