Dr Katie Wright-Bevans, a Lecturer in Social Psychology from Keele University, joined us on 23rd January 2020 to deliver an insightful visiting speaker talk on bisexuality and health promotion.
What type of Psychologist is Katie?
Katie is a critical social, health and community psychologist. Therefore, Katie draws upon a variety of perspectives when looking into different topic areas.
What kind of approaches does Katie take?
Drawing upon her perspectives Katie uses social representation theory, qualitative measures and action research approaches when designing and analysing her research.
But what does this mean?
The foundations to Katie’s research enable her to:
- Gain understanding of the mechanisms behind health and social inequalities;
- Facilitate positive social change.
Katie’s bisexuality and health promotion research:
Katie approaches her research into the LGBTQ+ community with an apolitical stance. Katie worked alongside colleagues from other institutions on the research project she talked about. This was inspiring as it allowed people to work together to design and analyse the research project so that it was considered from many points of view.
You can read national reports on bisexuality and health promotion from Stonewall and the Government.
How many participants?
840 individuals from around the globe participated in Katie’s research. This led to over a thousand pages of open-ended survey responses!
Key themes from the research:
Thematic analysis was used to analyse the data. This is the process of reading through people’s responses and drawing on commonalities and differences across the data set. These responses are explored to see whether any key messages can be found from within the data.
Katie is continuing to analyse the dataset. To date she has found that sexual identities mostly hinge upon the degree of empowerment or oppression experienced within the social institutions in an individual’s life. She also found a strong theme across participants that the pursuit of wellbeing was the ultimate goal.
Key messages from the talk:
Bisexuality and health promotion is a key area for research due to the findings from recent reports because:
- Lower mental health compared with other LGBTQ+ groups.
- Sense of isolation from LGBT and straight communities.
Working in research teams allows Psychologists to conduct research from a range of perspectives and approaches.
Thank you to Katie for sharing her research with us and we look forward to hearing more about the research in the future!
Missed the talk? Follow the visiting speaker series and see upcoming speakers!
The Department of Psychology at Staffordshire University offers a range of undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Psychology at the University’s £30 million Science Centre in Stoke-on-Trent. The department is home to the Staffordshire Centre for Psychological Research, a large and active group of psychologists, PhD students and researchers conducting work into a variety of psychological disciplines and topic areas.