• Question: What preliminary work have you done, or are in the process of doing?

    Asked by bilbo to Jack, Gem, Jermaine, Michelle, Steve on 14 Jun 2017.
    • Photo: Jermaine Ravalier

      Jermaine Ravalier answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      I’m currently collecting data from Scottish teachers – had 5,000 responses so far (about 10% of the teachers in the country) – about stress, what causes them stress and how to overcome it. This will then form the basis of a wider study to prevent stress in teaching.

    • Photo: Steven Brown

      Steven Brown answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      In my main post we are beginning to put together what we will actually be doing – there’s a lot of prelim work. We want to select an appropriate instrument to capture treatment related side effects of cancer treatment and generally measure quality of life. The problem is there’s thousands of instruments to choose from. So we are working closely with both doctors and patients to find out what is most important to them, so we can ensure we select an instrument which will work. We need to pick the right one as it will be used in real-life in NHS with cancer patients, to help inform better decisions about treatment.

      The instruments involve patients selecting how their pain has been, how tired they have felt, etc. on a numerical scale ie from 1 – 7, etc.

      On the side, I have started a few other projects into how people make sense of the world using the Internet as a resource, including why people believe in conspiracy theories and fake news. I am interested in decision-making and how bad decisions can impact on health.

    • Photo: Jack barton

      Jack barton answered on 14 Jun 2017:

      I am still in the early days of my research and I’m starting to bring together the results from my first study. At this stage, I have found that greater sleep disturbances are associated with increased paranoia and hallucinations in individuals who do not have a mental health diagnosis. This suggests that poor sleep, in general, has negative consequences for our mental health besides poor mood. However, what aspect of sleep or why poorer sleep co-occurs with these experiences is not clear from my results yet. This is why I am about to run a second study which will try to unpick this relation a bit further. For example, can a previous night’s sleep predict whether you are more likely to feel paranoid or see/hear things which aren’t there? If this is the case then why is this so?

    • Photo: Michelle Jamieson

      Michelle Jamieson answered on 15 Jun 2017:

      I’m currently wading through reams, and reams of studies to collate them all together into what work has already been done in the area I’m researching at the moment – called a literature review.

Comments