MethodsCon programme

Keynote

Interactive Seminar

A key element of health security is being able to detect and respond appropriately to acute public health events. When a potential threat is identified, the first requirement is to identify the scale of any impact as quickly as possible. Real-time syndromic surveillance systems have been developed to provide early warning and situational awareness for a wide range of potential multi-hazard threats, including infectious disease and environmental hazards. Syndromic systems are designed to be as sensitive as possible to detect all potential threats, however this can make it difficult to quantify the specific impact of incidents. For example, an increasing trend during an incident may be partly due to other seasonal factors. Also, differences between an area affected by an incident and its neighbours may partly be due to structural differences like deprivation or local health care provision. Therefore, UKHSA's real-time syndromic surveillance team have developed a novel investigation tool which uses a difference-in-differences (DiD) method to quantify the impact of local incidents, called "DiD IT?". The (DiD) method uses two sets of controls, both the time immediately before the incident occurred and areas unaffected by the incident. Thus, we can estimate, spatial and temporal differences and calculate the direct effect of the incident on our syndromic indicators. Importantly, the tool can also provide reassurance when no impact is detected. Estimates are always given with uncertainty intervals so that incident directors can assess what confidence to give to the syndromic data.

Interactive Seminar

This session will focus on exploring Freedom of Information (FOI) requests as a tool for social science research. We will start with a brief introduction and overview of how this tool has been used in health, social policy, and related research areas, and move on to a discussion of cross-cutting opportunities and challenges related to using FOI requests in research. What follows will be small group discussions, likely focused on thinking about the ways in which this data collection method could be applied and integrated with other methods relevant to participants’ areas of interest. Experience of using FOI is not required for participation. This event forms part of a wider NCRM Innovation Forum centred around the use of FOI requests to collect data for social and health research, as the first in a series of events.

Interactive Seminar

A fusion of psychology and healthcare. The session would open the floor to debate around perceived barriers to HIV pre-exposure prophylaxis, faced by individuals in the MSM community. The content will broadly describe a review of literature around the topic and then highlight the key themes across relevant papers. This will then lead to innovative discussion about how the UK system can best be improved to assist in patient care, accessibility to vital HIV preventive interventions and over looked aspects of the psychological on-goings of MSM individuals trying to access sexual health facilities.

Interactive Seminar

The frame for this session will be to explore the implementation of two policy instruments being rolled-out presently by the Government of Ireland in order to tackle societal inequalities at a strategic policy level, using Action Research methods. In order to uncover the lived experiences of implementation, policy measures designed to address health inequalities and gender inequalities will be examined, two intersecting albeit distinct, for the purpose of this presentation, interfaces on the inequalities spectrum.

Interactive Seminar

An interactive workshop designed to grow understanding into what is needed to welcome people who haven't been involved in research into participating in research and public involvement opportunities. As well as hearing from my experiences recruiting a broad range of previously unengaged people across the UK, the workshop activities will stimulate fresh ideas of how to welcome new perspectives into research and public involvement.

Interactive Seminar

This session will showcase the research (both our thinking, how we designed it and how we conducted it) plus the results (i.e. findings) from a 6 month long project at Barnardo's which seeks to capture young people's experiences, views and preferences to create a suite of tools (website and app) to improve the digital offer of mental health support that the charity provides. We will cover participant recruitment, engagement, ethics, accessibility, and research integrity.

Interactive Seminar

A session aimed at survey statisticians in academia, government departments, survey agencies and other research institutes. The purpose is to specify the challenges currently facing survey statisticians amid the increasing complexity of surveys, and the skills that need to be developed and strengthened in order to address these challenges. The outcome of the session will be a proposal on how to progress on these issues; e.g. setting up a community of practice, developing proposals for further research, development of guidelines or best practice, capacity building.

Interactive Seminar

The term Neurotechnology covers any device or system which interfaces directly with an organic (human) brain. Such technology can both monitor but also modulate neural functioning. Neurotech is envisaged by proponents as solutions for a range of health issues included sensory impairments, and interventions in conditions as diverse as epilepsy, strokes, ADHD and depression. But, Neurotechnology also throws up huge ethical and existential questions questions regarding what it is to be human? With the more extreme forms of invasive brain computer interfaces already being experimented the implications are potentially huge. Here we will discuss just one aspect of this what the implication are for studying humans as social and health scientists.

Interactive Seminar

The presenters are looking to develop a collaboration using text-mining and other natural language processing methods. They want to capture the context around how practitioners and health researchers use person-first or identity-first language in their documents. For example, do they tend to use "people with autism" or "autistic people"? Do they speak the same way about children and adults? Has the language used changed over time? Are there links to official publications of guidance or are the patterns driven from the bottom up? Researchers may have some intuitions about how language is used and what this may mean for practitioners or health care users. But intuitions are only the first step to using advanced methodological techniques to evidence the patterns and discern the factors at play. We will introduce the concepts, present some preliminary results, foment discussion, and solicit feedback or potential collaborators. We want to allow audience members to share their own intuitions and to reflect on how they came by those intuitions. We also want to learn how those intuitions might be investigated as research hypotheses, and how such research can challenge ideas that would otherwise have been accepted uncritically.

Interactive Seminar

This session will explore how practices of recovery from drugs and alcohol, social science and filmmaking, can be reconfigured together in order to create novel collaborative ways of doing recovery. Combining methodological expertise in social research methods, art and filmmaking, and empirical studies of recovery as a collective matter of care, we document the gradual transformations emerging through the involvement of people in recovery with artistic practices. Drawing on a pilot study conducted in collaboration with the filmmaker Melanie Manchot and the Liverpool Biennial of contemporary art in 2019-2020, the session advances novel methodologies for researching recovery that generate new interdisciplinary approaches to engaging health and well-being and proposes creative methods that challenge social scientific practices and assumptions of researchers. Our pilot study investigates how interdisciplinary collaborations can contribute to recovery practices through the involvement of people in recovery in filming and cinema-based workshops. Guided by a methodological approach which is committed to advancing the study of recovery from drugs and alcohol and health policy from an interdisciplinary perspective, the session reflects on the challenges of researching recovery and the potential for conceptual and methodological innovation in the social sciences.

Interactive Seminar

In this session Toby Brandon and several experts-by-experience (EBE) co-researchers will lead discussion on the benefits of meaningful (as opposed to tokenistic) service-user involvement before presenting the details of a researcher development programme aimed at catalysing existing EBE research skills and implemented across several UK universities. The session will also address the practical difficulties involved in meaningful co-production - as well as values-based and philosophical tensions inherent in this approach..

Interactive Seminar

This interactive session involves three short presentations followed by an open discussion on the subject of researching cold water therapies and wild swimming for mental health. The purpose is to explore and better understand different ways of apprehending alternative and complementary therapies (CAT) and integrated medicine through the phenomena of cold water therapy. The session is aimed to highlight different methods and methodologies used to produce knowledge about cold water therapy and invites those with an interest in mental health, sports science, physiology and evidence-based medicine to contribute to the discussion.

Interactive Seminar

A session aimed at survey statisticians in academia, government departments, survey agencies and other research institutes. The purpose is to specify the challenges currently facing survey statisticians amid the increasing complexity of surveys, and the skills that need to be developed and strengthened in order to address these challenges. The outcome of the session will be a proposal on how to progress on these issues; e.g. setting up a community of practice, developing proposals for further research, development of guidelines or best practice, capacity building.

Interactive Seminar

Our contribution wants to discuss main challenges, lessons learned, problems produced and problems solved in the design and implementation of an academic course for health and migration. We will concentrate on two main topics: 1. Cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-sectional cooperation 2. “Virtualisation” of cooperation due to COVID-19

Interactive Seminar

Language is a useful medium for transmitting information - but it also contains context-based information that is very valuable. We propose looking at person-first or identity-first language in medical texts to identify patterns that shed light on how people talk about themselves and others. As an example, a person-first description would be " a person with autism" while an identity-first description would be " an autistic person". While individuals may prefer one or the other for various reasons, there are likely to be patterns in how communities of researchers use this language. For example, researchers may refer to children with one description but refer to adults with the other or there may be a clear switch from one description to the other over time. These patterns can be made clear through a systematic study of medical texts through the use of natural language processing methods. Only once the patterns are extracted and quantified, can the meaning behind the patterns be understood. This session describes a novel research project around medical language and seeks audience feedback on the research questions, methods, challenges, and potential benefits.

Interactive Seminar

We are taking inclusive research methods and starting from scratch. Self-advocates are leading the project from the start and have recruited clinical experts and academics with similar interests to join us. We are looking at ways of doing statistical research together. We plan to use the linked health and social care databases in the SAIL datasets in Swansea University. We want to talk about the things we have found out in the first 8 months and to develop ways of making research accessible. We want the discussion in the session to be the start of writing an academic paper.

Interactive Seminar

Our proposal takes the format of presentation, discussion and practical workshop: Presentation: outlining the design-based and playful methods used to include children directly in the development of a MedTech project. This is done in relation to our Innovate UK funded R&D of an innovative mixed realities (virtual and augmented) playkit to help 4-10-year-olds undertake an MRI scan without a GA. The 30-month project included methods of co-design and production that used drawing, model-making, user testing, and character design. As well as, regular design summits with the transdisciplinary team that included researchers and developers from Dubit (a company specialising R&D of children’s digital products), Sheffield Children’s Hospital NHS Trust, the Royal College of Art, University of Sheffield and the Glasgow School of Art. Finally, we will highlight how these methods led us to understand that the ways in which children make sense of medical information and procedures is fundamentally different from adults. In particular, children’s desire for medtech that is playful, has spaces for open-ended play and storytelling to exist alongside the dissemination of medical information. Discussion: We will invite discussion on the benefits of including children in the design of health products and interventions, the methods and means used to analyse the outputs of design-based methods. Practical Workshop: We will provide the opportunity for participants to try one of our methods first-hand. In doing so, introducing the concept of Cultural Probes from design-research. Following this, we will offer physical materials for participants to prototype their own Cultural Probe in relation to a range of health projects. This will provide opportunities to extend on the methods we created and explore the possibility of their application to other child health projects. Project Link: https://dylanyamadarice.com/RESEARCH-VR-Mixed-Realities-Play-Kit-to-Prepare-Under-10s-for-an-MRI

Interactive Seminar

A PowerPoint presentation describing what massage ethnography is, how I developed it for my Masters in Research Methods as a result of my career as a hospice massage therapist where I observed inequities in care provision, its theoretical underpinnings, and the practicalities of incorporating it into research projects.

Profesional Development Workshop

This interactive workshop will outline why health and social scientists may be interested in investigating how exposures (or treatments) influence the variability of outcomes or have heterogenous effects; such methods are of aetiological and policy significance. For example, an intervention may successfully reduce the mean of a health outcome, yet increase its variability—and thus widen a form of health inequality. In other cases, an intervention may improve outcomes for some people but not others. Identifying this pattern could motivate the development of theory and of new interventions. We will briefly describe different approaches to investigate this, and provide a summary of previous evidence as applied to a health outcome of global public health importance: body mass index (BMI) and its inequality. There is emerging evidence that risk factors for high BMI such as socioeconomic disadvantage are linked with both elevated BMI and greater BMI variability. We will then provide a guide to using the GAMLSS package in R (Generalised Additive Models for Location, Scale and Shape). This modelling approach has been under-utilised in the existing health and social sciences literature. We will focus on the implementation and interpretation of results; syntax and data will be provided. The workshop will then facilitate a discussion of next steps in this under-researched field. Most health outcomes are continuous in nature, yet researchers frequently examine binary outcomes, or solely examine mean differences . Similarly, trials typically focus on differences in averages, and do not formally examine differences in variability. Should investigation of differences in variability become more widespread? What about skewness or kurtosis? Can the resulting findings have aetiological or policy significance? What sources of bias should researchers be aware of when investigating this?

Profesional Development Workshop

Traditionally in quantitative research, relationship between dependent and independent variables are modelled using regression analysis, either by assuming linear relationship or by categorising the independent variables. However, these approaches could not capture the nuances in the relationships, e.g. when the dependent variable is not linearly proportional to the independent variable. Instead, readily available statistical methods could be used to explore and report non-linear relationships. This workshop will illustrate what non-linear associations are, why do we need to model them specifically, and how this can be done in R. This workshop would be divided into two sessions, the first one on the theories and the second part is a demonstration. Programming codes will be provided and the participants are welcomed to try using the method in the workshop.

Interactive Seminar

A short introductory course on GIS and spatial data, and how maps and location are fundamental to understanding health. No prior knowledge of GIS is needed. Participants will get an understand of how GIS works and will be able to map some health data. Participants will need to bring a laptop

Profesional Development Workshop

Diet is a key behaviour associated with health that is embedded in our social lives. Analyses of the National Diet and Nutrition Survey have shown that when, where and who you eat with are key correlates of what and how much you eat. Understanding more about the social drivers of food intake is essential to ensure that public health and policy interventions to improve diet are a success. Dietary assessment methods that are detailed but easy to complete are required. Technology-based tools offer the potential to reduce participant and research burden, enabling measures to become embedded in daily life and offer unique insights. We’ll combine presentations and demonstrations of technology-based tools for measuring food intake to stimulate discussion. We’ll draw on our experience using 1) an online dietary recall (INTAKE24) at scale in the National Diet and Nutrition Survey; 2) food photography methods and crowdsourcing to identify foods in photos; and 3) Alexa to capture voice-based data on food intake. After sharing our experience we’ll facilitate group discussions on the broader potential to capture diet or other behaviours using technology-based tools.

Profesional Development Workshop

The purpose of this workshop is to help participants explore three different approaches to analytical integration during a mixed methods study. Analytical Integration in this workshop refers to the combining of qualitative findings and quantitative results which have already been primarily analysed for use within a mixed methods study. The 1.5 hour workshop will include a seminar on three approaches to integrating data, followed by an applied session where participants consider the approaches in their own work, and work through how they would apply an integration approach in their own planned or current mixed methods study. Participants will have the opportunity to explore their own analytical integration application by thinking aloud, discussing issues with other participants, considering alternatives, while receiving support from an experienced facilitator. This workshop is most suitable for participants who have some background knowledge of mixed methods, who are working on a mixed methods study or who plan to work on a mixed methods study. These approaches can be useful for researchers who wish to identify further insights in their data, who want to analyse their data in a more technical and replicable way, or who wish to extend the synthesis of mixed methods findings.

Profesional Development Workshop

The Medical Research Council (MRC) Complex Intervention Development Framework recommends the inclusion of behaviour change theory during design. There is little guidance included, however, on how to select a theory, meaning that researchers often use a 'favourite' or familiar theory, rather than the one that may be most useful. The aim of this session will be to equip participants with the skills to systematically appraise and select behaviour change theory and techniques when designing public/mental health interventions. The session will begin with an introduction to the MRC framework, what behaviour change theory is and why it is important to include during intervention design. We will then introduce a new systematic method of selecting behaviour change theory and techniques, and illustrate the method using an example intervention. Following this, participants will have the opportunity to practice the new method in a series of activities, by first using the example intervention (e.g. systematically assessing the usefulness of several theories based on pre-designed eligibility criteria, systematically assessing behaviour change techniques to include in the intervention) and then applying their new skills to an intervention they are working on now or may develop in the future (e.g. developing their own eligibility criteria to select a behaviour change theory, and mapping appropriate behaviour change techniques). The facilitators will be on-hand to support participants throughout the session, and in-between activities, will encourage the group to discuss the advantages of using the new method and how to overcome any difficulties.

Profesional Development Workshop

Across the health and social sciences, addressing many key scientific or policy questions requires an understanding of whether a given quantity has changed over time—e.g., by year of data collection or by birth year. For example, has the occurrence of—or socioeconomic inequity in—a given health outcome changed across time? Or has social mobility improved or worsened in recently born generations? Answering these questions motivates and informs future policy development and can provide clues to aetiology. While comparative research initiatives are increasingly prominent components of health and social sciences, they are notoriously challenging to conduct—involving the collation and analysis of data from distinct and potentially heterogenous sources, with a need to ensure that such collation is valid, sources of bias are avoided/minimised, and inferences are drawn appropriately. Seemingly innocuous analytical decisions can alter the conclusions drawn. Yet existing methodological training typically focuses on the analysis of single models with single datasets. This interactive workshop will therefore: 1) Discuss the opportunities and key challenges of comparative research, as well as possible solutions. We discuss the use and importance of such research, study inclusion, sources of bias and mitigation, and interpretation, highlighting examples of good practice. 2) Describe key datasets that can be used for comparative research 3) Introduce a new open-access teaching resource that offers detailed instruction and reusable analytical syntax to guide newcomers on comparative analysis and data visualisation (in both R and Stata formats). 4) Facilitate a broader discussion of methodological issues and next steps in comparative research.

Profesional Development Workshop

Typically, research papers in the health and social sciences include the results of one, or a few, models. These are drawn from a wider universe of defensible models that could have been run, but results may not be robust to these other model specifications. Other times, answering a research question requires running a model over different subsets of the data or with different sets of variables (for instance, repeating a model across a set of ages or performing an outcome-wide analysis). However, writing the code to run multiple models can be daunting and error-prone. In this interactive workshop, we will demonstrate simple ways to run many models using the tidyverse package within the programming language, R. We will also show how the results of many models can be combined and presented in simple, comprehensible ways using the ggplot2 plotting package, and we will show how computationally expensive models can be run cost-effectively in the cloud with Amazon Web Services. Attendees will require access to R and RStudio, which are both freely available, and will need to install the tidyverse package before joining the session (install.packages(“tidyverse”)). Syntax and data will be provided.

Profesional Development Workshop

Attendees will learn how to use COMPLEX-IT, which is a free online R-Studio suite of computational social science techniques for classification, scenario simulation, and prediction. COMPLEX-IT was created for users who are non-experts in these techniques, including cluster analysis, topographical neural nets, agent-based modelling, micro-simulation, data visualisation, and prediction/forecasting methods. Using a small public health dataset, this session will introduce attendees to COMPLEX-IT (and its online resources and tutorials) sufficient for them to leave the session able to use this method on their own.

Profesional Development Workshop

Format- Powerpoint presentation plus Q&A Purpose- To showcase the value of mixed methods and CRDA in health research- using a case study example Content- CRDA is a relatively novel methodology. It allowed me to meaningfully integrate and compare qualitative expert and patient accounts of PMS (Premenstrual Syndrome) with robust quantitative epidemiological data regarding the type, relative prevalence and severity of symptoms in the general menstruating population. The rationale being that if not based on the available data, expert and lay descriptions of PMS must be influenced by other (unscientific) factors. The participant descriptions consistently reproduced three gender myths, which perpetuate the 17th Century concept of female ‘hysteria’. Interestingly, the patient accounts were more empirically robust than those of the experts. The CRDA methodology revealed that the reproduction of gender myths appeared to be wholly unintentional and principally mediated by several discursive mechanisms, and embodied, material, or institutional factors. It is hoped that by mitigating these identified factors, it might be possible to more accurately define and explain cyclical experiences - as well as finally debunk the myth of the hysterical female.

Profesional Development Workshop

Anonymisation is a complex topic. We will endeavour to demystify it through the particular device of the Anonymisation Decision Making Framework, which ties together the statistical notion of risk with the legal notions of personal data and proportionality. We will, in particular demonstrate that data anonymisation should be considered as a process that operates on the relationship between data and their environment rather than a state of data. Anonymisation is a data science problem in itself and one demonstrates aptly the need for interdisciplinary thinking.

Join us for a facilitated discussion on participatory approaches in dementia research with interdisciplinary panel members Dr Katey Warran (University of Edinburgh), Martin Robertson (Lived Experience Researcher), Dr Rosalie Ashworth (Neuroprogressive and Dementia Network), and Dr Laura Wright (University of Edinburgh). There is growing interest in research that employs participatory methodologies within health and social science research. These approaches place coproduction and creativity at the heart of research design, delivery, and knowledge mobilisation, embedding lived experience and expertise at every stage. However, there are still areas of research within these fields that prioritise top-down approaches within restrictive medical models that may exclude certain populations. In particular, there are limited projects that enable those with dementia to be coresearchers. Having a dementia diagnosis may result in changes to experiences of self-identity, whereby many have to adapt their lives to living with the condition. This often entails stepping away from aspects of life that involve decision-making, due to the false assumption that those with dementia are unable to engage in leadership roles. However, many people living with dementia are capable of contributing to and leading research activities and adding valuable expertise to research teams. Research engagement can also act as an important aspect of quality of life that can provide support for those with dementia. This provocation panel seeks to challenge and unpack the false assumption that those with dementia cannot be research leaders. It will be a forum to discuss how to break down existing academic structures that may be barriers to those with dementia being coresearchers, and to engage in collective activism in relation to inclusivity and equity in dementia health and social science research. Please bring coloured pens and paper to engage creatively with the session!

Keynote

Innovation Incubator

Smart platforms constitute an entirely new field of methods that are still in the emergent stage, requiring critical engagement and also the real potential to develop a new methodological toolkit for social and health inquiry. Smart platforms are comprised of bespoke tools that facilitate user-driven learning by building expertise into the platform to create an intuitive, supportive, and open-ended environment for complex social and health inquiry. Unlike statistical platforms, AM-Smart platforms focus on a single technique or small network of interrelated (mostly computational) methods, which help users engage new methods. Smart platforms provide method-specific operational scaffolding, rapid and formative feedback, and which requires modest technical skill while being rigorous and reliable. Smart platforms are designed for applied, interdisciplinary and public sector analysis and researchers new to a method. Examples include R-shiny programmes, statistical and geospatial web apps, online computational modelling and data visualisation tools, and smart phone data apps. This session will introduce this newly emerging field, provide some examples, and then explore with attendees how to critically engage and develop new smart methods for social science and health research.

Innovation Incubator

If Covid-19 has taught us anything, it is that we can’t draw neat lines around cause-effect relations and that discrete disease categories are almost impossible to locate, making behavioural and individualised interventions problematic. Indeed, our most recent pandemic continues to throw into relief a wide range of critical concerns: the fragility of healthcare infrastructures, supply chains and human resource management; the precarity of employment; the availability of childcare; gender and racial equality; the processes of production and consumption; the interconnectedness of economies; and our entangled more-than-human relations, with raw materials, with animals, with the climate, with new technologies. COVID-19 has been a multi-species pandemic, one where ecosystem degradation has played a crucial role in rising zoonoses and the conditions of disease emergence but also one where our responses may well have exacerbated the very systemic structural issues which gave it such terrible implications at a global level. When policy makers have to take such an extended range of factors into consideration and deal with their very real interconnections, what does that tell us about the nature of the phenomenon we are actually encountering?; how can we understand it?; what methods and methodologies are appropriate to the task? Understanding the links between the what and the how are critical to any meaningful interdisciplinary discussion but it is also important to acknowledge that our long-standing intellectual divisions of labour with their standardised disciplinary methods silos serve us extremely poorly when we are attempting to understand the links between, for instance, such diverse things as lockdowns, the recruitment, training and payment of seafarers and truck drivers, viral waves and socio-economic and environmental recovery. This is why many researchers are taking up the concept of ‘the syndemic’, a concept originally introduced by the anthropologist Merrill Singer (1994), to emphasise the interactions between the biological aspects of illness in interaction with wider social, political and economic contexts and COVID-19’s multi-scale, multi-dimensional character has clear syndemic qualities. However, while important, on their own, reconceptualisations are not enough. Without new methodological settlements, we will continue to be blind-sided by unforeseen effects but also underestimate areas where concerted action can prove valuable. This panel will seek to flesh these issues out in interdisciplinary debate by inviting provocations from, for example, anthropology, sociology, public health, epidemiology, economics, environmental studies and/or history. The aim will be to examine opportunities to, for instance, mix methods, create interdisciplinary contexts where methods can be used in dialogue or, indeed, to develop entirely new methods adequate to the analysis of syndemic crises.

Profesional Development Workshop

This session will explain how datawalking is used to collect qualitative data. That is, the collection of observed data, interview data, or reflexive data whilst walking. Datawalking has been shown to support researcher cognition, metacognition, and self-confidence. It is a way to equalise power relationships between researchers and research participants. On a practical level datawalking is shown to be an effective method to gather place-based data in the fields of anthropology, ethnography, geography, environmental science and architecture. It must be considered that datawalking as a physical activity could exclude researchers with disabilities or chronic illnesses and this is identified as an area for research that could engage with movement in many forms. There are ways to make datawalking more inclusive from the language used to promote this activity, to offering examples of alternatives that could provide a similar experience of embodied engagement with qualitative research. Our session considers how datawalking can be made inclusive. For example, researchers may be excluded from walking activity due to disability, ill-health or caring commitments. As such we will look at how virtual reality may support alternative approaches to datawalking. Even though datawalking is not a physical activity promoted or used as exercise per-se, we can learn from sports and exercise research around the promotion of and engagement with physical activity. Alternative activities to accommodate embodied engagement are an interesting area to consider for further research, especially regarding inclusive research environments. The session will explore how any kind of somatic activity may bring the researcher into a felt (sensory and emotional) space and how this may be achieved through virtual reality walking simulation software.

Innovation Incubator

Recent discoveries in sociogenomics have revolutionised our understanding of the molecular basis for both ill-health and disease, and important social outcomes such as cognition and educational attainment. UK based studies, such as UK Biobank, ALSPAC, and Generation Scotland have been at the vanguard of these efforts. However, the vast majority of the genetic epidemiological literature to date has used samples of unrelated individuals (e.g. the primary analysis of the most recent educational attainment GWAS used 3 million individuals. It is increasingly clear that the signals detected in these studies are not solely due to individual-level biological effects, but are also likely to be due to demographic social and familial effects, such as assortative mating and dynastic effects. In order to understand these effects, and potentially come to a synthesis of understanding across social science and genetics, much larger family-based studies are needed. The purpose of this session is to debate recent discoveries, highlight new and upcoming resources (e.g. Our Future Health 5m participant study, upcoming study of adolescents), and provide a review of new methods for exploiting these resources (e.g. Mendelian randomization, family-based designs, SEM). The format will a panel discussion and debate, with a mixture of short intros to studies (e.g. UKB), methods papers, and applied examples. Provisional suggested agenda (I’ve not contacted most of these people, but know them all well):

Innovation Incubator

Translational research is health research aimed at translating (converting) results from basic research into results that directly benefit humans, and can do so at scale. It is considered increasingly important by universities, funders, governments, and other stakeholders, but little is known about how we can make translation work; what the ingredients of successful (and unsuccessful) translational research are; which research findings are translatable and which are not; and how we can study the field of translation itself. This session brings together key UoM researchers that are involved in translational research, and investigates with the audience how we can strengthen the field of translation methodologically. It will be led by the Christabel Pankhurst Institute for Health Technology Research and Innovation. After a series of short plenary talks, we will consider key questions in breakout groups, and close the session with listing the key methodological challenges in this area.

Innovation Incubator

The purpose of the session is to bring together scholars to develop sensory and creative approaches to researching complementary and alternative therapies/medicines. The session will be run in three parts. First, five speakers from different backgrounds will offer their thoughts and experiences of researching alternative therapies and/or using creative methods. Second, participants will play with different sensory methods and the final section will involve group reflection and working towards project proposal development for future research.