Mature women and the EdD: changing identity and family relationships

This project investigated the impact of postgraduate study on mature women students and their families. It built on my previous EdD thesis research with Foundation Degree (FD) students regarding HE study for mature women, identity change and family relationships. My previous findings showed women's identity and confidence changed, this then affected family relationships through a change in roles, changes to childcare approaches, changes in attitude and the perspective of woman students which often rubbed off onto husbands (Webber, 2015). Husbands and children were good producers of family capital and provided capital in the forms of social, economic, cultural and emotional capital. There were three reasons why husbands provided family capital (financial gain, strength of the relationship between husband and wife, and husband previously having experience of HE). This project builds on this research and explores whether these findings are similar for women students on Professional Doctorate (PD) programmes.PedRI

Quantitative environmental equity analysis of perceived accessibility to urban parks in Osaka Prefecture, Japan

Environmental equity (EE) has become internationally recognized as an important research field, but in Japan limited quantitative research is available. In this paper we report the results of a quantitative study that tested whether objective and perceived accessibility to parks is disproportionately distributed between the affluent and the poor in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Perceived accessibility is considered to be a more accurate accessibility measure which reflects the socio-cultural background of people. We find inequities in both accessibility measures, and using multiple logistic regression analysis, we clarified that perceived accessibility is shaped by a range of factors (i.e., income level, objective accessibility to parks, and people’s perceptions of traffic accidents, crime, and the level of scenic beauty in the neighboring area). Our results provide some insight into remediation measures for the environmental inequity of perceived accessibility. Simply establishing a new urban park may not sufficiently increase the perceived accessibility of socioeconomically deprived groups. Identifying the underlying mechanisms that could explain how poverty-related factors undermine the perceived park accessibility or improving the quality of neighboring area are also important to ensure the effectiveness of remediation measures

To become an asker of questions. A ‘functional-narrative\' model to assist students in preparing postgraduate research proposals

No Abstract. South African Journal of Higher Education Vol. 21 (8) 2007: pp. 1194-120

Functional Integrated Storage Housing

The Corley lab director asked us to design and build a shelf for the robotics lab to help store parts and help organize the lab. The group decided on an electronic vertical rotating shelf design consisting of groups of bins on shelves. The unit is able to store and sort through thousands of pounds of parts and keep track of them using an computerized inventory system to streamline the operator’s workflow and improve efficiency