Category / student research

Presentation PhD student Jib Acharya in Liverpool

Jib LJMU 2016Mr. Jib Acharya (FHSS) gave an interesting presentation yesterday about the qualitative research findings of his PhD at Liverpool John Moores University.  Jib’s PhD research focused on the knowledge, attitudes and beliefs of poor women in Nepal about healthy eating and the study also identifies major food barriers.

His mixed-methods approach combines a quantitative questionnaire survey with qualitative research. Jib’s research project is supervised by Dr. Jane Murphy, Dr. Martin Hind and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen. Some of the preliminary findings of this FHSS thesis have already been published in two scientific journals [1-2].

References:

  1. Acharya, J., van Teijlingen, E., Murphy, J., Hind, M. (2015) Assessment of knowledge, beliefs and attitudes towards healthy diet among mothers in Kaski, Nepal, Participation 17(16): 61-72.
  2. Acharya, J., van Teijlingen, E., Murphy, J., Hind, M. (2015) Study of nutritional problems in preschool aged children in Kaski District in Nepal, Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Healthcare 1(2): 97-118. http://dspace.chitkara.edu.in/jspui/bitstream/1/560/1/12007_JMRH_Acharya.

New HSS PhD paper!

SPSHSS PhD student Andrew Harding and fellow authors  Jonathan Parker, Sarah Hean and Ann Hemingway have recently had a paper accepted for publication in Social Policy & Society, the sister publication to the Journal of Social Policy and run by the Social Policy Association.

A critical yet under-researched area, the paper presents a comprehensive literature review that critiques current research on the outcome/impact of information and advice on welfare. A realist evaluation approach is then proposed as being capable to address critical weaknesses in existing research.

Among other areas that are covered, the paper provides an overview of the importance of information and advice in the context of the marketisation of UK welfare provision and a new ‘efficacy framework’ is developed which can be used to assess the scope of research.

A final draft post-refereeing version of the paper will be uploaded to BRIAN in due course.

Research and Impact in Active Ageing Symposia (University of Cumbria) – A URA Experience

Louise Burgess, Undergraduate Research Assistant (URA)

When first applying to become an URA, I was unsure about what to expect. Initially, I thought my summer would be spent holding a clipboard and collecting endless lists of data for someone else to analyse. In reality, the role has been much more exciting than I could have imagined, even prompting me to investigate future careers within research. The research I am assisting with aims to examine the most effective acute recovery routine for individuals who have undergone hip arthroplasty, a reconstructive procedure which involves the replacement of the femoral head and acetabulum with an artificial prosthesis. I felt immediately welcomed by James Gavin (Lead Researcher) and the Orthopaedic Research Institute (ORI) team: Tom Wainwright, (Deputy Head), Tikki Immins (Research Fellow) Shay Bahadori (Medical Device Engineer), in my URA role.

Since starting 2 weeks ago, I have been involved in:

  • Designing and implementing a testing protocolRecruitment media
  • Recruitment through designing posters and contacting volunteers
  • Advancing skills technical: electromyography (EMG), isometric strength testing, clinical recovery exercises
  • Developing my subject knowledge and understanding
  • Training on the PrimusRS Multimodal Dynamometer
  • Developing data collection spreadsheets
  • Data collection: anthropometric, handgrip strength, walk speed, muscle activity and isometric strength.
  • Data analysis (using Biometrics Datalog EMG software)
  • Conference presentation:Research and Impact in Active Ageing Symposia (University of Cumbria)

Attending the Research and Impact in Active Ageing Symposia (University of Cumbria) proved to be a valuable experience for me as both a student, and as a researcher. The morning began with a talk from Prof Tim Donovan, who covered the role of vision and eye movement in motor control. This was followed by Prof Giuseppe de Vito (University College Dublin), focussing on how old muscle responds to training and nutritional interventions. Finally, Prof Andrea Macaluso (University of Rome Foro Italico) discussed his work on physical activity levels and physiological factors underlying mobility in ageing.

The morning was followed by a poster presentation session, where I presented the findings of my dissertation project. My dissertation entitled, ‘The Incidence of Injuries and the Epidemiology of Osteoarthritis in Retired, Amateur, Rugby Union Males’ was a project I thoroughly enjoyed and despite being incredibly nervous, I really liked sharing it with others. I presented my work to other students, academics, researchers, and members of the NHS. The feedback I received during the question and answer session after my presentation was positive, with ideas how the research could be expanded in the future. Having the opportunity to take part within the symposia increased my confidence within my own research, improved my presentation skills and developed my knowledge of research in active ageing. I even won the prize for best poster presentation, a £100 Human Kinetics book voucher!

I’m not even half way through my time as a URA, but I would still highly recommend other students to apply for similar positions at Bournemouth University.

For more information on ORI please visit:

  • bournemouth.ac.uk/ori2
  • Twitter: @BU_Orthopaedic

Or to get involved with the current research please email me on:

  • Lburgess@bournemouth.ac.uk

Best paper award!

Heart 2015Best Paper for 2015 Award in the international journal Heart.  A paper published by Bournemouth University PhD student, Edward Carlton,  and his supervisors, Prof. Ahmed Khattab (FHSS) and Prof. Kim Greaves from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia in collaboration with world-renowned hospitals: John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford; Royal Brisbane & Women’s Hospital in Australia; and Christchurch Hospital in New Zealand has  been announced as the Winner of the “Heart Best Paper 2015  Award” [1].  This award is in recognition of the high quality and clinical impact of the paper. The winner for this award were chosen by the Editorial Team from the top 10 papers in each of the following three categories: downloads, citations and Altmetrics Score.

Dr. Edward Carlton has just finished his PhD at BU and he is now working as an Emergency Medicine Consultant in Bristol.Heart PDF 2015

Congratulations!

Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen

CMMPH

 

 

Reference:

Carlton EW, Cullen L, Than M, Gamble J, Khattab A, Greaves K. A novel diagnostic protocol to identify patients suitable for discharge after a single high-sensitivity troponin. Heart. 2015 Jul;101(13):1041-6. doi: 10.1136/heartjnl-2014-307288. Epub 2015 Feb 17.

Assessing Undergraduate Research Assistants’ Learning through Participatory Methods

This blog post reports on the progress of the CEL-Fusion Funded project Assessing Undergraduate Research AssistantsLearning through Participatory Methods (AURAL).

The Undergraduate Research Assistantship (URA) is an institutional programme run by BU’s Research and Knowledge Exchange Office (RKEO), which furnishes academics with the financial means to hire a part-time (spring cohort) or full-time (summer cohort) research assistant who works between 75 and 225 hours on the academics’ research projects. This scheme runs twice a year and this year alone attracted 95 applications from academics with the most diverse projects.

Student researchers plan their diaries' content over pizza and snacks.

Student researchers plan their diaries’ content over pizza and snacks.

Interventions that use a ‘students-as-researchers’ pedagogy, where undergraduate students are involved in research-intensive projects, are increasing in the UK (Walkington, 2015) and internationally (Healey, 2014). BU’s URA programme is an apposite case study given its arrangements of paid research placements, which position the scheme as both research-based and work-based learning. This research contributes to the burgeoning literature on students-as-researchers through its employment of a dialogical participatory research design whereby students actively self-monitor their evolving learning when working on a research project. Through the use of reflective diaries and participatory sessions, students engaged in the process of evaluating the impact of this university-wide scheme.

In this endeavour, RKEO and CEL worked closely to embed the research into the scheme. We matched a participatory planning session for those students taking part in the research with the induction for the entire cohort of URA, so that the timing would be convenient for the majority of them. In addition, the research was run in parallel with their URA placements, and the necessary adjustments were made when students continued working beyond their URA contracts.

The preliminary results of AURAL were reported during CELebrate, through a session that provided a link with other colleagues interested in fostering research-based learning and its university-wide implementation. Twelve students from the spring cohort agreed to take part in the research, but only 7 wrote at least one diary entry and 3 made it to the closing session. All students who agreed to take part are being invited for an in-depth interview, while 17 new participants have been recruited from the summer cohort.

For a flavour of the passages coded under ‘research skills’ gained by participants, see the quotes below:

I learnt how to successfully collect various forms of offline data in order to provide some background data for a study. I have also learnt that the collection process is not a scary as first thought, and confidence and professionalism is key to the collection of good data and a happy participant. The participant feel safe and confident and more willing to participate if you actually look like you know what you’re doing and happy to be doing so (Participant 3, Diary entry 5)

I understood Thematic Analysis a lot better and felt more comfortable doing it now knowing what I was doing (Participant 4, Diary entry 2)

The full results of this scheme will be ready by the end of the summer. Watch this space!

References

Healey, M. (2014). Integrating Undergraduate Research into the Curriculum: International Perspectives on Capstone and Final-year Projects. CUR Quarterly, 34(4), 26-32.
Walkington, H. (2015). Students as researchers: Supporting undergraduate research in the disciplines in higher education. York: Higher Education Academy.

Note: Earlier versions of this text were submitted as part of a number of internal and external applications and presented at CELebrate. The blog post was first published at the CEL Blog, and is reposted here with permission.

Vitae and Researcher Development

Vitae is an organisation set up to promote career development in both postgraduate researchers and academic staff. Their Researcher Development Framework is intended to help people monitor their skills and plan their personal development. At BU we will be using this framework to format the training on offer for the postgraduate research students and academic staff.

The Vitae website is an excellent resource and the organisation regularly runs free training events for researchers, PGRs and those involved in research development. Upcoming events include Vitae Connections: Supporting Open Researchers.

Vitae_RDF_logo_2011The Researcher Development Framework (RDF) is the professional development framework to realise the potential of researchers. The RDF is a tool for planning, promoting and supporting the personal, professional and career development of researchers in higher education. It was designed following interviews with many successful researchers across the sector and articulates the knowledge, behaviours and attributes of a successful researcher.

There is a planner available on the Vitae website to help you assess which stage you are at with your skills and a tutorial providing guidance on how to use the framework.

Top 10 tips from researchers on using the Researcher Development Framework (RDF):

1. You might choose to use the RDF for short term as well as long term development. The RDF can be used in planning for your long term career ambitions but also to make a feasible short term plan. It can be useful to imagine your long term ambitions in order to focus your career path however the reality of progressing through to the higher phases may be more difficult to plan. In the short term, making decisions about how to progress to the next phase or what sub-domains are most important for you will be easier. Try to be realistic when setting these short term goals.

2. Use the RDF to highlight your strengths and areas for development and how these might be used to benefit/influence your personal, professional and career development.

3. Use the RDF to highlight your applicable and transferable skills. This is important for career progression within or outside academia.

4. Prioritise those areas which are most relevant. You don’t have to try to develop in all the areas of the RDF at once. There may be some sub-domains/descriptors where there is less relevance in progressing through the phases for you.

5. Draw on experiences outside of work to evidence your capabilities.

6. Progression to the highest phase in a descriptor will not be applicable to everyone but being aware of the possibilities can aid personal and career development.

7. Talk to others to get their views about your strengths and capabilities. Your supervisor, manager, peers, family and friends are a great source of information to find out more about yourself. Talk to them about how they perceive your capabilities. By understanding how others view you, you will be able to make more informed choices about your future.

8. To move from one phase to the next why not explore attending courses. These courses may be run at a local level (within your University) or may only be run nationally or internationally so awareness of opportunities for training is important. Vitae also run a wide range of courses which address many aspects of personal and career development.

9. Some phases may only be reached through experience and practice however good self-awareness and professional development planning will aid the process.

10. Networking is likely to enable you to reach more experienced phases.

Human Milk Banking in the UK

UKAMBBreast feeding is the gold standard for feeding babies. This might not be surprising for most of you, although the rates of exclusive breast feeding in the UK are low. But have you ever heard of human milk banking? The UK Association for Milk Banking (UKAMB) does an incredible job in providing safe and screened donor breast milk all over the country through 16 donor milk banks, mostly to preterm babies whose mothers cannot provide sufficient breast milk. Feeding human donor milk instead of formula milk is for example associated with a lower risk for the severe gut infection necrotising enterocolitis.

Breast milk and donor milk also contain omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids, which are essential for brain and visual development in early infancy. However, research based at BU has identified that the current intake levels of preterm infants are too low to match the in utero accretion rates. Therefore, the aim of my PhD project at BU is to investigate approaches to increase the intake of omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated fatty acids in preterm babies to improve their outcomes. One aspect I will be looking at is the intake from donor milk. Therefore, I was invited by the UK Association for Milk Banking to give a short presentation about my research at their annual training day in June.

I am looking forward to meeting donor milk bank staff and other researchers in the field of human milk banking at this day. I will post more details after the event. If you have any questions in the meantime, please feel free to contact me at inessel@bournemouth.ac.uk

If you would like to find out more about human milk banking in the UK or want to become a milk donor visit UKAMB’s website at http://www.ukamb.org/.

Isabell

Bournemouth University student wins ‘Best Undergraduate Research Paper Award’

Katherine at the conference

Bournemouth University Events Management graduate, Katherine Devenish, has won the ‘Best Research Paper Award’ for undergraduate research at the Asia Pacific Forum for Graduate Students Research in Tourism.  Katherine’s research into event greening – the process of incorporating socially and environmentally responsible decision making into the planning and implementation of an event – was carried out as part of her undergraduate dissertation.

Her research explored the factors that ease or impede the process of event greening in the corporate world, based on interviews with staff from a UK corporate event organisation.  As well as identifying the barriers and facilitating factors, Katherine’s paper also makes useful recommendations for practice.  These include developing a formal environmental policy to support cultural change within the organisation, encouraging long-term thinking to improve the use of resources and providing formal training to improve staff knowledge of greening measures.

Katherine was encouraged to submit her research paper to the conference by her supervisor – Dr Miguel Moital, a Principal Academic in Events Management.

“Katherine did extremely well in her dissertation, which was essentially written at journal article level,” explains Dr Moital, “We have developed it into a full academic paper which we’ve submitted to a journal.  We’re waiting for reviews at the moment.”

“After we’d written the paper up, I found out about the ‘Best Undergraduate Research Paper Award’ at the Asia Pacific Forum and encouraged Katherine to submit the final paper.  I was delighted to hear that she had won first prize.”

The conference was hosted by Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Hotel & Tourism Management – one of BU’s partner institutions.  Conference organisers incorporated an undergraduate award with the aim of highlighting and fostering high quality research from undergraduates across the world.

To find out more about Katherine’s experiences, please see her video blog.

FHSS PhD student awarded prestigious Churchill Medallion in London

new medallion Anita

129 Fellows awarded a prestigious new Churchill Medallion at a London award ceremony

 

Anita Immanuel, PhD student in FHSS was presented with a newly designed Churchill medallion at a prestigious biennial award ceremony in London this week (Wednesday, 18th May), after successfully completing  her Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowship.

Anite was presented with the stunning blue cloisonné enamelled silver Churchill medallion by its designer and Guest of Honour, Professor Brian Clarke, who is a world renowned architectural artist. Professor Clarke presented 129 Fellows with their medallions at a ceremony in Church House, in Central London. Church House has significant Churchillian associations as during the Blitz, Winston Churchill requisitioned Church House as a makeshift Houses of Parliament after the originals had been damaged by bombing.

As part of  her Fellowship and linked to her PhD research, Anita travelled to Australia and Canada.  Her PhD reserach examines the quality of lives of adults who have survived cancer of the blood or lymphatic system. Patients with haematological cancers have frequently reported lack of care-coordination as an unmet need following their intensive treatment.   Anita’s Fellowship has been outlined in a previosu BR Research Blog (click here!).

Speaking about the Fellowship, Prof. Stephen Tee (Executive Dean FHSS) said: “These Winston Churchill Travelling Fellowships provide opportunities for UK citizens to go abroad on a worthwhile project, enriching their lives through their global experiences.  We are proud of Anita’s PhD research focusing on the quality of life in people who have survived cancer.  This Fellowship has also benefited Anita and her colleagues at the Royal Bournemouth and Christchurch Hospitals NHS Foundation Trustwhere she works as specialist nurse in this field”.

Anita’s PhD is supervised by: Dr. Jane Hunt and Prof. Edwin van Teijlingen (both FHSS) and Dr. Helen McCarthy, Anita’s clinical Ph.D. supervisor.

In 2017 The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust will be awarding 150 Travelling Fellowships. This will directly support British citizens who want to travel overseas to gain knowledge, experience and best practice to benefit others in their UK professions and communities, and society as a whole. The Winston Churchill Memorial Trust was established shortly after Sir Winston’s death in 1965, as his national memorial and living legacy. Since then it has awarded over 5,250 Travelling Fellowships.  The application process for travel in 2017 is now open!  Visit www.wcmt.org.uk for more details, or to apply before 5pm on 20th September 2016, for travel in 2017.