CASS Doctoral Students

Doctoral Research topic
Approaches to identifying and mitigating international event-related sex trafficking in Superbowl host cities.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
For this study, qualitative methods will be employed; the main method will be the use of semi-structured in-depth interviews.

Keywords
international hospitality, tourism & events management; sex trafficking; mega sporting events.

Supervisors
Dr Rebecca Finkel, Dr Marjory Brewster

Doctoral Research topic
The purpose of this research is to investigate personalised customer satisfaction and its antecedents and consequences, within the UK domestic in-flight service experience. The contribution of the study is to recommend adopting value co-creation within service-dominant (S-D) logic that would allow airlines for connecting to an individual consumer experience, towards a long-lasting and congruent relationship.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
The research undertakes a quantitative method via survey questionnaires for measuring customer experiences towards personalised customer satisfaction.

Keywords
Value co-creation, Service-Dominant (S-D) logic, Customer experience, Customer Satisfaction, Airline service

Supervisors
Dr Majella Sweeney, Dr Marjory Brewster

Doctoral Research topic
Mediation and Justice: this study investigates the justice thinking of unrepresented people participating in court-referred small claims mediation.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
24 semi-structured qualitative interviews followed by thematic analysis.

Keywords
mediation; justice; fairness; Simple Procedure; court-referred mediation; legal norms

Supervisors
Craig Cathcart, Carol Brennan, Dr Chris Gill

Doctoral Research topic
Relationships between trees and buildings.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Action Research

Keywords
organicism, architecture, arboriculture, environment, well-being, education

Supervisors
Dr Anthony Schrag, Dr Fiona Maclean

Doctoral Research topic
The research aims to investigate the shift to online teaching in HE due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions as it has been and is being experienced by those “first responders”, i.e. the lecturers.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
The proposed research will adopt a qualitative research methodology following an inductive approach to data analysis using IPA (Smith, 1996).

Keywords
Online teaching, pedagogy, adaptation to change, wellbeing, IPA, phenomenology.

Supervisors
Dr Simon Hoult, Dr Linda Craig

Doctoral Research topic
The study explores the employee voice forms, mechanism and extent of its embeddedness in the hotel industry in Lagos, Nigeria. It seeks to make a practice-based recommendation on the employee voice concept to achieve organisational outcomes in the hotel industry in Lagos, Nigeria.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Mixed method

Keywords
employee voice, employee relations

Supervisors
Dr Catherine Matheson, Dr Majella Sweeney, Dr Andrew Bratton

Doctoral Research topic
My primary research questions are around how we can shift the culture and design of complaint systems to more participatory, relational and reflexive approaches to complaints which support all the actors within complaint systems and ensure that learning takes place. This includes improving the experiences of those who make complaints, those who are complained about and the complaint handlers whose every day job is dealing with complaints.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
My thesis is being based around retrospective publications and uses a qualitative approach.

Keywords
complaints, consumers, complaint handlers, participation, learning

Supervisors
Professor Brendan McCormack, Dr Rebecca Finkel

Doctoral Research topic
My research is on 'Feminist Political Ecology' and its use to help understand and compare power relations and gender variables within Waste Initiatives in India and Scotland.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Feminist Political Ecology, Feminist theory, Bricolage, Video Participation, Popular Education, Actors Theory Network, Dialectic, literature review, observational, longitudinal.

Keywords
feminist, political ecology, participatory, participatory, bricolage

Supervisors
Dr Eurig Scandrett, Dr Oonagh O'Brien

Doctoral Research topic
My research explores multi-stakeholder collaboration through a collective leadership lens. It is informed by the public administration, organisational and leadership fields and a 2019 empirical study of public service collaboration in Scotland, UK.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Social constructionist ontology, interpretivist epistemology and phenomenological thinking, semi-structured interviews.

Keywords
collaboration, public services, collective leadership, complexity

Supervisors
Professor Claire Seaman, Dr Janice McMillan, Roderick Ferguson

Doctoral Research topic
Small Tourism Business Survival in the Eastern Caribbean.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Mixed Method

Keywords
strategy survival tourism, small businesses

Supervisors
Professor Claire Seaman, Dr Cecilia Gladwell, Richard Bent

Doctoral Research topic
My research explores how memory is mobilised, used and conceptualised in museum community engagement work in Scotland. I draw on sociological and psychological theories of memory to examine the connection between memory, identity, narrative and storytelling, specifically in community engagement activities centred around interactions with museum art and artefacts.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Qualitative and collaborative approaches; narrative inquiry; creative and visual methods; participatory methods; interviews.

Keywords
memory, museums, narrative, sustainable community engagement, public sociology

Supervisors
John Docherty-Hughes, Dr Stephen Darling

Doctoral Research topic
Leadership and Followership interdependence. As such I am exploring leader and follower relationships in the military with the intent to determine if an interdependent relationship between the two can be demonstrated.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
I’m using a qualitative method and taking an adaptive grounded theory approach.

Keywords
leaders, followers, organisational behaviour, interdependence

Supervisors
Professor Claire Seaman, Professor Chris McVittie, Dr Susanne Ross

Doctoral Research topic
Exploring and understanding how contemporary children construct their daily life within the context of the urban space of the city of Athens, through doing, considering childhood as a period of agency and subjectivity and providing a space for sharing children’s voice and representing their ideas, meanings and descriptions.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Qualitative Research of explorative nature with emphasis on participatory methodological approaches within the field of urban studies.

Keywords
childhood, children, human action, occupation, urban space, agency

Supervisors
Dr Sarah Kantartzis, Dr Michelle Elliot

Doctoral Research topic
Brexit and social care in Scotland: An Exploration of the perceived impact on workforce sustainability.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Mixed methods approach using sequential exploratory strategy

Keywords
social care workforce, Brexit, immigration policy, stakeholders

Supervisors
Professor Claire Seaman, Dr Andrew Bratton, Dr Margaret Smith

Doctoral Research topic
I am interested in how individuals communicate and interpret probability estimates. I am particularly interested in the interpretation of confidence statements in the context of eyewitness evidence and the implications for theory and in practice. My doctoral research focuses on developing an evidence-based approach for interpreting eyewitness expressions of confidence.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Quantitative approaches, including experiments and surveys

Keywords
eyewitness, eyewitness confidence, eyewitness identification, eyewitness evidence

Supervisors
Dr Jamal K. Mansour, Dr Stephen Darling, Dr Stuart Wilson

Doctoral Research topic
Play is a fundamental occupation in children’s life. Nevertheless, many children do not have the same opportunities to access to meaningful play occupations, due to sociocultural, political-economic or physical factors, which may threat children’s occupational rights. New knowledge from occupational science is necessary to foster inclusive play within P4PLAY programme.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
Child-centred participatory qualitative methodologies with an occupation-right perspective will be carried out. Critical, inclusive and gender lens will be consider.

Keywords
children, play, occupational science, occupational justice, social transformation, child-friendly communities

Supervisors
Dr Sarah Kantartzis, Jeanne Jackson

Doctoral Research topic
Predictors of Integrative Public Leadership in the Malaysian Public Sector: A Structural Model Analysis.

Doctoral Research methodological approaches
In phase one, I used an online modified Delphi survey technique to identify important attributes for public sector leaders. In the second phase, the study further developed the items to measure these important leadership attributes by validating the items using the Rasch model. The next stage involved invited panels for content validity which utilised the content validity index (CVI) to ensure the items are valid for survey questionnaires. Finally, in phase three, used a paper method to distribute survey questionnaires to 14 federal agencies and analysed data to develop PLS-SEM.

Keywords
transformational leadership, civic capacity, public leadership, integrative public leadership, public sector leaders, subordinates.

Supervisors
Dr Susanne Ross, Dr Gemma Blackledge-Foughali, Richard Bent