dr. Tom Emery, Associate Professor in Sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam
Family and the Big Picture: A New Lens on Society
Zooming in on family life, which provides lots of inspiration for his research, and zooming out for a broad perspective on society, using advanced IT infrastructures. It characterises sociologist Tom Emery (40). In the coming years, he will oversee the building of the world’s first population-scale Macroscope, that will shed light on how societies change over time.
Family, policy, and life milestones
“Like most family sociologists, I started out by trying to figure out how my own family works. I come from a big family, I’ve got many sisters, and my parents have been a big influence. Family sociologists think family is important in shaping your success,” he laughs: “but also in messing you up.”
Tom Emery
The family is the unit where many decisions happen, Tom explains. “I did my PhD on what is called ‘the Bank of Mum and Dad’: the extent to which parents give their adult children financial help. I tried to understand how important the role of parents is for young adults in getting education, bridging an employment gap or buying a house – all these life milestones.”
“What maintained my interest is that family is only part of the equation, there is still considerable scope for policy interventions. One of my other interests, therefore, is understanding the impact of social policy and how it interacts with families to shape people’s opportunities in life. But we live in a country, not an experimental lab. To understand the effects of policies we also look at countries where policies differ. Using Europe as a laboratory rather than a single country.”
The best place in the world
Tom, who grew up in the UK, came to the Netherlands in 2013 to work on a cross-national survey on family relationships: the Generations and Gender Survey. “I ended up staying because I concluded that the Netherlands is the best place in the world for a social scientist to live. There are two things that other countries have, but none has both.”
“One is excellent administrative data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS), that can be used for research purposes. Scandinavian countries have this too – we know a great deal about what goes on in Sweden because they have lovely administrative data and conduct some fascinating research. The UK and US on the other hand, have wonderful surveys.”
“But the Netherlands has something that is globally unique: high-quality surveys that can be linked to administrative data. This makes it possible to see how health effects education, which in turn affects employment. Or how trust is linked to people’s contacts within wider society.”
“I study the role of family and policy interventions in major life choices such as buying a house. But it’s difficult because we live in a country, not an experimental lab”
Passionate about better instruments
During his PhD, it became evident to Tom that the kinds of questions he could answer were determined by the data and the instruments that were available to him. He became passionate about improving social science data and the digital infrastructure that is needed for its collection, processing and dissemination. “I wanted to work on better instruments, so we could open up new areas of study.”
He does this, among other things, in his role as Executive Director of ODISSEI, the Dutch national infrastructure for social science. He also collaborates closely with SURF on the ODISSEI Secure Supercomputer, which enables social scientists to safely analyse CBS data in a shielded environment. These infrastructures allow Tom to see things on a grander scale.
“People often think of social research as something that you can kind of just do from your desk, without needing these big, coordinated efforts. But I’m of the opposite opinion: social science is a social activity. You need large collaborations to understand pressing societal questions. We need lots of different ways of measuring things, we need lots of different types of data and we need lots of different types of expertise to wrap our head around the complexity.”
“People often think of social research as something that you can do from your desk. But I’m of the opposite opinion: social science is a social activity. You need large collaborations to understand pressing societal questions”
Macroscope will reveal entire societies
This vision will hopefully be realised in a new project: the Macroscope. The Dutch Research Council NWO awarded 16.8 million euros in funding to build the world’s first population-level research infrastructure designed to study how societies change over time. The Macroscope will shed light on how misinformation spreads through a population, how trust evolves across society, or how culture shifts across populations.
It will allow researchers to securely link and analyse massive datasets spanning social, cultural, and digital domains across the entire Dutch population. They will have access to secure data vaults, archives, AI tools, and breakthrough capabilities to tackle society’s biggest questions – all while protecting individual privacy. As the executive director, Tom is responsible for overseeing the building of the infrastructure.
The complexities of childcare
“The Macroscope is designed to look at complexity. A good example is my current research on childcare. Loads of different factors play a role in the decision to put your child in childcare. How close do the grandparents live? Are there other children? And does that help or does that hinder? Is the local childcare centre a good one? Is it close by? Is it full? Is it expensive? How does it fit with my job? Where am I in my career? And all those questions again for your partner.”
There is also a strong cultural context. “Compare Sweden and the Netherlands: in the Netherlands, very few children go to childcare for 4 days a week or more, but they start relatively early. Swedes don’t send their child to childcare any earlier than 12 months – but when they do, it’s 5 days a week. These are very different perspectives, and they both consider the other option as very bizarre.”
“So, when the government is considering making childcare free for everyone, how many people would use it? The simple answer is that we don’t know. Price is a big consideration, but it’s not everything. It’s an exceptionally complex issue, which makes it really interesting for me as a scientist.”
“I hope the Macroscope will broaden the types of research questions that can be asked”
Cross-pollination between domains
“We see this complexity in many areas: education, the labour market, housing. The Macroscope is really good at disentangling these different factors and enabling researchers to consider them all at once and seeing how they interact.”
The project was initiated by two major Dutch research infrastructures: ODISSEI, focused on social science and economic data, and CLARIAH, which houses cultural and linguistic archives. “Social scientists perform surveys and work with CBS data. The humanities analyse texts, content and media. Bringing those two together will be super powerful.”
“The diversity of data that this project combines into one research stream is unique. We will be able to use different kinds of measurements, such as digital trace data, tax records, and surveys, in one single, integrated framework. When diverse scientists are working on a shared platform, we will hopefully see a lot more collaboration, innovation, and cross-pollination between the domains.”
Painting a richer picture
The Macroscope is set to be operational in 5 years. “But for me the true measure of success is not in what we’ve built, but what is done with it. It’s important that we see wide usage, so we want to make it easy to use and accessible at scale, also for people who are less quantitatively minded or data-savvy.”
Tom hopes the Macroscope will also change the types of research questions that can be asked. “The happiest moments are when you see papers come out in journals that were not possible before we provided this infrastructure. Trust in society, for example, is particularly complex to understand and track, especially over long periods of time. It’s something we feel, and to capture that in data is very difficult.”
“Currently, the best instrument to establish trust at the societal level is through surveys. But surveys don’t show how one person effects another, how trust builds, develops, percolates and then is destroyed. With the Macroscope, we can combine people’s opinions, social media content, and administrative data, to paint a much richer picture. And understand, for the first time, how these processes work in a society.”
“Childcare is an exceptionally complex problem, which makes it really interesting for me as a scientist”
Big inspiration
“Physics has microscopes, and astrophysics has telescopes. But in the social sciences, we’ve always lacked these large infrastructures. Surveys are great, but they’re a limited instrument. To continue the telescope analogy: it’s like seeing society through only one lens. The Macroscope will help us to think on a much more structural scale.”
Meanwhile, his own family life remains a big inspiration for Tom’s research. “When I had young kids, I started looking at childcare. But now that my kids have grown older and are in school, I’m really interested in BSO: the role that plays and its shortcomings in supporting parental employment. My wife is also a researcher in this area, so we spend many hours talking about it.”
Text: Josje Spinhoven
Photos: Sicco van Grieken
The role of SURF in the Macroscope project
Coordinated by Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Macroscope is a collaboration between many scientific partners. As project partner, SURF will develop next-generation secure computing and storage facilities. These build upon existing solutions such as the ODISSEI Secure Supercomputer, SANE, and the Data Access Broker. Furthermore, SURF will provide engineering expertise in deploying AI models that are trained with highly sensitive data.
“The biggest technological challenge is that the IT infrastructure needs to be hyper secure”, Tom Emery explains, “because we are talking about extremely sensitive data. There is a huge amount of technical work to be done by SURF to make sure that these infrastructures are legally compliant and fit for purpose, but that they're also usable by researchers.”