Kelvyn Jones


Kelvyn Jones, is a British professor of human quantitative geography at the University of Bristol. He focuses on the quantitative modeling of social science data with complex structure through the application of multilevel models; especially in relation to change and health outcomes.

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:
He researches in three main areas:
His substantive and methodological work is wide-ranging and includes the following bodies of work:
Substantive research
Methodological research
University of Newcastle, 1978-1979, Lecturer in Geography,;
University College Swansea, 1979-1980, Lecturer in Geography;
University of Reading, 1980-1981 SSRC Postdoctoral Fellow;
Portsmouth Polytechnic 1981- 1994, Lecturer, Principal Lecturer, Reader;
Portsmouth University, 1994-2000, Professor of Geography, Head of School ;
Catholic University of Brussels, 1992-2011, Professor of Social Science Methodology;
University of Bristol, 2001-2018 Professor of Geography, ;
University of Bristol, 2018- Emeritus Professor of Geography;
University of Leuven, 2011- Professor at Leuven Statistics Research Centre.
His and other reflections on his time at Portsmouth were produced on his election to the British Academy
Voluntary positions include:
RAE Panel Member for Geography 2001;
RAE Panel Member for Geography and Environmental Studies 2008;
Board Member of Bristol University Press, 2018-;
Member of Understanding Society Scientific Advisory Committee, 2018-;
Scrutiny Committee for Fellowship of the Learned Society of Wales, 2016-.

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 and to Anthropology and Geography ). 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 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. and since then his h-index as measured by Researcher ID has increased from 20 to 36 in 2020; comparable figures for different social sciences can be found in the LSE impact blog. His Rgate Score as of February 2020 is over 300, and that compares to the outlying high scores of over 100 identified by E. Oduna-Malea et al., 2017 reflecting his willingness to answer questions.

Postgraduate teaching and supervision

He has taught a course on multilevel modeling annually at the Essex Summer School in Social Science Data analysis since 1992 and is a long term contributor to the Masters in Statistics and the Masters in Quantitative Social Science at the Leuven Statistics Research Centre. He also two led two five-day workshops in Pennsylvania State University and UC Santa Barbara under the aegis of GISpopsci.org.
He has supervised a number of students for their PhD; they include:
Book length publications include: