Interview with Dr Mark Ward, Senior Research Fellow at The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA)
What is your area of research?
I am Senior Research Fellow with TILDA, which is the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing. My work focuses mostly on the social determinants of health among older adults. In the last number of years, I have been particularly interested in exploring how the social world impacts our health and well-being, with loneliness being of particular interest.
How did you become interested in this area of research?
My background is in sociology, and I have always been interested in how social structures and institutions shape outcomes for people and particularly health outcomes and essentially how the social world shapes our lives and our well-being and so on. Obviously, the social world is broad, so the things you can focus in on are equally wide ranging. But over the last number of years, through working at TILDA that we really saw how important good social relationships and friendships and social participation and the like, how essential they are for the well-being of older adults. Then of course, with the COVID-19 pandemic, interest in loneliness really came to the fore. I suppose people who possibly hadn’t thought of it before could really see how essential it is to their mental and physical health; the importance of being able to make social contacts and maintain friendships.
How do you see your research contributing to society, for example, what impact would you like your research to have?
The more ambitious side of me would hope that it helps us figure out how best to organise society and social structures so that it benefits most and not just a few. At an individual level, obviously I’d hope that my research can inform the work that community groups and people running interventions do to try and improve the lives of people at an individual level. So, there is two tiers to it, the big picture, the change society piece and the smaller, maybe improve one person’s life at a time.
What inspired you to pursue a career in research?
I have always been curious about how the world works; particularly how society is organised and how differences in that organisation impact on people’s well-being and their life chances. When I was choosing what to do in college, I initially wanted to be a social worker. I did social science in UCD and then I came to the realisation that I probably wasn’t best suited to that, but I was really interested in the big picture stuff. Over the years I developed a keen interest in research methods and particularly in understanding how we can apply statistics to understand what’s going on in the world. I had a basic curiousness to begin with and then was fortunate enough to be able to have develop and apply that curiosity in my education and research career over the last number of years.
In your opinion, what are some of the most important skills needed to succeed as a researcher?
Firstly, you have to be curious. If you’re not or you don’t have questions that you want answered well then you know you’ll find it difficult. You’ve got to be curious; you’ve got to want to actually find things out. The second is to be rigorous, and that’s where you are willing to spend the time to learn the skills and then apply those skills correctly to answer those questions that stem from your curiosity to begin with. So, curiosity coupled with rigor.
What would you consider to be your greatest achievement to date as a researcher or is there something you are currently working towards achieving?
I am very excited about a new project that I’m currently developing. My motivation for it is that levels of loneliness differ hugely between countries. In some countries you might have less than 10% reported loneliness, whereas in others it’s upwards of 30%. That got me thinking, well, what is it about those different societies that lead to those differences? I’m working at the moment to try and get research off the ground that will allow me to compare structural factors or contextual level factors in different countries to try and see if they explain some of those differences. When we talk about contextual factors, I’m talking about cultural norms; things like how important family is to people or how important is having a lot of friends to people. Also, demographic and socio-economic factors such as inequality, poverty, gender, employment, and caring roles. Then there are also differences in welfare regimes and how societies are shaped from a governmental or policy level.
In terms of my own achievements, I’m very proud of a lot the public facing research that we’ve done, including some work we’ve done with ALONE in the past where we’ve gotten the message out about how important an issue for health that loneliness is for older adults. This was particularly telling or noteworthy around the COVID-19 pandemic when everybody could see just how essential our social lives are having to a large degree taking them pretty much for granted before. You don’t know what you have until its gone.
What is the biggest challenge or challenges that you face or have faced as a researcher?
To get into the weeds of it, the data infrastructure in Ireland really lags behind that of other countries. What I mean by that is we’re really constrained in the types of data that we can link together or combine together. If I want to combine TILDA survey data to data collected from other sources, for example, healthcare data, or employment data, it’s next to impossible. Whereas in other countries, you can combine all these things together, which gives you a really full picture of people’s lives in terms of their healthcare use, employment, social factors and so on. One of the biggest challenges has been the data infrastructure constraints in Ireland.
Can you give an insight into any interesting ongoing or upcoming projects that you are involved in, or will be involved in?
The one that I’m really excited about is looking at the different kind of institutional or structural differences. I also led out on our programme of research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on people’s health and well-being. We continue to use that data to try and figure out who has recovered best and least from the pandemic. For example, what we’ve found is in terms of loneliness, that while loneliness peaked during the pandemic and it has kind of returned towards pre pandemic levels, but it’s still not back to where it was. Related to that, we know from working with the likes of yourselves in ALONE and Men’s Sheds and other organisations on the ground, that a lot of people haven’t returned to the good habits that they had before the pandemic, particularly men. People seem to have broken the good habits that they had in terms of being part of organisations within the community and a lot of people have not gone back. We are trying to figure out exactly who those people are and maybe ways that could get them back to the better places they were in pre pandemic.
Is there any research that others are engaged in at present that is of interest to you?
One of the things I’m really glad to see over the last couple of years has been the realisation that loneliness isn’t just an issue for older adults. A lot of the narrative, both within research and more so in public discourse, is this notion of the lonely, isolated older adults living in a rural area on their own. The reality is that all age groups experience loneliness, and if anything, loneliness can be more strongly felt by younger people The research highlighting the fact that loneliness occurs over the life course, and it doesn’t just appear in old age is really important. It has motivated some really good research that looks at the life course of loneliness rather than just at one point in time. This is related to lots of research for older adults in that a lot of what we call risk factors or modifiable things happened much earlier in life. We don’t simply start at age 50 or age 60. We need to understand the kind of things in earlier life, even childhood, through to early adulthood, middle adulthood, how these all bring us to the situation that we’re in older adulthood. Equally, many of the changes that we advocate for older adults, for example, safe places to walk, accessible services, and so on, benefit everyone, young and old.
If you could offer one piece of advice to someone starting out a career in research, what would it be?
Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. In terms of just your own curiosity and having questions that you want answered at that level. But also, just on a day-to-day, keep asking questions, to colleagues etc. Also read everything but question everything you do.
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