"Awfey busy"

Been bogged down in work for the past several weeks but thought I'd revive my blog as an opportunity to showcase the research seminars we're having in Psychology & Behavioural Sciences in the next few months.

Have placed posts about this on our departmental Facebook page, but bears repeating here as well:

Date	Speaker	Affiliation	Title
7th December	Dr Lorenzo Stafford	University of Portsmouth	Olfaction And Emotion: What More Is There To Know?
14th December	Prof. Peter Spurgeon	University of Warwick	Management and Leadership Competence: No Longer An Optional Extra for Clinical Staff.
25th January	Dr Caoilte O´Ciardha	University of Kent	The treatment needs of adult firesetters.
1st February	Dr Douglas Howat	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	Effective team-talks in sport: an identity leadership perspective.
8th February	Prof. Neil Coulson	University of Nottingham	Online support communities: Who, what and why?
15th February	Dr Rebecca Jenks	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	The effects of Salvia Lavandulaefolia on behavioural and self rated measures of attention.
22nd February	Luisa Tarczynski-Bowles	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	Stress sensitivity and reading ability in primary school children.
29th February	Sarah Critten	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	The role of spelling in the relationship between oral and written language in children with specific language impairment.
7th March	Lisa Hopkins	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	Bullying and cyber-bullying.
14th March	Dr Jackie Abell	Lancaster University	Discourse and Identity.
21st March	Kate Walker	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	Comparison of the psychological characteristic of desisters and persisters of intimate partner violence.
28th March	Prof. Lucy Yardley	University of Southampton	Learning from LifeGuide: Developing web-based health interventions.
4th April	Amy Grubb	Psychology and Behavioural Sciences, Coventry University	An exploratory study of police hostage (crisis) negotiation within the UK.

Hitting the Hub

Met up with co-author colleagues David Giles and Clare Wood to do some forced labour on a joint project.

We met up and spent the entire day in a work pod at the Hub.

Location:Hitting the hub

Last minute preps for welcoming new students

Freshers week is upon us again, so I've been making (what I hope are) the final adjustments to tomorrow's plans for welcoming incoming students on the MSc Health Psychology.





Time to stop though as experiencing brain fade.

Postgraduate open day

Back home after an interesting stint dealing with enquiries at the postgraduate open day on our Coventry campus.

We had a very busy time on the Psychology desk with a queue forming rapidly.

I talked to people interested in several different courses, including the MSc Health Psychology (for which I'm now course director), MSc Forensic Psychology ( on campus course accredited by BPS), MSc Forensic Psychology and Crime (blended learning course), and the MSc Occupational Psychology.

I even spoke to someone who has already been accepted onto a course and wanted to know how she could make a head start on her background reading. Always nice to meet someone who's keen.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Why we find it hard to throw stuff out

Interesting feature in BBC news Magazine today, on the growth in self storage business, and the factors fuelling it.

Reminded me of a research study we discuss in one of the final year seminars in Advanced Social Psychology:

Ahuvia (2005) Beyond the Extended Self: Loved Objects and Consumers' Identity Narratives.

Details

All you can eat

Lunch today to say farewell to my colleague Katherine, who is leaving us for a prestigious research role in another part of the university.

We went to an all you can eat Chinese place in the centre of Coventry and while I didn't think we'd over-indulged have been suffering mild indigestion for the afternoon's marking bits and pieces of resit coursework.

Paid Internship Available

Not really a blog post as such but I'd like to publicise this as widely as possible.  A local charity I do some research with is advertising an internship opportunity.

They are Ryder Cheshire Volunteers, and the advert can be viewed at http://pdp.coventry.ac.uk/viewasset.aspx?oid=990356&type=file

Catching up

Another day of catching up, including:

• Talking to a charity sector partner organisation about recruiting a student intern to work with them in the coming academic year.  
• Making arrangements for students to resit exams deferred from May/June, including special needs such as extra time and particular colour of paper (yellow can help with some disabilities).
• Marking some literature review papers submitted by students on the Health Psychology Masters programme (Reducing weight bias in healthcare professionals, home carers' experience of dementia care, types of chronic fatigue).  
• Giving feedback on the data analysis a PhD student has done.
• Attempting to write references for recent graduates (with some difficulty as the online student records system seems to have temporarily gone phut)

Hoping to get back into my own research tomorrow!

Holidays all gone

Back at work after three weeks annual leave - unable even to recall my password to log on to university IT system this morning. That's what I call a proper holiday.

Usual trawl through emails to attempt a catch-up.

The only interesting things I can think of to post about are probably too controversial for public consumption, so here is a nice picture of some donkeys I took on Ile de Re.

Sampling

Spent most of today on administrative tidying: getting samples of work ready to be seen by the external examiners for the various programmes I am 'module leader' on:

• BSc Hons Health & Lifestyle Management: Second year and third year psych modules
• BSc Hons Psychology: a third year module on applied health psychology 
• MSc Health Psychology: a module on long term conditions 

External examiners are senior academics from outside institutions who look at a sample of our students' work - in the context of a lot of other information - and check our academic standards.

For every module this requires the designated leader to put together a pack of information which typically includes:

• Copy of the module guide and all guidance given to student on the assessment they're required to do
• Copy of an overall marks list showing individual students' marks for each component (piece of coursework, exam, etc.), plus summary statistics for the whole group.
• Copies of marked coursework with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic
• Copies of exam papers - with markers' guidelines
• Copies of marked exam scripts with evidence that marks have been internally moderated (checked) by another academic

Some external examiners also request summary statistics broken down per exam question (to see if some questions seemed 'harder' than others).

We also have to produce a form that shows an assessment 'audit trail' - evidence that we got all our assessment tasks and instructions checked and signed off by another academic within the department - before we used them. This process does happen but keeping a record can sometimes be forgotten...

All of the documentation required is kept on file until near the examination boards  - which are in the next couple of weeks - but it's still rather time consuming to collate it together into a digestible form. Not the most interesting of tasks but it still gives a sense of closure on the filing front.

Meanwhile of course teaching and assessment continues apace on postgraduate courses and preparations have to be made for students who'll be doing resits over the summer period.

PhD opportunities for research in psychology

I haven't had a funded PhD student of my own since I've been at Coventry and am hoping that various changes to the Faculty structure and research groups/centres will mean that I can now compete for funds to support this. I have good experience of supervision but have tended to inherit other people's students rather than taking on people whose research interests coincide directly with my own. 


The advert for PhD studentships came out online today.  If anyone reading this is interested in doing a PhD in any of the following areas and would like me to supervise, please let me know as soon as possible:


Health, especially gender specific issues, e.g. women's reproductive health, men's health behaviours; long term/chronic conditions; experiences of healthcare, e.g. good and bad experiences and need to improve patient experience.


Coping with difficult situations, especially in emergency or disaster work, e.g. mundane day to day experiences of ambulance, fire and police crews, e.g. in-theatre and post deployment experiences of armed services personnel, including but not specifically focussed on responses to traumatic situations.


I'm guessing this will be very competitive so we can work together to help refine and develop your plans.
Please see the entrance requirements online at http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/ResearchStudents/ResearchStudentships/Pages/StudentshipDetail.aspx?stuID=73


And contact me if you'd like to talk about it further.

Mostly marking -and a new department

A lot of marking in last 24 hours... 


Students on a final year module in health psychology took a multiple choice class test under exam conditions some weeks ago. This was administered online and gave them their marks and feedback right away - thus meeting our demanding new targets for providing timely student feedback - a key element in getting good student satisfaction scores and rising up the university league tables.


Unfortunately the marking key that had been provided had some errors in it. A couple of students noticed that they'd been marked as wrong for answers they were sure they'd gotten right. I have spent many hours in the interim checking all 100 questions and regrading all students' papers manually.  Rather than being a quick and easy way to objectively assess students this turned out to be very time consuming and difficult - urgh.  What didn't help was that every students' virtual test 'paper' had the questions numbered differently and presented in a randomised order. This technical wheeze is meant to make it less likely that students sitting at adjacent PCs might be tempted to copy each others' answers. It also made it a pain to identify the problem items when regrading them by hand.


Much simpler was my exam essay marking for M99PY Management of Chronic Illness and Disability. Only nine candidates, with two essays each. Very low tech (and arguably less objective), but much more pleasant to do.  All the scripts are anonymised and I now hand them over to a colleague who will sample some and second mark them to check that the grading standard is appropriate and consistent.


The tedium was relieved today by a brief launch lunch, to celebrate the creation of a new academic department. Our faculty has just been restructured. Psychology will now be joined by colleagues from Clinical Psych, Criminology and Forensic and Investigative Studies, to form a new department called Psychology and Behavioural Sciences. 




 

Disaster Management Days 2 and 3

Rather briefer report from remainder of conference...


Met a nice man from Mexico who had just arrived and was (like me) expecting to be able to walk to the venue.  We shared a taxi.  His talk was on Physical vulnerability of critical facilities in Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands


Other papers I found especially interesting included several reporting various indices and tools to assess and compare disaster preparedness, readiness and resilience, including these from the Argonne National Laboratory:


Assessing community and region emergency-services capabilities 
Community resilience: measuring a community’s ability to withstand

I was also fascinated by a couple of presentations on emergency services responses.  One of these highlighted a fairly simple problem that ought to be fairly straightforward to address.  Apparently emergency responders (n the US state of Alabama at least) often report that traffic congestion significantly affects their ability to reach people in need, and that they are rarely given traffic information when setting off to jobs. Yet emergency dispatchers report that they often give this information but feel it makes little difference to outcomes. A case for dispatchers/controllers to spend the occasional shift in the vehicle with responders? And/or to use existing traffic information systems?

A much more complicated issue is how to co-ordinate responses to exceptional events, such as  the July 2005 bombings on the London public transport system. One paper reported the use of mathematical modelling to optimise the use of resources when responding to mass casualties across multiple incident scenes.    A major issue with this work may be persuading key decision makers that mathematical models have something valuable to offer, and helping them to understand how and why the models may work.

Disaster Management Day 1

OK so a lot has been happening while I haven't been posting, but no time to relate that just at the moment.


I'm at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, attending the Disaster Management 2011 Conference organised jointly by UCF and Wessex Institute of Technology (UK).


We were welcomed to the event by Carlos Brebbia (WIT) and Alain Kassab (UCF) who each told us a lot about their respective organisations.  We then had a very interesting keynote talk by Naim Kapucu, from the Centre for Public and Non-Profit Management.  He described how his PhD research was on the emergency responses to the terrorist attacks on the USA in September 11th 2001. On completing this he thought he would move into more general policy issues but fate had different ideas. He relocated to Florida and in 2004 the central region was struck by four hurricanes in rapid succession. This inevitably drew him back into the field of emergency responses to large scale disasters. 


[Florida is so accustomed to extreme weather events that every lecture theatre on campus has its own copy of the disaster response plan. The reality of this was brought home to me as I noticed the janitor's office next to the ladies loo was marked as a hurricane emergency local resource centre].


Dr Kapucu's research has made use of social network analysis to explore the interrelationships between the various federal, state, local, public and private sector organisations that all have a role to play in disaster management. he showed us some fascinating visual representations of the these networks, which can be used to diagnose weaknesses or breakdowns that may place the public at risk.


Towards the end of the day it was my turn to present the paper I co-authored with folks at Coventry: The contribution of human psychology to disaster management: mitigation, advance preparedness, response and recovery.  Given this rather inclusive title, luckily in my presentation I only had to plot out a broad overview of the areas where work has been done, and highlight gaps where there is potential for further development. The talk went well (I think) and I had some interesting questions, including one from a US healthcare professional about the phenomenon of 'worried well' self-presenting to emergency departments in crises, and another on the ways in which online social networking may give us an insight into the behaviour of volunteers in a disaster. More great ideas for further research...
The paper is available (in full text, via open access) at http://library.witpress.com/pages/PaperInfo.asp?PaperID=22040


During the final session of the day we became aware of a thunderstorm and high winds which necessitated a swift retreat back to the conference hotel.  I'm very grateful to the team who looked after us, reassured us and got us indoors safely before the threatened 'dime-sized' hailstones arrived. 

Finally finished all that marking

urgh... Finally managed to finish the dissertation marking today, and sent off my draft modules for the new degree programme:

Level 3: Clinical and Counselling Psychology

The aim of this module is to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the fields of clinical and counselling psychology, and the settings and client groups with whom clinical and counselling psychologists work. 

Level 2: Professional Skills for Psychology Graduates

The aim of this module is to provide students with opportunities to develop, reflect on and refine the core subject-specific and generic transferable skills they will need to pursue graduate opportunities relevant to psychology. 

Keen colleagues are off to a writing retreat tomorrow but I have to confess that I will be on the allotment ...

No longer LIW - sort of

Having taken part in a pilot of location independent working (LIW) I have decided it is not for me.  I miss the structure and stimulation of coming into the office each day - didn't think I would but I do.

So I have been allowed back into my old individual office, and will have to hand back the various bits of kit I had use of (multifunction printer, smart-phone, laptop).  This may not be such a wrench as I had anticipated as:

• I've been waiting for ink cartridges for the printer since Christmas 2010 (they arrived at the end of last week!)
• The smart-phone has refused do do the 'smart' bit since we were migrated onto a new mobile network last week (it will take calls but not synchronise my outlook emails, calendar, etc.)

It has been rather spooky being back in my old room as it's very dusty and the wall calendar is still open at the page for June 2010. But at least I don't have to jump out of my skin every few minutes as someone in the sports lab upstairs drops a set of dumbbells on their floor, causing everything to shudder in the LIW 'touchdown space'.

I will really miss the laptop though as it's nice to have a clear (and clean) desk surface to work on when marking, etc. I gather some staff have swapped their bulky desktop PCs for laptops so I might see if I can do this too.

The hills are alive...

...with the sound of marking.

OK it's the end of term and it would be tempting to run for the hills (or at the very least the allotment) in search of recreation, but I have just received twelve dissertations to mark, which come to 11.3 MB of text.   No Easter holidays for me just yet...

Apple for the teacher?

Had to collect some student feedback on my module today, using the standardised questionnaires.  This process is a perennial source of amusement/offence/general bewilderment for academic staff.  It's very hard not to take comments personally.  Over the years and at various institutions (not necessarily my current one) I have known staff to cry, hit the bottle, construct voodoo dolls, consider a change of career, etc. - all based on  the odd throwaway remark made on the questionnaires.

Someone has even written a paper on it:
Lindahl, M.W. & Unger, M.L. (2010) Cruelty in Student Teaching Evaluations. College Teaching, 58 (3): 71 - 76

To paraphrase from the comments made on a colleague's recent module evaluation: "He thinks he's IT you know - he SO isn't."

Or on one of mine after I'd spent hours devising classroom based activities and interactive sessions to stimulate and excite:
"Sometimes it seemed like Carol couldn't be bothered to lecture to us - we had to do lots of work in class to fill the time".

At least today's were fairly positive:

Interesting topics covered- long term conditions
An interesting subject area
Lecturer very knowledgeable about the topic
Beneficial to talk about careers related, journals, etc.
A lot of help in extra sources available on topics in a practical way
A chance to practice presentation skills to increase confidence
Explained well - well supported with appropriate research

Can't believe it's the last week of term already

Can't believe it's the last week of term already.  Still lots to try to get finished. Some recent highlights:

Been marking student assignments on the module I run on our MSc Health Psychology programme. Students have to write a case study of a hypothetical person who has a chronic health condition, describe the psychosocial issues they face, then choose and justify a self management intervention that will help them with these issues. Students can choose any condition they wish. Diabetes, HIV and arthritis proved the most popular choices this year.

I've also been writing new modules for the degree restructuring that's currently taking place for next academic year, including: clinical and counselling psychology, applied social psychology and professional skills for psychology graduates. I'm particularly keen on the last of these but finding an assessment strategy that will work for such a large group of students (its a mandatory module) will be a bit of a challenge.

In the last week I've drafted ethics submissions for projects with external collaborators, on the experience of volunteering and of monitoring one's fertility. I'm hoping that dissertation students and/or placement students will work on these in the next six months to a year.

I've also just submitted a research paper on PCOS to a journal - please please PLEASE don't let it be rejected... and have decided to write a blog entry as an excuse to digress from the very long NHS form I have been struggling with...

Enjoyable student discussion, and some frustration too.

One hour plus meeting today with student on MSc health psych about his dissertation plans, and a piece of coursework he is about to attempt on my module M99PY Self management of chronic conditions.

Very interesting dissertation proposal on an aspect of caregiver burden in home-based care for dementia.
Good case study plan too - choosing a self management intervention for type 2 diabetes.

We had a very productive discussion - just wish I could spend an equal time with all the students I teach but the numbers mean that it doesn't bear thinking about.

Meanwhile have been writing a draft training programme in motivational interviewing for a public sector organisation - more later if we win the bid - and giving a two hour lecture to undergraduates on the discursive defense of threatened identities.  We were 'discussing' two key papers:

Horton-Salway, M. (2001) 'Narrative Identities and the Management of Personal Accountability in Talk About ME: A Discursive Psychology Approach to Illness Narrative.' Journal of Health Psychology 6, (2) 247-259
Willott, S. and Griffin, C. (1999) 'Building Your Own Lifeboat: Working-Class Male Offenders Talk About Economic Crime.' British Journal of Social Psychology 38, 445-460

...or rather I should say I was talking about them.  Only two students had actually read a paper in advance of the class, so the seminar discussion fell rather flat.  I think I may also have offended one student with my reply to her question: "What is the exam on? Are we having a lecture on the exam?"

I asked her how many lectures she'd had on the module and her exasperated response suggested that she knew what I meant but dared not say out loud (That the exam is on the topics covered in the lectures we've been having all year - or did you think I just turned up and lectured because I'd nothing better to do...?).

I fear I may have compromised my student satisfaction scores...

Oh and gave feedback to a PhD student who is champing at the bit to submit for ethical approval of her next research study (apologies for the horse metaphor Felicity)

Drafty today

I've spent much of today reading undergraduate students' draft copies of their individual research dissertations.  This is one of the rare instances where students get to revise their work following tutor feedback, prior to submitting to be assessed.

I deal with these in the order that I received them - those who got the draft to me sooner are the first to get their feedback. I've done these:

People's responses to facial disfigurement 

Locus of control, age, exercise activity and body image perception

and have yet to read these:

The subjective experience of self harm

Using an analysis of the subjective experience of opiate addiction to inform treatment programmes

Birth order effects and empathy

Gang membership

slippage may occur

Teaching four hours non-stop is quite tiring...

'Psychosocial aspects of stroke' on MSc Health Psychology for two hours then straight to 'motivational interviewing' on MSc Forensic Psychology.  Some slippage between the terms 'patient' and 'offender' may have been evident...

Making preparations

Spent what seemed like an awfully long time this morning making preparations for travel to a conference in May.  Visa waiver application, flights, accommodation,etc. At least it's done now.

Afternoon spent doing some marking, and preparing for tomorrow's classes on two different applied psychology masters programmes: Forensic Psychology and Health Psychology, plus a wee bit of research on an external organisation who've expressed an interest in buying some training from us. 

Really looking forward to Friday when I hope to pick up my OWN work again - if I ever manage to catch up on all the (increasingly terse) emails that are swamping my inbox...

Has it really been so long?

Been busy  - too busy... But back to it:

Supervising a test today for students on the third year option module Applied Health Psychology.  Students took the test online and got their results immediately - nicely meeting the new fast turnaround time for student feedback ;-) - with exception of a few who encountered technical problems and will get their papers manually marked within a day or so.

Some very pleasing results overall.

In the interim, one of my colleagues (Erica Bowen) has been on Radio 4 Women's Hour, discussing her new book on domestic violence. Listen again is highly recommended http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00yj189

Not the best day ever...

The day started badly when I turned up to give a guest lecture and found that the room had changed without my knowing.  A colleague, who left for a new post recently, had neglected to mention that the room for my two guest spots had changed.  Embarrassing exit from the room I had set up my presentation in, several phone calls later and a chance meeting with one of the students in the corridor... eventually turned up to the new room to find that all but one of the students had left - v. frustrating.

Then got some horrible news at lunch time about the health of one of my valued research collaborators - which put things in perspective somewhat.  We are all thinking about her and wishing her the best for the tough few months she's likely to have ahead.

Feedback on student presentations

Pleasant session today with third year students on the Health & Lifestyle Management degree - giving feedback on a practice presentation.

We ask our students to prepare a presentation as if for a job interview. Today's was for a post working as a healthy lifestyle support worker in a forensic mental health unit. A particular focus was on the ethical dilemmas that one might face in working in this setting.

We give students video recordings of their presentations so they can view and critique their own performance.

Also advertised another voluntary research internship: focusing on assistance dogs placed with families where a child has a developmental disability.

Tick tick tick

Have just finished some marking on the Health & Lifestyle Management course - to meet our new super-fast feedback turnaround time - and it's the end of the working week already.  Students have said some nice things about their experience of the Health Behaviour Change module we offer, which includes the following: 

Motivational interviewing knowledge and skills refresher

MI with sent clients, with groups, in rehab settings.

CBT refresher

Lay-led and peer-led health behaviour change interventions

Classifying health behavioural change interventions

Publicly funded health behaviour change programmes in the UK and beyond

Intervention mapping : health behaviour change programmes in the UK and beyond

Key ethical issues in research on health and lifestyle management

Key ethical issues in practice in health and lifestyle management

The different roles played by professionals working in health and lifestyle management

Diversity awareness issues working in health and lifestyle management

Meanwhile - I have a new(to me via ebay) shed AND it's potato day at Ryton Organic Gardens tomorrow - my joy is complete...

Since Monday

Since Monday have forgotten to post.  Monday night was teaching until 8.30 pm for part-time students, so got thrown slightly off kilter in my posting habits.

Tuesday teaching social psychology, with a focus on personal construct psychology:

Doster, J. A., Mielke, R. K., Riley, C. A., Toledo, J. R., Goven, A. J., & Moorefield, R. (2006). Play and health among a group of adult business executives. Social Behavior and Personality, 34(9), 1071-1080.

Weiss, P. A., Watson, N., & McGuire, H. (2003). Smoking and self-concept in young adults: An idiographic method of measurement. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 16(4), 323-334.

Wednesday meeting with student representatives as part of the student forum.  As final year tutor for psychology I was especially keen to find out what we can do to help our soon-to-be-graduates with their employment prospects.  Given that it's just been announced that graduate unemployment is at 20% they will need all the help we can give them.

Bumpass Hell

Ok so the bubble has been burst.

I opened the editor's decision email referred to in yesterday's post. It was a rejection...

Editor's comment:

Thank you for allowing us to consider this work for (name of journal). At this point your paper has been reviewed by one expert reviewer only, who has presented us with a quite brief review. In order to avoid a delay I decided not to invite more reviewers. However, we have subjected your paper to a thorough editorial evaluation.

Reviewer #1: I enjoyed reading the paper which makes a worthy contribution to an under-researched area. Although the paper is well-structured, I have a number of minor suggestions to improve it...

Editor's comment:
Because of an increase in submissions, we can only publish a minority of the manuscripts we receive. Space constraints dictate that that to an increasing extent we may publish only those manuscripts providing significantly novel insights or new perspectives.

Sadly, this means that we are unable to publish many manuscripts of significant quality. I must regretfully inform you that based on the review and our editorial evaluation your paper did not reach a high enough priority to be further considered for publication.

Sob

Preparing for clinical - and is my bubble about to burst?

Teaching students on MSc Health Psychology today - looking specifically at pain management programmes and the guidelines offered by the British Pain Society and the International Association for the Study of Pain.

Also preparing some teaching materials for tomorrow morning's session teaching narrative analysis to year two clinical psychology trainees.

Meanwhile, an email has arrived with an editorial decision from a journal we submitted to in the autumn.  Am postponing looking at it in case it's bad news. If I look tomorrow and it turns out to be bad news at least I will have the weekend to lick my wounds...

Happy day - but mysterious

Great meeting today with colleagues to discuss some research collaboration.  Decided on the scope and shape of a future project - which must remain a mystery until we have secured some funding...

Some snowdrops have appeared in the garden as well.

More teaching

Met with my head of department today to talk about taking on some extra bits and pieces of cover within the health psychology team.  There have been a few moves (departures, other people's sabbaticals, planned absences, etc.) so duties have to be swapped around a little.

I also broke the news about the Florida conference, and my HoD was positive about supporting me to attend - reasonable costs permitting.

Teaching this afternoon on Advanced Social Psychology.  Allocated students a couple of papers to read on the use of personal construct approaches in social psychology:

Doster, J. A., Mielke, R. K., Riley, C. A., Toledo, J. R., Goven, A. J., & Moorefield, R. (2006). Play and health among a group of adult business executives. Social Behavior and Personality, 34(9), 1071-1080.

Weiss, P. A., Watson, N., & McGuire, H. (2003). Smoking and self-concept in young adults: An idiographic method of measurement. Journal of Constructivist Psychology, 16(4), 323-334.

Looking forward to hearing what they make of them when we meet again next week...

Health and lifestyle management

Teaching again today on 305HLM Health behaviour change, on the BSc Hons Health & Lifestyle Management Programme.

We were discussing employment opportunities and what our graduates could contribute to multidisciplinary teams in various settings.

Examples of interesting jobs we discussed included:

PhD studentships, e.g. http://www.jobs.ac.uk/job/ABZ072/fully-funded-environmental-sciences-phd-studentship/

Rehab support workers, e.g. http://www.jobs.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/vacdetails.cgi?selection=912602438

Low Intensity Worker (IAPT), e.g. http://www.jobs.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/vacdetails.cgi?selection=912601336

Smoking cessation advisor, e.g. http://www.jobs.nhs.uk/cgi-bin/vacdetails.cgi?selection=912597565

Some disappointment was expressed at the starting salaries...

Unrelatedly - I bought a second hand strimmer on ebay to start clearing the allotment with.