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Given the centrality of regions in social movements, politics and public administration, here we aim to quantitatively study regional identity, cross-region communication and sentiment. This paper presents a new methodology to study social interaction within and between social-geographic regions, and then applies the methodology to a case study of England and Wales. We use a social network, built from geo-located Twitter data, to identify contiguous geographical regions with a shared social identity and then investigate patterns of communication within and between them. In contrast to other approaches (e.g. using phone call data records or online friendship networks), use of Twitter data provides message contents as well as social connections. This allows us to investigate not only the volume of communication between locations, but also the sentiment and vocabulary used in the messages. For example, our case study shows: a significant dialect difference between England and Wales; that regions tend to be more positive about themselves than about others, with the South being more ‘self-regarding’ than the North; and that people talk politics much more between regions than within. This study demonstrates how social media can be used to quantify regional identity and inter-region communications and sentiment, exposing these previously hard-to-observe geographic concepts to analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For pilot or experimental employment programme results to apply beyond their test bed, researchers must select ‘clusters’ (i.e. the job centres delivering the new intervention) that are reasonably representative of the whole territory. More specifically, this requirement must account for conditions that could artificially inflate the effect of a programme, such as the fluidity of the local labour market or the performance of the local job centre. Failure to achieve representativeness results in Cluster Sampling Bias (CSB). This paper makes three contributions to the literature. Theoretically, it approaches the notion of CSB as a human behaviour. It offers a comprehensive theory, whereby researchers with limited resources and conflicting priorities tend to oversample ‘effect-enhancing’ clusters when piloting a new intervention. Methodologically, it advocates for a ‘narrow and deep’ scope, as opposed to the ‘wide and shallow’ scope, which has prevailed so far. The PILOT-2 dataset was developed to test this idea. Empirically, it provides evidence on the prevalence of CSB. In conditions similar to the PILOT-2 case study, investigators (1) do not sample clusters with a view to maximise generalisability; (2) do not oversample ‘effect-enhancing’ clusters; (3) consistently oversample some clusters, including those with higher-than-average client caseloads; and (4) report their sampling decisions in an inconsistent and generally poor manner. In conclusion, although CSB is prevalent, it is still unclear whether it is intentional and meant to mislead stakeholders about the expected effect of the intervention or due to higher-level constraints or other considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]