Staff and post-graduate research students make up a community of DRMC Fellows from a wide range of disciplines. Fellows meet regularly to share expertise, develop novel research methods and engage in the pedagogy of research methods training. To support their activities, Fellows have access to small pots of DRMC funding.
Please contact us if you’d like to find out more about becoming a DRMC Fellow. Staff can apply to be a DRMC Fellow here. Post-graduate research students can apply to be a DRMC Student Fellow here.
John Paul is an applied statistician who has experience of developing and applying novel statistical methods over a number of disparate areas including the reduction of animal testing, climate change, and criminal sentencing. As an applied statistician, his research work is often done in interdisciplinary teams, and he has collaborated with criminologists, engineers, environmental scientists amongst others. He has also worked outside of academia in both the civil service and the flood risk industry.
His two principal areas of research are:
The projects I lead use randomised controlled trial methodology with an associated implementation and process evaluation (IPE) for the programme. The IPE often integrates qualitative and quantitative research methods using interviews, focus groups and surveys to gather stakeholder feedback and data on how well the programme has been implemented. I also have some experience in conducting systematic reviews, and intervention programme development for implementation at scale. I have a background in psychology and psychology research methods and have developed many different survey instruments as part of different projects as well as conducting research in many different educational settings.
Research Interests:
Much of my basic research focuses on social hiearchies - how hierarchical relations are formed, and how being at the top or at the bottom of a hierarchy impacts people's thoughts, feelings and actions. On the more applied end, I help organisations and stakeholders make use of behavioural insights to tackle the challenges that they face.
The word cloud below illustrates some of the topics I have been working on. I welcome expressions of interest from prospective students, researchers, and organisations wishing to work with me on these and related topics.
My research has developed in three fields: health inequalities; climate change adaptation; and post-industrialism and class. In each of these areas I have a strong interest in the application of complexity theory to policy and governance systems and how the political economy functions relative to these. For example, my interest in health inequalities centres on the implications of both methodological and ideological framings for how this issue is understood and addressed. I have been involved in developing approaches to study place-based health inequalities through the application of qualitative comparative analysis.
I recently completed a book called Social Policy, Political Economy and the Social Contract that ties together a range of diverse but related research interests that I have developed throughout my academic career, through employing complexity and social contract theory to understand the trajectory of the political economy and its interrelationship with policy.
My research interests are:
I am particularly interested in Theme 1 (focus 1 & 2), Theme 2 (focus 3 & 4) and Theme 3 (Focus 2) in the Methods Centre.