My doctoral research focuses on improving understanding of grief and bereavement through the identification, evaluation and secondary analysis of existing UK and Irish data resources. The project examines how grief-related experiences are measured across large-scale datasets and how these resources can be used to investigate the psychological structure, correlates, and consequences of grief, including prolonged grief disorder.
A central aim of the PhD is to strengthen research capacity in this area by developing a clearer picture of the data already available for reuse. This involves systematically identifying relevant archives and datasets, documenting the bereavement and grief-related information they contain, and assessing their potential for future secondary analysis. Later stages of the project will use suitable datasets to address substantive questions about the structure and consequences of grief using advanced quantitative methods, including latent-variable modelling. The project will also extend into linked administrative data, using ADR-NI infrastructure to examine bereavement-related outcomes at population level through census and mortality data linkage.
More broadly, my research interests include bereavement, prolonged grief disorder, psychological measurement, psychopathology, secondary data analysis, and advanced quantitative methodology. Through the PhD, I hope to contribute both to substantive knowledge about grief and to the development of more efficient and reproducible approaches to using existing data resources in psychological research.
