There’s one benefit of what my PhD colleague calls Interdisciplinary Imposter Syndrome, I feel I can be part of both the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science (SGSSS) and Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities (SGSAH).
So, I took advantage of their summer schools’ wide range of talks and training in the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I was doubled booked for Interdisciplinary Round Table! Instead, I was at the Health and Inequalities in an era of Crises symposium. There was an interesting range of health inequalities talks covering population and individual health, discussing crises from austerity, to populism and Brexit and including methods from discourse analysis to structural equation modelling.
The symposium stressed the urgency of dealing with health inequalities, describing how progress has stalled and likely to worsen if action isn’t taken. Which is one of the reasons why my research is focusing on this. One area I’m exploring, is how this research has been dominated by social epidemiology and needs to broaden of what it thinks of as casual evidence. A related area is how research needs to be more in touch with lived-in experiences. It was great that the symposium also raised these points and talked about how a mix of social epidemiology and qualitative research is vital. Both for understanding what health inequalities looks like for an individual but also to help articulate messages. It’s always nice have confirmation that your interests align with research and societal needs!
My research is interested in psycho-social factors, which are any factors that affect health outcomes through psychological mechanisms. It was interesting that although this as a topic wasn’t discussed in the symposium most talks referred to specific factors, such as fear, loss of control and meaningless.
How do I explore mechanisms? Again, the graduate school training has been a help. SGSSS held a great workshop on Critical Realism and Realist Evaluations, something which has interested me before this PhD. There was a helpful reminder from one of instructors reminding me why I signed up for a PhD. Mechanisms, compared to outcomes are time and resource intensive to investigate. Which is why we have a lot of evidence, such as in the field Arts and Health, of what works, however why something works is less evidenced. Therefore, a PhD with its luxurious 3-year timescale (but still feels too short), rather than 3 months, is a great opportunity to pursue this, so we should make the most of this rare opportunity to dig deep.
This blog was written by Lan Pham, Lan is a Doctoral Research Student in CCSE at UWS.
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