BU Research Blog

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Omowonuola Okunnu (PhD, FMC) with this poster entitled: A comparative study of the interconnectedness of religion and politics in Northern and Southern Nigeria: The role of literacy level.

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Although research on the determinants of political outcomes has been a subject of debate for many decades and perhaps centuries, findings are often awash with nuances and not on par with realities at the regional level. There are more questions arising from dynamics in the societies, related to political campaigning and social movements at the regional level. Consequently, the aim of this project is to examine the independent and mediating effects of religion and literacy levels on voters’ decision and electoral outcomes at regional levels amongst female voters in Nigeria. A mixed-method approach is adopted to ameliorate any contradictions between qualitative and quantitative findings. Early findings of this research suggest a battery of issues ranging from divergence in perceptions of religious issues; poor attitude to political outcomes; a weak awareness of political issues; and an underdeveloped attention is paid to gender imbalances in politics.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Rabeea Maqsood (PhD, FHSS) with this poster entitled: The association between Combat Related Traumatic Injury and Heart Rate Variability in the UK Armed Forces Personnel and Veterans- a quantitative secondary data analysis of the ADVANCE study.

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CRTI’s impact on HRV and its link to Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) risk have not been examined. This study aims to explore: the association between CRTI and HRV, and HRV’s potential to predict CVD risk. This study employs a baseline cross-sectional analysis of the ArmeD SerVices TrAuma and RehabilitatioN OutComE (ADVANCE) longitudinal cohort study, consisting of 579 adult male UK combat-veterans (UK-Afghanistan War 2003-14) with CRTI; frequency-matched to 565 uninjured men by age, service, rank, regiment, deployment period and role-in-theatre. Measures include single-lead ECG based HRV (RMSSD, SDNN, LF, HF, LF/HF-5-min ECG recordings), arterial stiffness (augmentation index, pulse wave velocity), injury-severity (NISS scores), and metabolic syndrome. Kubios software and SPSS will be used for HRV data-analysis and descriptive tests, respectively. CRTI’s influence on HRV and its relationship to CVD risk will be examined using T-tests and correlation. The findings may contribute to intervention development for veteran’s rehabilitation programme and trauma care.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Penny Wells (PhD, FMC) with this poster entitled: How people relate to environmental disaster in contemporary literature; an ecocritical approach.

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Taking six contemporary eco-novels containing scenarios of environmental disaster, this study examines how each is portrayed. The question of whether the disasters are natural or man-made is examined using Garrard’s six philosophical positions of ecocriticism, and further discourse analysis from ecological and scientific perspectives. The extent to which the characters engage with their natural environment in terms of their cultural capital (Bourdieu) will also be looked at. As well as exploring the political rhetoric of each book, from the various stakeholders’ perspectives, the study also incorporates a separate sociological research element which sets out to explore other ways in which authors may or may not express their concerns about our shared environment.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Jordan King (MRes, FST) with this poster entitled: Exploring nostalgic experiences in video games.

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Video game players may experience emotional demands, such as nostalgia, when thinking of a memorable game which can increase levels of well-being and social connectedness (Wulf, Bowman, Velez & Breuer, 2020). Yet previous literature has asked participants to think about a nostalgic game, the current study aims to have participants play a memorable video game to see what may make a video game nostalgic, explore how is nostalgia experienced before and after playing a nostalgic video game and, explore whether nostalgia is a positive experience which relates to well-being. Using a mixed method approach, quantitative data will explore levels of nostalgia before and after playing a nostalgic video game, and levels of well-being. Qualitative data will be collected to explore what may make a video game nostalgic which will be analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis. This contributes to existing literature on video game nostalgia by having participants play video games.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Megan Jadzinski (PhD, FHSS) with this poster entitled: How are Fitness to Practise processes applied in the Higher Education Institutions, in relation to Health and Care Profession Council or Nursing and Midwifery Council healthcare courses?

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Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) are required to manage concerns raised regarding pre-registration healthcare students. All HEIs are required to have a Fitness to Practice (FTP) policy to manage concerns. Due to limited guidance from regulatory bodies, variations occur. The aim of this research is to understand how the FTP processes are applied. A qualitative methodology will be utilised. Two stages will occur. Firstly, a review of FTP documentation from multiple universities. Secondly, online interviews with HEI staff who manage the process within their organisation. Following a systematic review, limited evidence was found with recommendations that further exploration is required. Limited research has been conducted on the FTP process within HEIs in England. Multiple gaps, including, a need for a more consistent and fair approach has been identified. The output from this research could impact the way in which FTP cases are managed.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Mirte Korpershoek (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: Rock art as an environmental archive.

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Rock art occurs worldwide, across societies and time-periods. Traditionally, rock art studies examine the intention behind the images: the symbolism and shamanistic ritual interpretations. In my research, I am investigating whether rock art depictions are useful to understanding the palaeoenvironmental context of the people who created the art. I will compare the images -focusing on depictions of humans, animals and activities/tools- to published archaeological assemblages, to establish to what extent rock art accurately depicts the way of living and environments of the artists. I will also compare themes in rock art from various locations to see whether there are any similarities and what this could mean. Machine learning will be applied to these themes to identify the most common figurative motifs per region. Here I will present the first results from South America: I discuss the prevalence of human and wild animal depictions from this region.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Iram Bibi (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: Reliability, validity, and feasibility of a generic quality of life scale for use directly with community dwelling older people with dementia.

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Currently, measures of quality of life (QoL) used with people with dementia (PWD) are mainly health-related. Health is not an actual attribute of but a means to attain QoL. The ICECAP-O scale measures attributes of QoL. In this study, ICECAP-O was tested with community dwelling PWD for face validity (N = 5), feasibility to administer, internal, and test-retest reliability (N = 54). The ICECAP-O was found to have good face validity and feasibility to administer. It also had acceptable test-retest reliability (r = .68, p<.01, n = 54; r = .56, p<.01, n = 54; for ICECAP-O raw and tariff scores respectively) and moderate to good levels of Cronbach alpha (.68 for raw score of 1st administration and .70 for the raw and tariff scores of 2nd administration) (Cicchetti, 1994). Therefore, ICECAP-O appears to be a useful measure for future research to directly assess actual attributes of community-dwelling PWD’s QoL.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Jack Wieland (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: Investigating the Role of Microsatellite Instability in Reproduction. 

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Infertility is defined as the inability to conceive after 1 year without the use of birth control methods. Previous research has revealed that genetic analysis to date is strongly associated with different nucleotide pathogenic variants within different DNA repair systems. However, there is little understanding in how microsatellite instability and the role of the immune system contributing to infertility. The workflow presented shows how this conclusion was drawn using a self-designed MySQl database utilising the research published to date. The next step from this is to undertake laboratory and computational bioinformatic analysis to demonstrate how microsatellite instability contributes to infertility. Other future directions of this research may explore how other genomic abnormalities contribute to infertility that may have not been reported in research to date.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Hayden Scott-Pratt (PhD, FST) and Sigrid Osborne (MRes, FST) with this poster entitled: Unlikely allies: Combining archaeobotanical and metallurgical material in archaeological research. An example from the Iron Age settlement at Hengistbury Head.

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How can an investigation of plant material inclusions in metallurgical waste inform on the use of furnaces in the Iron Age at Hengistbury Head? This poster presents a novel approach to studying ancient metal production practices.  It focuses on a case study of material excavated from the Iron Age settlement at Hengistbury Head, Dorset. It shows how using the field of botany can support interpretations on a prehistoric metal production process. On investigating the metallurgical slag recovered at Hengistbury Head an unusual macroscopic inclusion deemed to be plant material was discovered. A sample of the slag with the plant inclusion was investigated looking for phytoliths, microscopic plant remains. Investigating smelting parameters and furnace construction in antiquity is fraught with difficulty. Previously the packing of a furnace with organic matter has been inferred from occasional plant imprints. The phytolith analysis proved that the slag contained microscopic and macroscopic plant remains. This is new evidence and alters the interpretation of how Iron Age furnaces on Hengistbury Head may have been constructed.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Liz Bailey (PhD, FMC) with this poster entitled: Is history repeating itself?

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Parallels can be drawn between the power of the publisher over the author in the 1700s and the power of the internet over the author today. By drawing comparisons between the Stationer’s Company of 1556 and the tech giant Facebook, it becomes apparent how similar the situation is today. Through review of the natural evolution of the destruction of the publishing monopolies of the 1700’s and the current fight back at tech giants like Facebook, it becomes apparent how history demonstrates that power is never perpetual, monopolies are constantly built up and destroyed. This is the natural law of things.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Faisal Alsubaie (PhD, BUBS) with this poster entitled: The effect of cultural tightness-looseness on tourism destination choice for Western Europeans: Evidence from Saudi Arabia.

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This study addresses the question “How do the changes in cultural tightness–looseness (CTL) influence the perceptions of Western European tourists and their willingness to visit Saudi Arabia (SA)”? To answer this research question, the study adopts a research design of two phases sequential mixed method; (1) first phase employs a quantitative survey to measurement the tourists’ perceptions of the recent changes in cultural tightness (i.e., the strength of cultural norms and tolerance for deviant behaviour) and their impacts on their intention to visit SA. (2) the second phase employs a qualitative semi-structured interviews to get an in-depth explanation of the findings of the first phase of the study. This study contributes to the literature by developing a framework using CTL theory to investigate the effects of CTL on tourism destination choice in a Saudi context which has not been examined before.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Ceyda Kiyak (MRes, FST) with this poster entitled: Minimising online gambling related harm through persuasive technologies.

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How effective are the various types of interactions in breaking through disassociation of at-risk and social gamblers?  After identifying whether the participant is at-risk or social gambler with The Problem Gambling Severity Index on an online survey, fifty participants will be invited to the lab experiment. Participants will be given two tablet devices: on the first device they will play the gambling session with virtual money for 20 min; on the second device, participants will be randomised to five different interactions (experimental groups: cognitive tasks, interactive dialogue, infographic; control groups: neutral interaction, no interaction). Participants will then complete Jacob’s Disassociation Questionnaire, acceptability, and demographic questionnaire. The results of this research may enable prevention and intervention strategies in problem gambling. Moreover, it will allow gambling industry and policymakers to better develop responsible gambling applications and may even lead a policy change.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact our dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Daniel Dimanov (PhD, FST) with this poster entitled: MONCAE: Multi-Objective Neuroevolution of Convolutional Autoencoders.

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With this poster, we present a novel neuroevolutionary method to identify the architecture and hyperparameters of convolutional autoencoders, which has been published in an ICLR workshop. Remarkably, we used a hypervolume indicator employing neuroevolution for in the context of neural architecture search for autoencoders, for the first time to the best of our knowledge. We rely on novel decoding of the architecture to automatically reconstruct the decoder from the encoding. We tested our approach with MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and CIFAR10 to verify the performance of the approach. Results show that images were compressed by a factor of more than 10, while still retaining enough information to achieve image classification for the majority of the tasks. Thus, this new approach can be used to speed up the AutoML pipeline for image compression and much more.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.

The 13th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference, hosted by the Doctoral College.

Abier Hamidi (PhD, FHSS) with this poster entitled: HIV epidemic in Libya: Identifying gaps.

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HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) became a public issue in Libya after the infection of 400 children in El-Fatih Hospital in 1988. Due to the civil war, social and religious barriers, HIV prevalence is hard to establish, but it is generally believed to be increasing.  This review (a) assesses the size and scope of the available literature on the HIV epidemic in Libya; and, (b) identifies the nature and extent of research conducted to date. A comprehensive search was performed using PubMed, Medline, Web of Science, ScienceDirect, Scopus, Academic Search Ultimate, Cochrane Library and Google Scholar.  Primary research studies and official reports that are exclusively on Libya published during 1988 -2021 were considered.  In total 25 studies were included. The literature suggests there is an increase in HIV infection rates in Libya.  Culturally sensitive research will assist in reducing HIV stigma and decreasing infection rates.

You can view the full poster exhibition and pre-recorded presentations on the conference webpage.

If this research has inspired you and you’d like to explore applying for a research degree please visit the postgraduate research web pages or contact the Doctoral College dedicated admissions team.