Dr Kate Andersen

Profile

Areas of expertise

• Welfare reform
• Welfare conditionality and sanctions
• Gender and citizenship
• Qualitative longitudinal research

Academic biography

My research explores the intended and unintended consequences of new social security policies. I am especially interested in investigating how government justifications for welfare reforms compare with the everyday realities of affected claimants. My research particularly focuses on how welfare reforms impact people who are already marginalised in society. I find qualitative longitudinal approaches particularly useful for analysing changes to the social security system, and for observing how people experience, manage, and are impacted by, change.  

In 2015 I joined the school as a master's student and went on to complete a PhD which investigated the implications of the conditionality within Universal Credit for women's citizenship. This explored how the new conditionality regime affects mothers' unpaid caring roles, their position in the paid labour market and their agency. My interest in social security policies stems from experiences prior to joining the department of teaching children and adults living in poverty in the UK, the US, Kenya and Malawi.  

I am currently working on the Family Finances project (a comparative evaluation of the Scottish Child Payment), the Safety Nets project (an exploration into the devolution of social security within the UK) and the Benefit Changes and Larger Families project (an investigation into the impacts of the two-child limit and the benefit cap on larger families).