Yunlong Liang
Supervisors: Dr Cara Booker, Dr Laura Fumagalli, Dr Edith Aguirre
Thesis title: Allostatic Load As A Mediator of Socioeconomic Status and Chronic Pain: A Longitudinal Analysis.
Research Interests: Social determinants of chronic pain; demographic approach; longitudinal analysis
Precious Ogbonna
Supervisors: Dr Violetta Parutis, Dr Alita Nandi
Thesis title: Disaggregating BAME: The ‘subalternation’ of Black African international students and their experiences at UK universities. A comparative study on the experiences of Black African Home domiciled and International students
Research Interests: Black students experiences; Identity; Sub-Saharan Africa; The Global South; Post-colonial theories
Dan Bai
Supervisors: Dr Paulo Serodio (ISER), Dr Yan Gu (Psychology) and Dr Nina Markl (Linguistics)
Thesis topic or title: Have TikTokers Changed? A Multimodal Analysis of Humour Changes in TikTok/Douyin Comedies During Covid-19
Brief summary of thesis:
This study examines the evolution of humour in TikTok and Douyin comedies across China, the UK, and the US before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic. By comparing the language, themes, and presentation styles of content from 21 creators, this research highlights how different political, cultural, and social contexts shape comedic expression.
By analyzing content from 21 creators over 36 months, sourced through the TikTok Research API, third-party analytics (Analisa.io), and manual ethnographic calibration, the study identifies critical patterns in platform engagement and content creation. The preliminary findings show that TikTok’s Research API struggles with data consistency, offering fewer videos than expected.
The analysis highlights diverse creator demographics, especially in China, where creators show a wider age range and have larger audiences than their Western counterparts. Furthermore, it reveals that COVID-related content accounts for less than 10% of overall humour in the US and UK but is interwoven into daily narratives, whereas in China, creators exhibited distinct patterns of video deletion during lockdowns.
By exploring the memetic structure of humour, this research illuminates key trends in how societies cope with crisis through digital comedy. It further addresses the limitations of current research tools and suggests alternative methods to enhance data quality for future research into platform-based social phenomena.
Expected end date/on job market: 7 October 2026
Hettie Burn
Supervisors: Professor Birgitta Rabe & Dr Laura Fumagalli
Thesis topic or title: Thesis by papers – policy and educational opportunity in England and Wales
Brief summary of thesis:
Chapter 1: ‘Stereotyping and Ethnicity Gaps in Teacher Assigned Grades’ – co-authored with Birgitta and Laura. The data used is the English NDP. This chapter uses the exogenous change in assessment type in 2020 to identify grade gap changes which may be attributable to teacher stereotyping. The main methodology used is decomposition.
Chapter 2: ‘The Long-Run Effects of Extended Play-Based Learning in Early Childhood’ – solo authored. The data used is the Welsh NPD linked to Welsh healthcare records (via SAIL). This chapter exploits a Welsh policy which extended play-based learning from ages 3-5 to ages 3-7, piloted in 44 schools between 2004-2009. I use a staggered diff-in-diff design to compare children who received this pilot provision with their peers who did not on outcomes at ages 11 and 16 including test scores, attendance, exclusions, and post-16 destinations.
Chapter 3: ‘Sibling spillover effects in school behaviours’ – co-authored with Birgitta and Cheti Nicoletti. The data used is the English NDP. This chapter uses an instrumental variable approach to estimate the extent to which negative school behaviours of a child are transmitted to his or her younger sibling. The negative behaviours considered are school exclusions (including by reason for exclusion) and unauthorised absences.
Expected end date/on job market: Autumn 2025
Jonas Kaufmann
Supervisors: Profesesor Renee Reichl Luthra, Dr Magda Brokowska
Thesis title: Local immigrant integration
Research Interests: Migration; Political behaviour and attitudes
Jingyi Li
Supervisors: Dr Silvia Avram, Dr Karon Gush
Thesis title: Three essays on gender and economic opportunity
Research Interests: Gender inequality; Intra-household bargaining power; Motherhood wage penalty; Fertility rate
Adisetu Joy Malih
Supervisors: Professor Meena Kumar, Dr Cara Booker, Professor Paul Clarke
Thesis title: Understanding the biological pathways that mediate the associations between social position and mental health: Allostatic load
Research Interests: Biological pathways; Social position; Mental Health
Benedict Hignell
Supervisors: Dr Nicolas Geeraert, Dr Alita Nandi, Professor Meena Kumari
Thesis title: Neighbourhood Sociocultural Context and Acculturation Across the Life Course: Consequences for Physiological Dysregulation and Psychological Health
Research Interests: Biosocial research; Acculturation; Cross-cultural research
I am currently investigating how objective and subjective neighbourhood cultural and economic resources influence the physiological and psychological health of migrants. During my PhD I will use UK and US longitudinal datasets as well as primary physiological and survey measures.
Linh Nguyen
Supervisors: Professor Peter Lynn, Professor Tarek Al Baghal, Professor Markus Frölich
Thesis title: Assessing and improving survey data quality in sub-Saharan Africa
Research Interests: Total survey data quality; Measurement error; Interviewer effects; Questionnaire translation; Questionnaire design
The impetus for Linh’s doctoral research lies in the distinct data collection context found in countries of the Global South, in particular sub-Saharan Africa. Her dissertation investigates how different aspects of survey design, mainly the interviewer, can influence the quality of surveys. During her Ph. D. studies, Linh received the unique opportunity to manage a panel study between 2016 and 2019 with more than 2,000 households in Zambia accompanied by a monthly telephone survey with ca. 250 respondents between 2018 and 2020. As one of the principal investigators for this study, she embedded survey experiments in the Zambian data collection to then analyse the experimental data for her Ph. D. dissertation. Her first paper studies the gender-of-interviewer effect in both factual and attitudinal questions. Her second paper estimates the magnitude of interviewer effects and links them to the use of a scripted translation versus oral, on-the-fly translation. To investigate interviewer-respondent interactions to further exlore interviewer effects, Linh secured a grant of ca. 10,000 USD from the Research Methods Initiative created by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University. All in all, Linh’s research aims to provide evidence-based guidelines for survey design and enhance understanding in survey methodology from a multilingual perspective.
Tommaso Sartori
Supervisors: Professor Emilia Del Bono, Dr Angus Holford
Thesis title: Three Empirical Essays in Economics of Education
Research Interests: Economics of education; Labor economics; Economics of migration