Most research undertaken in the School of the Faculty is centred around a number of key themes, or research groupings listed here. Click on the headings to find out more.
Adult services
Organisational and legal frameworks, individual practice and citizenship rights of adult service users, and younger people in transition to adulthood.
Ageing and development
Population ageing and the condition of older people in developing countries.
Applied and Financial Economics
Finance and financial econometrics, macroeconomics and development, labour economics, economics of education and environmental economics.
Behavioural and experimental development economics
Risk preferences, workplace norms, motivation, intrahousehold allocation norms, trust among kinship and envy.
Business, accountability, regulation and development
The role of business in development addressing environmental, labour and human rights dimensions.
Business relationships
The conceptual development and empirical testing of the link between business relationships and business performance.
Children’s services and children’s wellbeing
Children at risk, pathways in health and social care, and family placement, fostering and adoption.
Climate change and development
An interdisciplinary group including natural scientists such as biologists and ecologists, geographers, and social scientists including ecological economists and political scientists. Research examines a range of climate change issues at international, regional, national and local levels.
Cognition and individual behaviour
The cognitive mechanisms that underpin individual behaviour, including the role played by emotion, especially in clinical conditions.
Contract, tort and restitution
Restitution, property law, especially trusts and personal property security law, contract.
Company and commercial law
international commercial law and tort law, company law; banking and securities law; comparative law; law, finance, and economics.
Competition law
Merger law and public enforcement, private enforcement of competition law and collusive behaviour.
Developmental and relationship psychology
Aspects of children's social and cognitive development, including antisocial behaviour, moral development, and children's understanding of scientific concepts.
Diversity and equality in careers and employment
Diversity and equality issues within work-related contexts.
Employment law
Trade union law.
Environmental and energy finance
Carbon quantitative finance, energy finance and financial regulation of environmental and energy markets.
Equality and fundamental rights
Peaceful protest and public order, European human rights protection, anti-racial discrimination law
Evidence, criminal justice and procedure
Restorative justice, victim participation in criminal justice procedures, the Law of Evidence, criminal appeals and judicial discretion in criminal procedure.
Experimental economics
Developing, testing and evaluating theories of preferences and choice, and in investigating the role of information and of expectations.
Family law
Child maintenance and children’s rights, child sexual abuse, pre-nuptual contracts.
Gender and development
The social and gendered dimensions of poverty reduction, inequality and social injustice.
Global environmental justice
Linkages between social justice and environmental change.
Health policy and practice
Ways that development settings and processes influence the health sector, whether at household and community level or in terms of health policy and practice.
Higher education
Sociology of higher education communities and where higher education and social change intersect.
HIV and development
The ways development settings and processes influence the course of the epidemic, and how HIV/AIDS in turn influences a range of development processes at micro-, sectoral- and macro-levels.
Industrial economics
Theoretical and applied industrial economics, competition policy and regulation.
Intellectual property and media law
Legal regulation of artistic expression
Land resources
Soil, water and biological resources that provide ecosystem services to land-users and society.
Literacy and development
Gender, religious literacies, language and education, minority literacies, numeracy practices, ICT and multi-modality, academic literacy, non-formal education and lifelong learning.
Mathematics education
Teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics; social, emotional and cognitive aspects of students' engagement in the secondary mathematics classroom; mathematics in the primary years; and secondary mathematics teachers' pedagogical and epistemological beliefs.
Parenting and families
Understanding how changes in family structure, gender roles and employment patterns have transformed the nature of parenting.
Physical education and sports pedagogy
Motivation, development of confidence perceptions, physical education pedagogy, engagement in sport with the homeless excluded.
Property and confidentiality
Land law and Scots law.
Psychosocial processes
The interplay between social life and personal experience.
Public and public international law
Public International Law and Human Rights, Constitutional Rights in Southern Africa, French Law.
Regulation
Competition policy, financial regulation and small firm insolvency.
Social identities, institutions and justice
Social and relational understandings of human wellbeing.
Social protection and mobile livelihoods
Social protection and the social and economic implications of migration.
Strategy implementation
Hoshin Kanri and related research in strategy and performance management, strategic knowledge and innovation management, strategic intelligence, the use of executive information systems, and the implications of strategic scorecards on corporate governance.
Strategic operations management
The flexibility and responsiveness of the retailing sector and their suppliers.
Teaching and learning
Research and evaluation which covers the broad spectrum of educational settings and curriculum subject areas.
