What Makes People Happy at Work? Insights from Quantitative Data

What makes people happy at work? Why are some workers more satisfied with their jobs than others? What factors influence job satisfaction and can the way work is organised be changed to improve it?

In this interactive online workshop, students will seek to answer these questions through:

Group discussions of what factors influence job satisfaction, covering sociological debates on the role of work in people’s lives, and how it can provide them with identity, purpose and self-fuflillment. This part of the session will also look at the role of work design and human resource/people management activities in influencing workers’ behaviour and satisfaction;

Group tasks exploring the determinants of job satisfaction in the UK – examining real data  gathered from 10,000’s of workers in the UK over the last decade, contained in 2 large-UK datasets: Understanding Society and the Workplace Employment relations Survey;

Students will develop an understanding of how quantitative data is conducted in the social sciences, with specific reference to the Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS) and how data analysis results are summarised, visualised and presented in SPSS.

Additional resources will be made available after the workshop, to give workshop participants the opportunity to develop their practical quantitative data analysis skills further.  Pre-recorded tutorials and worksheets will provide step by step guidance on how to analyse specific data using SPSS.