Evidence summaries

I support the work of the research team. Two of my biggest responsibilities are managing the research coordinators and editing the evidence summaries. Our team researches topics in social care that people have said they want to learn more about. We turn this work into content for the Insight Collective website. 

Before I joined Social Care Wales, I was a freelance editor. I’ve previously worked in support roles in communications and in research roles in the third sector and academia. I worked for the Children’s Social Care Research and Development Centre (CASCADE) at Cardiff University for five years, first as a project administrator and then as a research associate.

My role is about making research accessible to people working in social care. As a team, we take academic research, research done by other organisations or people with lived experience, and data collected by Social Care Wales, and make this information easy to understand. I'm a trained social worker and have experience of working with a range of people. This includes people with learning disabilities, substance misuse issues, and people engaged in survival sex work. I have a master's degree in criminology and a PhD in social sciences. My research includes a variety of topics from education, attitudes towards vaccination and the way people talk about moral beliefs, as well as inequality in the workplace.

As a research coordinator, my job is to make academic research engaging and accessible for people working in social care. I do this by writing evidence summaries, which convey the key principles of research into different topics relevant to social care. 

Before starting with Social Care Wales, I spent several years working as an academic researcher for the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data’s Civil Society Research Centre. In that role I worked on several projects, primarily focusing on political polarisation and environmental activism. Through this I developed experience working with communities and activist groups to conduct in-depth research into sensitive topics in the UK and abroad. My research interests are wide-ranging, but focus on community, identity and lifestyles through time.

My main role as a research coordinator is to write evidence summaries, which collate social care research and make it accessible to people who work in a social care setting. 

My research focuses particularly on the context of identity and its impact on social care work/support. I have a master’s degree in international relations and I’m in the final stages of my PhD in sociology. 

My previous research addressed the role of anti-racist activism in Wales, for which I was awarded ‘Most Outstanding Postgraduate Researcher’ at Liverpool John Moores University. I am also a fluent Welsh speaker.