Social Work and Public Health
Our internationally recognised research plays an important role in developing new standards of care in social work and public health settings, and creates a supportive and collaborative community in which to study.
Research degrees on offer including MAs by research:
- MPhil
- PhD
Support and Supervision
You can expect:
- A supervisory team comprising at least two and not normally more than three supervisors. One supervisor is designated the Director of Studies (or ‘main supervisor’)
- To meet with your supervisors on a regular basis and have many additional opportunities to share your progress with other researchers and research students.
- The opportunity to participate in the faculty’s annual research conference and to attend research seminars, including research training seminars across Oxford Brookes University. In order to take advantage of these opportunities, overseas students are required to spend at least six weeks per year at the university.
Research Areas
You can undertake research degrees in the following areas:
- Children and families
- Drugs and alcohol
- Interprofessional education and collaborative practice.
Much of the department’s research has an international impact. For example, a large, systematic review of school- based alcohol prevention, published in 2011 by Dr David Foxcroft, Professor of Community Psychology and Public Health, has attracted global attention. His findings were welcomed by, among others, Dr David Jernigan, Director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and could result in reduced costs for health care and social services.
As part of the children and families theme, Dr Jane Appleton, in collaboration with Professor Margaret Harris in the Department of Psychology and colleagues at the Open University, has been completing a pilot study to evaluate the accuracy of health visitor assessments of the quality of mother-infant interactions (funded by the Burdett Trust). This research focuses on the accuracy of health visitor assessments around infant and family mental health, to develop the evidence base for public health nursing in this area.
