Category: TARG people

Journey to the front of the lecture theatre

Posted on by sallyadams

Sally Adams reflects on the journey from student to lecturer as she begins a lectureship in health psychology at the University of Bath and looks forward to continued collaboration with TARG.

This week saw students all over the UK collecting their A-Level results, and I was reminded of collecting my own, 13 years ago. Disappointingly, I didn’t achieve the grades I expected. I was advised to consider a different degree course other than psychology by my school career advisor. However, even with relatively poor grades I was certain that psychology was for me. This interest in psychology has been a feature throughout my career and has motivated me when things were tough.

I managed to convince (read as: rang the same university 3 times in the space of a few hours, professing my undying love for cognition and behaviour) the University of Wales, Institute Cardiff to offer me a place to study. From this point I promised myself I would take every opportunity to be proactive and hardworking as I had been given this amazing opportunity. I finished my undergrad with a 2:1 and an offer to return to the university as a research assistant. I was invited to interview for this post with a few other students from my year. I like to think that this opportunity was the result of my work ethic and enthusiasm for the subject.

This post was the beginning of my interest in health psychology, specifically the psychology of health and well-being and the factors that underlie health behaviours (e.g., engaging in exercise, drinking alcohol, and cigarette smoking). At this stage I was still unsure whether to pursue a career in clinical health psychology or research. My experience of research up to this point was largely entering and analysing questionnaire data and the prospect of a career of “data entering” did not particularly light my fire!  However, my impression of research was forever changed during a placement as part of my masters in health psychology at the University of Bath. I was assigned to shadow Marcus Munafò at the University of Bristol and as they say the rest is history!  Without any over-statement I can safely say my mind was blown; everything I thought about research was turned on its head. My masters project investigated the role of dopamine in cigarette craving and processing biases towards cigarette cues (e.g., a packet of cigarettes, seeing someone else smoking). This was a clinical study, which involved lots of planning, developing study documents and recruitment and testing of participants. The placement was a new challenge which I relished and I was amazed at how well-designed and rewarding human lab-based studies could be.

My passion for research and specifically experimental studies was consolidated following a research assistant post in Catherine Harmer’s lab group at the University of Oxford. It was around this time I started to have my own focused ideas and research questions. Itching to start answering these questions I began to apply for PhD studentships. It was a tough time as I was rejected from several programs and I started to doubt my ability to pursue a career in research psychology. My post in Oxford brought me back in contact with Marcus at Bristol and we decided to put in an application for a PhD studentship. I was especially excited by this application as it was based on my own research questions and in a subject I was very passionate about-alcohol use.

The day I found out I received a University of Bristol scholarship was amazing, it felt like a massive step in my career journey. I was fairly late in starting my PhD, aged 26, but with several years of research assistant experience under my belt I felt ready and extremely excited to return to studying. My PhD is easily one of the best experiences of my life. Every day was different; sometimes I would be sitting in a cafe reading papers, and sometimes I would be designing experiments or testing in the lab. My PhD was an exciting rollercoaster of highs (completing studies, presenting my own research at conferences, publishing papers) and lows (hours of experiment programming, paper rejections, no-show participants), but overall it was a great experience. One of my proudest achievements during my PhD was being awarded several travel awards to attend international conferences. This required a lot of proactive effort on my part but having a very supportive supervisor was extremely important too. TARG in general was a great supportive environment during my PhD, a culture of collaboration in a research group saved me from some hairy moments.

I was fortunate enough to begin my postdoc career in TARG. I still felt I had lots to learn from working with Marcus and the research group. My postdoc has actually been the steepest learning curve of my research career, but also the most rewarding. Learning to juggle all of the roles in my post has been pivotal in preparing me to become an independent scientist. Alongside running studies and writing papers came new responsibilities including grant writing and supervision. I have been lucky enough to secure my first small grant to research a form of cognitive training for reducing cigarette use. This was a great feeling and has given me the confidence to apply for larger grants. However, as my responsibilities increased, so did my workload and rejections. Throughout my postdoc I have had to learn how to better manage my time and to delegate. I found this very difficult to begin with after doing everything for myself as a PhD student. However it has been an essential lesson to learn along with developing a thicker skin for paper and grant rejections. For me, my thirst for understanding the thought processes and behaviours that guide health behaviours has motivated me to keep working long hours and keep applying!

So, back to present day: I am due to start my first lectureship in the next few days and I couldn’t be any more nervous or excited. When I was first offered the post I was terrified about the idea of “going it alone”, but in the last few months, looking back on what I have learnt I finally feel ready to fly the TARG nest. I take with me the confidence to follow my own programme of research, management skills to begin my own lab group and my continued love of psychology. I can’t wait to return to TARG as a collaborator and an independent researcher!

This article is posted by Sally Adams

 

Why I applied for an internship at the Behavioural Insights Team

Posted on by oliviamaynard

Hi, and welcome to TARG’s shiny new blog! I’m Olivia Maynard and I’m a final year PhD student. I’ve recently found out that for three months over the summer, I will be working as a Research Fellow in the Behavioural Insights Team, part of the UK government Cabinet Office . I thought that I would use my first blog post to tell you a bit about the team I’ll be working in and why I applied for the job.

The Behavioural Insights Team’s aim is to ‘find innovative ways of encouraging, enabling and supporting people to make better choices for themselves’. Since its creation in 2010, the team has claimed among its many successes: encouraging more people to pay their income tax, saving energy by promoting loft insulation, helping more people into work and making government savings of 22 times the team’s cost.

The secret behind the team’s success is its reliance on ‘nudges’, which are anything that ‘alters people’s behaviour in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives’. It is therefore known as the ‘Nudge Unit’, and uses these nudges to help inform and design effective policy interventions. To use the example of the loft insulation scheme, the team realised that one of the greatest barriers to people insulating their lofts was the amount of junk they had stored up there. In a trial where residents of two London Boroughs were offered loft insulation with or without a subsidised loft clearance scheme, those offered the loft clearance were four times more likely to get their lofts insulated. In this case, removing the ‘hassle factor’ nudged people in the direction of saving both energy and money in the long-run.

The team also hope to make inroads into the nation’s health problems, with plans to encourage organ donation by changing the current opt-in scheme to an opt-out scheme, promoting healthy eating by placing signs at supermarket checkouts detailing the amount of fruit and vegetables the average shopper buys, and helping people to quit smoking through schemes offering rewards to those who sign a contract stating their commitment to quit. In addition to using these novel techniques to encourage behaviour change, the team have pioneered the use of rigorous randomised controlled trial methodology to assess these interventions.

My main motivation for wanting to work in this team stems from my strong interest in public health and the important interplay I see between research and policy. Now in the third and final year of my PhD, I’ve been using objective experimental techniques, such as eye-tracking and brain imaging to directly assess, for the first time, the likely impact of standardised tobacco packaging on behaviour. As an academic researcher, it’s all too easy to lock yourself in your windowless lab and ignore the outside world. However, I have learnt the value and importance of engaging with policy makers throughout my PhD, and as a result, my research has been used by a number of governments and by the European Union to inform their tobacco control policies. I hope that by working within the Behavioural Insights Team, I will gain a greater understanding of how evidence is actually used by governments to inform policy and I hope to be able to come back to research with a fresh perspective on how to engage and collaborate with policy makers.

Another motivation is that I want to try something new. Although I’ve enjoyed working in such an exciting field over the course of my PhD, the very nature of a PhD means that you spend three or four years focussing all of your attention on one particular idea or project. Now I’m approaching the home-stretch, I’m looking to expand my research interests and develop myself as an independent researcher. The three month internship will involve working collaboratively across government and local authorities, writing briefings for members of government on how behavioural science can inform policy and also designing, managing and analysing the data from a variety of policy intervention trials. I hope that this experience will provide me with new ideas for research when I return to my PhD in October.