Research

Evaluation

My evaluation experience has largely focused on evaluating the implementation, effectiveness, and efficacy of social change programmes and government interventions. The programmes and interventions I've evaluated have varied in terms of existing evidence, how well established they are, and their size. As such, I have utilised a variety of evaluation approaches, including:

  • Implementation and process evaluations

  • Impact evaluations

  • Randomised Controlled Trials

  • Programme evaluations

  • Realist evaluation

I also have experience with Theory of Change and logic model development (most recently for The Black Curriculum and in my current role as Impact Lead for Frontline).

Policy Research on Children and Families

I have managed a variety of mixed-method, qualitative, and evaluation research projects. Some examples include:

  • understanding parents and their employers' experiences of shared parental leave

  • evaluating a pilot programme that provided case-based support for asylum seekers as an alternative to detention

  • a pilot evaluation of a new teaching resource for sex and relationships education for children aged 12-14

Other projects I worked on include: community differences in perceptions of extremism, PhD students' experiences of UKRI funded extensions, experiences of leaving care, and an evaluation of a Year 5 maths programme (Same Day Intervention).

Adolescent language and standard language ideology

I collaborated with my colleague Christian Ilbury to explore the narratives and meta-commentaries that arose through our fieldwork with adolescents. In particular, our work examines how standard language ideology is informed by and serves a neoliberal agenda.

During my PhD fieldwork at a secondary school in East London, I encountered discourses of standard language ideology on a regular basis. Teachers often called out non-standard language as being inappropriate for the classroom, and the UK National Curriculum stipulates that "Standard English" is taught in schools (although quite what that is and how it is to be taught remains unclear). Christian found similar ideologies at a youth group in East London (his field site). Our data showed that this ideology seeks to marginalise working class and ethnic minority adolescents even further, rather than offering equal opportunities in the workplace as is often suggested.

We presented this research at applied linguistics conference, BAAL 2017. We also ran a two-day event in October, Language Variation in the Classroom, to discuss and explore these issues with academics and practitioners. For more details about LVitC, see my page on outreach. This work will be published in a forthcoming volume by the British Association of Applied Linguistics.

Language and ethnicity in a multicultural secondary school

Multicultural London English (MLE) is widely considered to be "the new Cockney" - that is, the new way of speaking in (East) London. It is most commonly spoken by those under the age of 35, and is often thought to transcend racial and ethnic boundaries. While there are undeniably tangible shifts in London dialects that move away from more traditional ways of speaking (you'd be hard pushed to find a young Cockney speaker nowadays), my research examines the ethnic and racial dynamics in more detail. I argue that although multicultural communities are highly diverse, ethnicity and race are still important in these communities - not only for ethnic minorities but also for White British adolescents.

My research discusses ethnicity and race by examining language variation among adolescents in a multicultural secondary school in East London. I take a mixed-methods approach, combining ethnography with descriptive and inferential statistics. Combining these methods illuminated the importance of social practices and ethnic identity. Girl peer groups were particularly interesting, as they not only named their peer groups by ethnic identity, but their linguistic practices reflected this very intentional self-identification.

Ethnic identity and stylistic variation in African American English

My MA research was my first exploration into examining ethnic identity by combining qualitative and quantitative methods. I used a data set consisting of 9 hours of self-recorded speech from one speaker, Ricky, a middle-aged, middle-class, African American male. This work illuminated the different ways in which Ricky "turned up" and "turned down" his ethnic identity, but also used typically "black" language for other purposes in addition to ethnic identity construction.

To do this, I examined the ways in which he used a range linguistic features typically associated with African American English in different speech contexts with different interlocutors in every-day situations (e.g. at work or spending time with his children). I conducted a multivariate analysis of different linguistic features (morphosyntactic, phonological, and prosodic). I then looked closely at different speech situations in the data, using narrative analysis to explore the interactional function of linguistic variable.