Kelvyn Jones, (born )[Kelvyn Jones website at the University of Bristol [1] University of Bristol. Retrieved 9 February 2021.] He focuses on the quantitative modelling of social science data with complex structure through the application of multilevel models; especially in relation to change and health outcomes. Uniquely he is an elected Fellow of the British Academy, the Academy of the Social Sciences and the Learned Society of Wales.
Academic controversies
He has been involved in a number of academic controversies, and these debates have been of a methodological and substantive nature. They include:
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He has disagreed with the Wilkinson inequality hypothesis that within country differences in health and mortality are driven by invidious comparison; instead arguing that there is a materialist argument based on poverty even in advanced economies.
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He has argued against Growth in a Time of Debt thesis and (with Andy Bell) re-analyzed the Reinhart and Rogoff data to show that the evidence for many counties is that the relationship is around the other way - the lack of growth produces debt,
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With colleagues, he has argued against Trevor Phillips that the UK is 'sleep walking to segregation', finding that ethnic residential segregation in London for example is decreasing.
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He has argued that quantitative analysis in the form of quantitative geography has an important role in emancipatory human geography (see critical geography). He has argued that this involves adopting a realist philosophy of science distinguished as critical realism and not positivism. The arguments are made in "The Practice of Quantitative Methods"
[Jones, Kelvyn (2011)The Practice of Quantitative Methods in Somekh, Bridget and Lewin, Cathy (eds.) Theory and methods in social research
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and are further developed and exemplified with colleagues in "Mutual misunderstanding and avoidance, misrepresentations and disciplinary politics: spatial science and quantitative analysis in (United Kingdom) geographical curricula"
and a subsequent extended reply to critics in "One step forward but two steps back to the proper appreciation of spatial science".[Johnston, R, et al. (2014) "One step forward but two steps back to the proper appreciation of spatial science."
] One commentator described this as "an extraordinary contribution. This is a panoramic survey of the legacy of half a century of innovation in spatial science—put into a critical, constructive engagement with half a century of innovation in critical social theory".[Wyly, E. 2014. The new quantitative revolution. Dialogues in Human Geography 4(1): 26–38. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2043820614525732 ]
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He (with colleagues) has challenged the 'gold standard' that fixed effects should be the standard approach to the analysis of Panel data and that a Hausman test is an appropriate way of choosing between a Fixed effects model and a Random effects model. Somewhat controversially they argue that a particular form of the random effects model (the within-between model or the similar Mundlak model) offers all that fixed effects can provide and more.
[Geoffrey Thomas Pugh'
] Another was: "Bizarre and often incorrect paper by two political scientists on the virtues of random-effects over fixed-effects". to "You can and should use a well-specified random effects model. Always.".[Panel data within group estimator on StackExchange demonstrates results with R (programming language) code, see ] These models shown algebraically in the table for a two-level panel model discussed and illustrated with snippets of R code by Daniel Lüdecke,
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He and colleagues argue that group-mean centering in multilevel models can be a useful procedure in random coefficient models,
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He contends that even with population data (e.g. a full enumeration of all pupils in all schools in a country), a statistical inference approach is required to deal with stochastic or natural variation. Observed outcomes are seen as a result of a stochastic process which could produce different results under the same circumstances. It is this underlying process that is of interest and the actual observed values give only an imprecise estimate of this.
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A review of the debate is given by Barker, KM et al (2020) Cross-classified multilevel models (CCMM) in health research: A systematic review of published empirical studies and recommendations for best practices, SSM - Population Health, Volume 12.
Academic work and projects
He researches in three main areas:
[These are listed on his University of Bristol website: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/geography/people/kelvyn-jones/research.html ]
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Geography of health: particularly geographical inequalities in mortality in advanced economies;
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Research design: especially to develop evidence-based research in non-experimental, observational studies;
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Realistically complex modelling: this research work focuses on the quantitative analysis of social-science data with complex structure, particularly when there are many levels of analysis such as panels, spatial series, and space-time series.
His substantive and methodological work is wide-ranging and includes the following bodies of work:
Substantive research
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Geography of health
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Multilevel modelling of health-related behaviors and outcomes
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Multilevel modelling of mental health outcomes
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Multilevel modelling of social capital, trust and volunteering
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Multilevel modelling of voting behaviors and electoral outcomes
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Forecasting geographical variations in the EU referendum
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Multilevel modelling of socio-demographic variation in China
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Modelling segregation: applying the new methodologies
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Multilevel modelling of property(house) prices
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Multilevel modelling of sporting outcomes
Methodological research
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Quantitative geography
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Statistical data analysis in the social sciences
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Multilevel modelling: scope, models and issues
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Multilevel analysis, software, manuals and data
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Fixed and Random effects analysis
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Modelling nationally predicting locally (multilevel regression with post stratification)
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this includes work on the modifiable areal unit problem;
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Modelling interactions: analysis of large tables of counts using a Poisson random effects model
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Age period cohort analysis
Access to publications and citations
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A Google Scholar profile gives up-to-date citation of his work; as of January 2025 his H-index score is 69.
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He makes available much of his academic output on
As of February 2022, he has over 1.4 million 'reads'
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There are also a ResearcherID site,
[University of Bristol Kelvyn Jones Research Outputs http://research-information.bristol.ac.uk/en/persons/kelvyn-jones(d70b4392-03cc-48b4-a3d8-d3cd6a2e3a3c)/publications.html ]
Posts held
University of Newcastle, 1978-1979, Lecturer in Geography,;
[According to entry in Who's Who (UK)]
University College Swansea, 1979-1980, Lecturer in Geography;
University of Reading, 1980-1981 SSRC Postdoctoral Fellow;
Portsmouth Polytechnic (post 1992, University of Portsmouth) 1981- 1994, Lecturer, Principal Lecturer, Reader;
Portsmouth University, 1994-2000, Professor of Geography (Personal Chair), Head of School (1997-2000);
Catholic University of Brussels, 1992-2011, Professor of Social Science Methodology;
University of Bristol, 2001-2018 Professor of Geography, (Personal Chair) (Head of School, 2005-2009 );
University of Bristol, 2018- Emeritus Professor of Geography;
University of Leuven, 2011-2018 Professor at Leuven Statistics Research Centre (LStat).
His and other reflections on his time at Portsmouth (Polytechnic and University) were produced on his election to the British Academy
Voluntary positions include:
RAE Panel Member for Geography 2001;
Recognition and awards
The election to a Fellowship of the British Academy was in 2016 and he was elected both to Sociology, Demography and Social Statistics (Section 4) and to Anthropology and Geography (Section 3)). The citation on election reads ‘Kelvyn Jones is an internationally leading quantitative social scientist. He has made major contributions to the analysis and interpretation of large and complex data sets in a broad field of quantitative social sciences, including geography, and is extremely active in promoting training in quantitative analysis in the social sciences.”
He is also a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, having been elected in 2013,
and an Academician of the Social Sciences, elected in 2008.
He was awarded the
Murchison Award of the Royal Geographical Society in 2013 for his contribution to quantitative geography;
an account of the ceremony was published in
The Geographical Journal.
2019 Market Research Society Silver Medal: he was part of the team (Ron Johnston, David Rossiter, Todd Hartman, Charles Pattie, David Manley and Kelvyn Jones) that won this award for best research paper, "Exploring constituency-level estimates for the 2017 British general election", which discusses the implications of constituency-level opinion polls as their predictive ability is improved.
, he was listed in the top 20 most cited human geographers of the last half century.[Measuring the influentialness of economic geographers: career h indexes for human geographers ] and since then his h-index as measured by Web of Science Researcher ID (Publons) has increased from 20 to 44 in 2024;[LSE impact blog Chapter 3 Key measures of academic influence http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/the-handbook/chapter-3-key-measures-of-academic-influence/ ] His Rgate Score as of May 2022 is over 400,
Postgraduate teaching and supervision
He also two led two five-day workshops (2009 and 2011) in Pennsylvania State University and UC Santa Barbara under the aegis of GISpopsci.org.
[GISpopsci.org http://gispopsci.org/multilevel-modeling/ ]
He has supervised a number of students for their PhD; they include:
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Andrew Clegg
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Craig Duncan
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Nina Bullen
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Sarah Johns
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Katherine French
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Min-Hua Jen
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Beatriz Caicedo Velasquez
[B Caicedo-Velásquez, K Jones (2019) "Measuring neighbourhood social dimensions using individual responses: an application of multilevel factor analysis and ecometrics" Spatial and Spatio-temporal Epidemiology, DOI: 10.1016/j.sste.2019.100318]
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Zhixin 'Frank'
[Feng, Z., Jones, K., & Wang, W. (2015) An exploratory discrete-time multilevel analysis of the effect of social support on the survival of the elderly in China. Social Science & Medicine, 130, 181-189.]
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Andrew Bell
[Bell, A., & Jones, K. (2014). Another'futile quest'? A simulation study of Yang and Land'
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Dewi Owen
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Yingyu Feng
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Gwilym Owen- Winner of the Faculty prize for Best Doctoral Research Thesis 2016/17
[Gwilym Owen best doctoral thesis Faculty of Social Sciences and Law Bristol http://www.bris.ac.uk/news/2017/october/best-theses.html ]
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Gareth Griffith,
[Gareth J. Griffith, Kelvyn Jones (2019)"Understanding the population structure of the GHQ-12: Methodological considerations in dimensionally complex measurement outcomes", Social Science & Medicine, Volume 243, doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2019.112638][Gareth J.Griffith and KelvynJones (2020) When does geography matter most? Age-specific geographical effects in the patterning of, and relationship between, mental well being and mental illness, Health & Place, Volume 64, July 2020, 102401]
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Lucy Prior
[Lucy Prior, David Manley, Kelvyn Jones (2020) Stressed out? An investigation of whether allostatic load mediates associations between neighbourhood deprivation and health, Health and Place, 52, 25-33][Lucy Prior, David Manley, Kelvyn Jones (2018) Ageing and cohort trajectories in mental ill-health: An exploration using multilevel models, PLOS ONE 15 (7), e0235594]
Major publications
Book length publications include:
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Jones Kelvyn (1991). Multi-level Models for Geographical Research, Environmental Publications, Norwich.
[Full text of Multilevel models for geographical research available at http://www.ggy.bris.ac.uk/personal/KelvynJones/54-multi-level-models.pdf ]
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Personal life
He married Christina Thrush in 1979; Tina died of Breast Cancer in 2020. His hobbies are listening to classical music, especially opera and song; gardening and 'allotmenteering', cooking, wine tasting and watching Bristol Rugby. They have a son, Alex, born in 1987 who is a Fellow of the Royal College of Anaesthetists.
