Current Research Students

Che-Sheng Chao

Title: Applications of MHP Technology in Digital Interactive Television on Educational Programmes
Supervisors: Professor Frank Webster and Dr Petros Iosifidis

The development of new media by interactive television technologies makes it possible to provide audiences with more command and interactivity and thus to adapt broadcast instruction to the needs of a variety of entertainers and learning styles.

By using an edutainment television MHP programme, “Follow Me after School,” as experimental materials, this study is aimed to examine the impact of digital interactive television programmes on audience’s knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors. In addition, insightful suggestions as to how to design interactive features and interactive contents of digital interactive television programmes are also put forth through experiments, surveys, focus groups, and expert interviews, etc.

The objective here is to identify the shortcomings of current approaches toward interactive television, to provide proper solutions, and to test them accordingly with viewers’ validation. Preliminary experiment shows that using interactive television as educational tools appear to generate good audience responses. However, how to arrange proper information and video images concurrently on the same screen then becomes a key issue for the programme provider.

Jorma Hakala

Title: The regulation of Manned Commercial Security Services: A Transnational Comparative Study of Belgium, Estonia, New York, Queensland, South Africa and Sweden

The research compares the reasons and implementation of statutory private security regulation in different sort of societies. It also deals with the influence the existing legal and cultural factors in the states under study have in the making and execution of the industry specific of laws. The examination is based on documentary analyses of existing statutory regulation and interviews of different local interest groups within private security.

Lena Karamanidou

Title: The Political Discourse of Asylum in Greece and Ireland
Supervisors: Alice Bloch and John Solomos

The aim of my research project is to analyse and compare the legitimation strategies employed by political actors in Greece and Ireland in order to justify choices regarding asylum policy. Using Critical Discourse Analysis as a method, I examine the dominant themes, linguistic features and rhetorical and argumentative strategies employed in official political documents between 1996 and 2004. The analysis is aided by the use of NVivo software. The research explores the regional and domestic social and political factors which influence the formulation of asylum policies and the legitimation strategies in the two countries. Moreover, it analyses their similarities and differences of thematic content and discursive strategies in the two national contexts and compares the conclusions to the existing relevant literature on asylum policy and discourse of European states.

Damien Lanfrey

Title: User-generated citizen activism in the Social Web : capturing emerging forms, properties and opportunities
Supervisors: Professor Frank Webster and Professor Kevin Robins

Generative interactivity, interconnectedness and their formalization seem, to me, to be the main drivers of a shift that is leading the Web from being an almost text-dominated medium into a social environment where user-generated content and people appropriate an irreversibly central position. In this highly appropriable, fast-changing environment that I define Social Web, organizations and networks operate, develop or even emerge. While traditional political actors and SMOs are increasingly turning to blogs and SNsites for new campaigning opportunities, new forms of “user-generated activism” and civic awareness are given birth within the Social Web. They perhaps cannot be named “social movements” but carry similar goals; they don’t use the Web as a mere “tool”, but as an environment where new “allies” emerge and boundaries between projects are blurred.Through the in-depth analysis of three case studies, this research aims at investigating the cutting edge of this emerging web-based, user-generated, flourishing activism.

Three dimensions – media feature, users’ perspective and web sphere – will be examined, with the final goal of uncovering the fluid relation between the Social Web and these emerging forms of user-generated activism. Lastly, suggestions concerning the meeting points and potential synergies between these Web-based networks and SMOs will be proposed.

Peter Martin

Title: Measuring complex attitudes in surveys
Supervisors: Dr. Liza Schuster and Professor Roger Jowell

Attitude measurement is an important purpose of survey research. Traditionally, an attitude is defined to be an individual’s stable tendency to evaluate a given social object on a single dimension ranging from positive to negative. Survey researchers sometimes assume that (a) people have such one-dimensional attitudes, and (b) that survey questions can measure them. However, arguments from discursive psychology, as well as evidence from the psychology of survey response, support a more nuanced theory of attitudes: most people’s views are multidimensional, can contain internal contradictions, and are expressed in relation to social contexts. The process of how people translate complex attitudes into survey responses is as yet poorly understood. In order to interpret people’s responses to survey questions, we must learn to understand how they go about answering them.

My project examines the methodological challenges of measuring attitudes. Taking the example of opinions about neighbourhoods, local communities, and migration, my study will combine a quantitative attitude survey with qualitative interviews. The aim is to investigate the cognitive strategies that people use in order to come up with an answer to a survey question. Insight into these strategies will enable survey researchers to improve the design of attitude surveys. The study also hopes to provide evidence to improve the art of interpreting survey responses, by questioning taken-for-granted assumptions about just what survey respondents express when they tick a box. .

Nikolas Nicoli

Title: A Multi-Case Study of the Development Process for Free-to-Air Terrestrial Original Television Programmes: The Who, the Why and the How

This thesis is an explanatory multi-case study of the development process of original television programmes for free-to-air terrestrial channels in the UK. I seek to answer the questions who - or which divisions of labour are involved, why are they involved and how does the development process transpire. The research themes identified in the literature review – primarily economic, regulatory and technological factors affecting the development process – will allow me to build a research framework to use for the empirical work.

The methodology will draw largely on explanatory case study research methods and analysis techniques. The empirical work consists mainly of in-depth interviews with television professionals and regulators that work directly or indirectly on the development process. Where possible, documentation will be gathered and internal meetings will be observed for a more scrupulous analysis of the development process.

Assunta Maria Nicolini

In my research I plan to investigate the transnational dimension of Afghan women refugees exiled in Pakistan. The focus will be on how the transnational experience has influenced gender roles and relation since Afghan refugees started to settle in Pakistan, soon after the Soviet invasion of 1979. I will analyze and compare different segments of Afghan society in terms of engendered transnationalism giving particular attention to the eventual impacts such experience may have on the lives of Afghan refugees, especially women. I will also consider whether/how Afghan women remaining in Pakistan affect the lives of those living in Afghanistan.

Polina Obolenskaya

Family Values in time and context: using two British Cohorts for comparison

Using quantitative secondary data analysis of the two British cohorts (The National Child Development Study and The1970 British Cohort Study) this study seeks to explore attitudes to family and marriage. The nature of these data allows for a longitudinal analysis at various ages of the cohort members and thus the investigation of changes and continuities of their attitudes.

The aim of the research is to investigate family values change during the life course of the respondents. It further looks at these changes in association with certain life-evens such as partnership formation/dissolution and having children; as well as some parental characteristics of the cohort members.

Finally the attitudes of the two cohorts and the patterns of their changes and/or stability will be explored at a comparable age. Issues of period as well as cohort effects will be considered.

Nongluck Pussayabipul

Project name: London Borough of Camden Evaluation of Quality of Life Strategy for Older Citizens

Project description: This evaluation project, conducted by City University London on behalf of Camden Council's Promoting Independence Group and Camden Primary Care Trust (PCT), aims to evaluate the impact of Camden's Quality of Life Strategy on older residents' perceptions of feeling independent, and their sense of well-being.

The main objectives are to measure the changes on older people's perception of their quality of life over time and to identify the impact of services provided under the Quality of Life Strategy on older people's self-reported quality of life. Further, the research will provide feedback to Camden Council and the Camden Primary Care Trust as well as its partners in order to influence social policy and service development.

Bernadetta Siara

My PhD research will focus on gender relations amongst Polish women and men who migrated to the United Kingdom in the post-2004 European Enlargement period. When analyzing the debates these Poles have on the internet forum relating to gender and ethnic aspects of identity, I observed that this transnational space Poles have found themselves in enables Polish women and men to renegotiate gender relations (analysis was presented at the BSA Annual Conference, London 2007). My research will investigate the matter in more detail and it will be a gendered analysis of the post-2004 EU Enlargement Polish migration to the UK.

Yanet Toirac

Title: Policing culture in Havana: pictures of the present, metaphors of the future
Supervisors: Dr Patria Roman-Velazquez and Professor John Solomos

The principal aim of the research is to identify the core conceptual, ideological and practical constituents defining cultural policies in contemporary Havana. To fulfil it, cultural policies will be analysed at two levels --the city and the neighbourhood--, in order to detect both similarities and variations on those components as they are stated in general guidelines shaping city-based cultural policies as well as in local-based cultural planning at three selected Havana boroughs. A more theoretical objective pursues to identify the main variations/challenges, if any, posed by a centralized political system to the established notions of cultural policy grounded on social democracies.

This research is funded by the School of Social Sciences at City University and is due for completion in December 2007.

Nora Gamez Torres

Title: Living in transition: a study of popular music and emergent values in contemporary Cuba

This study will attempt to fill a gap in the literature discussing the ongoing process of social change in contemporary Cuba by focusing on the cultural public sphere. Specifically it

will examine the emergence of alternative values in Cuban society through an analysis of the discourses of popular music, a cultural practice that is at the core of everyday life in the country. A qualitative approach combining textual analysis of songs and interviews to musicians, musicologists, journalists, producers and other actors in popular culture industry aims to provide an understanding of how the emergence of new social relationships and identities, the shift of old values (in sum, social change) are interpreted, made to cohere, negotiated, adapted and even contested within the displays of Cuban popular music.

Brooke Van Dam

Title: Journalists Construction of a News Story Online: Comparative look at how parentage and net native news sites cover the 2008 Presidential election
Supervisors: Dr. Jean Chalaby and Dr. Chris Greer

The world of news and journalism has changed exponentially in the last few years as the World Wide Web has become a prime source of information for billions of people around the globe. This project looks at how the process of creating a news product is different in the online environment. It uses three case studies of US-based news websites to show how both parentage news sites and net native news sites construct a news story. The case studies include content analysis, in-depth interviews and direct observation to deconstruct the process of covering the 2008 Presidential election.
The project identifies 4 key changes in the process of constructing news by the journalist. These inform the conclusions showing how online journalism is very different from its offline counterpart. Additionally, it shows how net native sites are an even more distinctive type of journalism from parentage sites. Finally, this project aims to show how the study of the field of journalism is changing rapidly and major redefinitions are needed in order to understand how the practice works and exists online.

Hanna Weir

Title: Vocation and Choice in Nursing Careers

The study focuses on experienced nurses and the choices and constraints on their careers, whilst also engaging views about the motivating factors during their early and later years of nursing. Integral part of the study is the use of lifeline, which points to some of the social and biographical events that indicate the interaction between life events and structural factors impacting decision making.

Chang Yong Son

Title: The transformation of the media system under the neo-liberal government (1998-2008): the introduction of pay TV and competition in South Korea.

Recent rapid changes in the media environment through the development of electronic media have continued to change the media market. However, the nature and scale of the new media structure significantly depends on a different social-political background. This study examines the transformation of the media market under the neoliberal government (1998-2008) in Korea, in particular focusing on the inception of pay TV platforms. The main object of this thesis is to explore the questions of how and why the role of the state and market change in relation to the media industry. In addition, it attempts to analyze how each pay TV platform competes with the other operators within the competitive media circumstances. In attempting to answer these questions, the thesis attempts to delineate the pay TV platform and its socio-political, economic and technological implications in relation to their origins, processes and consequences in the national media system. As a case study, this work adopts multiple methods of collecting data, to increase their reliability and to minimize the danger of a prejudiced view. It is based on an extensive study of official documents, observational experience and in-depth interviews.