By Dr Heather Morgan is a Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, and was part of the 2015 cohort of Cruciblists.
Heather’s research interests lie in the broad conceptual areas of surveillance/monitoring, compliance/deviance and gender, as well as their complex theoretical intersections and pragmatic interactions with technologies, broadly conceived. She has researched and published in the fields of health services and applied health research, surveillance, criminology/policing and gender studies to date.
Heather is primarily a critical theorist and qualitative researcher. She also uses grounded theory/theory on the ground approaches, preferring participatory methods of research-researcher-researched engagement and data collection. She favours these approaches owing to their value for enabling more relevant, deeper and informed critical understanding of the conceptual and practical dynamics, and pragmatics, of people’s perceptions and experiences of their everyday lives, in addition to the potential for more collaborative public involvement in and engagement with research processes.
Heather is currently exploring people’s uses of health self-monitoring technologies (apps, wearables, etc.) and has recently won The Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund project funding for: ‘Using self-administered health monitoring technologies to support self-management of long-term conditions: a qualitative evidence synthesis’. You can follow the project on Twitter here. She is also writing papers for two previous projects: Concept:SSM involves a review of the conceptual underpinnings of health and social care support for people living with long-term conditions, including use of personal health monitoring technologies to support self-management; the other is entitled ‘Seeing your smoke: stopping for your baby’ and explores the use of indoor air quality monitors within homes to increase engagement with and efficacy of routine smoking interventions in pregnancy.
Previously, Heather worked on the BIBS project and led authorship of the final NIHR-HTA report (publication April 2015). This project explored pregnant women’s smoking behaviour, infant feeding choices and the use of incentives. It considered the concepts and practices of surveillance/monitoring concerned with gendered ‘deviance’ (less healthy choices), and behaviour change in a health context. This compares with Heather’s PhD research, which involved a police CCTV control room ethnography and focused on surveillance, deviance and gender in respect of CCTV operator behaviour around (potential) crime/social transgressions.
Current Research
- Morgan, Using self-administered health monitoring technologies to support self-management of long-term conditions: a qualitative evidence synthesis, The Wellcome Trust Institutional Strategic Support Fund (ISSF@Aberdeen)
- Entwistle and colleagues, Concept: SSM, Health Foundation
- Turner and colleagues, Seeing your smoke – stopping for your baby, Scottish Government
For more information on Heather, see her webpage at the University of Aberdeen.