All posts by : Carolyn Freeman

So before we start chatting about this important topic I just want to find a bit more background about each of you and where you come from, a little bit about what you’re doing and then why and what would that pivot point was for you in terms of your cyber psychology journey and what got you passionate about it. So start with Fiona. Yeah so I mean yeah my journey to cyber psychology it’s probably yeah quite a long one in terms of kind of various interests I’ve had over the years.

So I mean in terms of where I currently am, so I’m currently actually working in eating disorders and eating disorder service at the moment in the NHS but prior to that I was doing my doctorate at the University of Wolverhampton and I think one of the kind of things that I was excited about about Wolverhampton was actually the cyber psychology because there’s not many universities in the UK that focus on cyber psychology so I thought that sounded pretty cool, pretty awesome. So I was quite interested in maybe aligning my research alongside with the cyber psychology stuff and in terms of so my research kind of overlapping with kind of intellectual developmental disability so that’s kind of been a longer standing interest of mine. So prior to the doctorate I did a master’s in health psychology where I looked at kind of the experience of informal carers so particularly carers who are parents of children and children including adult children with developmental and intellectual disabilities and looking at the impact in terms of their well-being and health and really enjoy kind of working in kind of the disabilities area and for me that comes from kind of a personal interest and so my brother’s got kind of severe developmental disability so that’s kind of where that interest came from and my father being a caregiver kind of just naturally that’s where I was drawn to.

So kind of coming to Wolverhampton I kind of saw an opportunity really to combine the two and looking at the cyber psychology side which kind of you know is both Lisa and Darren’s interest so Lisa more in the cyber psychology and Darren on the developmental but kind of bringing the two together was really exciting opportunity and looking at kind of digital inclusion and particularly for adults with developmental and specifically intellectual disabilities. Yeah and I mean just in general I suppose my interest in cyber psychology I think as someone who is a millennial growing up the internet you know has been a big part of my life and I think really seen the benefits and throughout life as well so I think yeah growing up it’s been such an influence and how I make sense of the world but also my communications so I think that’s also partly why I was really excited to kind of as a psychologist to kind of delve into to that area. Thanks for that Fiona.

What about you Lisa? Yeah so hi everyone I’m a senior lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton and I’m the current co-lead of our research centre in cyber psychology which we call CREW which is cyber psychology research at the University of Wolverhampton and I co-lead that with Dr Joanne. So for me I guess I fell into cyber a little bit just out of coincidence so when I was doing my undergraduate I you know Fiona touched on that part of observing the world and you know being a millennial used to use the internet as a teenager and it was all very new and exciting and so when I came to do my undergraduate project I wanted to do something about online communication and you know I spoke to my dissertation supervisor at the time and the word cyber psychology hadn’t really come around then you know it was kind of in pockets so it was more social psychology with this online angle to it and I ended up doing a project looking at how people with shyness communicated on the internet so I fell in love with that and then I was very lucky to get a job as a demonstrator which is sort of a teaching assistant at Wolverhampton and very lucky in the fact that there were lots of people at Wolverhampton who already had this interest in cyber again before it was kind of cyber so I got to hook up with my supervisors there so my director of studies Dr Chris Fulwether who sadly moved on from Wolverhampton now but we because we had such a large number of people interested in cyber to develop the the crew research group so it was originally WITS Wolverhampton Internet and Technology Society and then over time as we started to be called cyber psychology we adopted the cyber name. It sounds a little bit like Dead Society.

I’d love to be part of that one. Brilliant. Darren what about you? I had kind of like a career primarily looking at the well-being and working collaboratively with people with intellectual disabilities way before I ever really started to think about cyber psychology really at all and I remember kind of early 2000s at some conferences I went to people were starting to talk about the internet and using the internet for interventions and how people were involved in the internet and so for the past life since the 1990s I’ve worked with people with learning disabilities I have a lot of friends with learning disabilities and do a lot of inclusive research with them but in about 2010 I went to Wolverhampton University and I met Chris Fulwood and luckily I was very much his office mate so we chatted about our two areas of interest and WITS was in full flow then and now my area was different and we just started to talk about things and then we decided to do some research together so with Dr Caroline Wesson who’s also still at the University of Wolverhampton we did a literature review looking at the internet and how it was used by people with intellectual disabilities which is still one of my favourite papers I’ve ever written because it was fun just finding out about the area and then I kind of went along with the journey of cyber psychology as a kind of sub-discipline developing and becoming a subsection of the BPS so and from that I kind of realised that it was another area because one of the things I’ve always been interested in is the kind of disadvantage of people with intellectual disability and how they’re unfortunately sometimes viewed or not viewed at all within society as important or worthy of merit so I like to combat that with my research so I like my research to have kind of social meaning and given how much we now use the internet and like hours and hours a day that we kind of use technology and how reliant we are on it every day it’s really important that there aren’t subsections of the world that are systematically excluded from that so for me that was something that kind of fitted into my passion for why I do research so I’ve kind of carried on since 2010 publishing around digital inclusion of people with disabilities and digital risk and for me what’s quite important is the support that’s provided to enable people to use the internet and to make their own decisions around using the internet and technology in their everyday lives so that’s what my kind of interest is from and sustained till now and I’m currently doing some projects looking at older people with learning disabilities and how they use the internet and how they engage both in online and offline communities.

Oh that’s fascinating I’m going to have to chat to you again another time about that. So the reason I reached out to all of you and to come on this podcast is because you’ve just published a research paper on intellectual disability and victimization but before we get there Fiona you were kind of a lead author in this and this is part of your doctorate that you were doing so I just wanted to find out a little bit about just a little bit about your doctorate journey what got you started what you specifically focused on what it feels like to have finished. Yeah so I’ve completed actually in 2022 and it’s kind of the publishing process since then as I’m sure people understand it takes a while so it took us a while to get the research actually out there but in terms of yeah my journey I think so my doctorate was in counselling psychology and so it’s a bit different to a typical PhD in the sense that it’s not just 100% research you have kind of research as kind of one third of the doctorate and then you have another third which is the teaching and kind of the academic learning side and then another third which is kind of your practical placements where you’re kind of working in the NHS and putting it into practice really and I think in terms of particularly the research side yeah I mean it’s how I ended up in kind of the project that I did is actually down to really Darren and Lisa because they kind of they had an interesting idea which was around kind of looking at the specific kind of more interact you know the specific interactions that can occur in kind of behaviours like cyber bullying and looking at things like flaming and so kind of that and when I say flaming I mean kind of like those harassing kind of messages that can kind of go two-way between two people and I’m particularly then in the context of disability so they’ve kind of there was we received kind of a kind of a guide of proposed projects if anyone was interested and I saw kind of the two areas of interest and I thought great this sounds really really interesting and combining both the disability side but also kind of more the cyber the cyber psychology side and so kind of when I saw that project I emailed them both and we met and then we kind of got started from there really talking about ideas and kind of from there the project evolved and kind of that links with this paper that we published which was kind of fed into part of the kind of literature review that we did as part of the the doctorate and really understanding and the area and the specifics around cyber bullying and the specific types of cyber bullying that might be experienced for people with with intellectual disabilities.

Thank you so much for clarifying because I think a lot of people don’t understand the difference between a PhD and a doctorate and that was a really great way of showcasing that and PhD if I’m not mistaken is mostly research-based and the doctorate’s very different so thank you for clarifying that but you’ve finished I know it’s two years ago but what does it feel like to accomplish this massive achievement? Do you know, interesting question, do you know it feels like a lifetime ago now I think at the time it was a very challenging journey and I think particularly because halfway through my doctorate is when we had Covid and kind of the lockdown and kind of the impact of that so I think yeah I think it when I think of Covid as well it does feel like a lifetime ago I think yeah it was it was really difficult and I think but rewarding you know to have completed it so I’m really pleased and also really pleased that I’ve had the opportunity to kind of continue with Darren and Lisa to get that research out there as well because I think when you do a piece of research and you know a doctoral piece being such a big piece you know you do wonder what the impact will be so I think it’s really nice to actually share that and to get that get that information out there because it feels like it might have an impact which is really good but yeah it’s probably not fully sunken to answer your question. Fair enough, fair enough, probably when you’re 15 go I’m a doctor yeah I am of course I’m brilliant. So Darren and Lisa I know as supervisors and as academics you have a lot of things you juggle every day and quite a number of students you work with so it takes quite a lot of effort to bring on someone new as a to supervise so what is it about Fiona and what she’s wanting to study that you went this is it she has to be one of my supervisees? I don’t know if you remember this Darren but the whole project started on a post-it note didn’t it? Darren and I were just socialising after work the way that we do and Darren’s always been lovely at looking after me you know he’s my uncle Darren and he always checks in with my research and he was asking how research was going and we just got chatting about it and we kind of got carried away so we grabbed a post-it note and wrote down let’s do project about this I mean we’d put together the paragraph about it and I think it sat on the shelf for a couple of years before Fiona came along and picked it up but oh my gosh we couldn’t have asked for anyone better than Fiona because she just completely took that paragraph and ran away with it and she was so independent so passionate about the research you know I honestly genuinely couldn’t ask for a better student than Fiona and I’m sure Darren feels the answer to a post-it note.

Yeah it was and it came out of a kind of so there’s a lot of research that suggests that people with learning disabilities are bullied on a weekly basis and you were really interested in online bullying of children weren’t you Lisa and that’s kind of where we just had a conversation about how important it was to tackle that and to address it in a sensitive way and Fiona really handled herself so well in terms of kind of managing the shift to online and doing online interviews with people with learning disabilities which is not an easy feat and just negotiated all that really really adeptly yeah so she was and we’re not just saying this you were an absolute model PhD doctoral student it was it was it was a pleasure supervising you and the work that you produced was of such high quality that it got published in New Media and Society which is a really really prestigious journal so yes well done and yes very very lucky for me and Lisa. So let’s talk about the article and I have to read this because it’s quite a long title so it’s a scoping review investigating the perspectives perspectives of people with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities on experiences of cyberbullying victimization and its subtypes which was published in Sage Journal in May so just for clarification because we kind of use cyberbullying as a generic term what is cyberbullying and what kind of different types of cyberbullying are there? Yeah so I think this is something that came up Caroline and is part of the review is that actually there’s so many different definitions out there of cyberbullying and you know some definitions kind of traditional bullying has the definition of that’s just been taken and applied to online bullying and then in other cases there’s been specific definitions that have looked on cyberbullying and kind of looked at it as a distinct process and given it a different definition so I think in terms of the review paper we kind of went with kind of quite a broad understanding of cyberbullying just in terms of something that would kind of encapsulate all the different definitions which was that idea around it’s kind of a behavior online with the intent to cause harm and so kind of via you know internet communications and so I suppose it’s capturing that element that there’s an intentional harm behind it. And in the introduction there was three elements that you wrote about was online content, online contact and online conduct which I’d never come across before and I just wanted to know if one of you can kind of clarify what it is and how they differ from each other.

Well it’s the work of Livingston and Haddon I think it came from originally and they kind of classified in the EU kids online study that there were different types of online negative kind of interactions that happened and so there was online content where people get access to potentially harmful materials online for example sexual or violent or hateful content there’s the kind of contact which is the focus Fiona do you want to take that one because it’s the focus of the paper. Okay so in terms of online contact risk so it is kind of risks that are occurring a relationship in terms of kind of two or more individuals and it is kind of a harm that is perpetrated towards someone else and so and that person being the receiver of that harm if that makes sense. So it would be an online contact risk for example is cyber bullying where that person would be cyber bullied and so it’s really kind of taking the perspective more of the person who’s victimized if that makes sense within that risk.

Yeah and then you’ve got the harassed and stalked haven’t you and being groomed would also fit into that as well and then we have the hot online conduct risks which is where the person themselves is actually engaging a behaviour that might be harmful to themselves or to other people so they’re perpetrating the bullying or the harassment or the stalking or the grooming or they’re kind of flaming people online or kind of sending out hateful content themselves and sharing that or illegal content themselves and there’s also an additional one which is contract risks isn’t there which kind of came up after we’d started the research which was a new revised thing which always becomes difficult when you’ve used a model in research and then they change it halfway through where you’ve not quite finished and that’s more about kind of negotiating kind of contracts online and signing up for things and getting kind of embroiled in kind of circumstances or with organizations where you might not be able to disentangle yourself or there might be financial repercussions from that so yeah that’s the fourth type that we didn’t talk about quite so much in the paper. Okay that’s really great to define that because I think we so often talk about cyber bullying as one specific thing and it’s kind of like screen time it’s such a generic thing that we that a lot of people throw around but there’s you know we know there’s no such thing as screen time but actually cyber bullying is just such a generic term so thank you for clarifying those different types and how it affects people both from the receiving and the aggressor in the process.

Darren, in terms of the gaps that we often look for when we’re doing research, and this comes from that posted note that Lisa and Darren wrote up, but what was that gap that you saw that you felt needed research? Because that’s really how we do research, is we find gaps and then we go find, understand what the research question is, a hypothesis, and then we go research and find out what the answer is. So what was that gap that you saw that you went, actually I really need to find out more about this? Yeah, so the gap was that, you know, so going away, examined the literature, and particularly in the case of intellectual disabilities, and we really found that there wasn’t really any research that was looking at the specific types of cyberbullying. And so in terms of, you know, we spoke there around the broad types of risks, but actually within cyberbullying itself, there’s different types of cyberbullying.

So examples include harassment, and outing people, so kind of maybe someone’s got a secret or something, and someone kind of reveals that online, and I think cyberstalking comes in as actually a type of cyberbullying. Briefing, flaming? They’re the newer ones, yeah, so they are, which is kind of in the gaming context, where people kind of might kind of sabotage the game for people, the shaming, so kind of shaming people about something. Impersonation, so kind of if, you know, we’re going online pretending to be someone else.

Exclusion as well, so kind of, we might go online and, you know, as we would in a kind of face-to-face setting, kind of exclude people from things, and kind of that kind of, yeah, false communication about people, and kind of, you know, making up information that’s not true. So kind of in terms of the gap there, there was papers looking at kind of online risks really in general actually, and not many papers specifically on cyberbullying as a specific risk, but then no research on actually then the specific behaviours within that, and so really kind of going more into the in-depth and understanding actually, you know, is there differences between the different, you know, the different types of cyberbullying, and quite often the intellectual disability papers would kind of conflate, and so they’re both face-to-face bullying, but also cyberbullying, and actually we know there can be a lot of differences between the two types, for example, you know, with the cyberbullying, and it can be hard for people to escape, you know, whereas if it’s, you know, more traditional face-to-face bullying, you know, the person might have a safe space at home, whereas actually, you know, the research shows that cyberbullying actually invades the person’s entire world, because even at home, you know, they might be experiencing this sort of bullying. So we felt kind of the research wasn’t really looking specifically at the differences, and it was hard to tell, you know, was this cyberbullying, or was this more face-to-face, and also in terms of the research, it wasn’t really looking at intellectual disabilities specifically, but quite often would look at disabilities in general, or disabilities in chronic conditions, and what we knew from the research is actually intellectual disabilities, there can be differences in terms of their experience, and it’s not, you know, one homogeneous population, everyone’s different, and it would be really hard, you know, to understand specifically the experiences of those with intellectual disabilities within a real mixed sample, and vice versa for other types of disabilities as well, you know, being in that mixed sample.

So we just felt there wasn’t really any that looked at the specific cyberbullying behaviours for intellectual disabilities, and looked at it within the online context, and that was kind of the gap that we identified in the literature. Are there specific types of cyberbullying that those with intellectual disabilities experience more than those who don’t have intellectual disabilities, and what are they? Yeah, so I mean in terms of what we found from the review is that harassment did seem to come out as kind of the most common experience that people were reporting, so as part of the review we really delved deep into understanding, you know, when people were mentioning cyberbullying, what did that actually entail, so looking at the specific behaviours involved, and harassment was, as I say, the most common experience, and as part of the discussion in the paper we went back to the literature out there, and a similar theme actually came out in the literature of those without intellectual disabilities, that harassment does seem to be the most common. However, a lot of the other cyberbullying behaviours weren’t discussed, so it might be that those other areas have just not been investigated, so for example, we didn’t really find many papers looking at flaming, for example, or the newer forms such griefing and shaming, so again that’s a gap actually, you know, is it that these ones are less common, or is it we’ve not investigated that yet, and kind of more research into those other types of cyberbullying could be helpful.

Yeah, it could be, and that’s a great thing about cyberpsychology, there’s just so much that we still want to learn, and there’s so many gaps, so so much opportunity for people to do research. So in terms of the cyberbullying and harassment side of things, and the different types of cyberbullying, is there a difference in age with intellectual disability, so are those who are younger children or adults experience different types of cyberbullying, or is it harassment across the board? From the review, and as I say, as quite is typical in the intellectual disabilities research, you know, that there wasn’t as many papers as we would have liked, compared to those, you know, in the literature of those without intellectual disabilities. So in terms of the papers and what we found, I would say it was quite mixed in terms of the samples, so it was about 50% of the papers were looking at adult experiences, and the other 50% were looking at the experiences of kind of children, adolescents, sometimes mixed samples that might have had, you know, young people and adults.

And it seemed to be a similar theme across both, that harassment was kind of the most common cyberbullying behaviour that people experienced. But kind of linking in, I suppose, with what Darren was saying in terms of his current area of research, what we did find is that older adults were really neglected in terms of the sample, the samples used in the studies. So I think there was maybe one study that included older adults as part of a mixed sample, but really, I think their voice is missed in the literature at the moment around cyberbullying, and if that’s something that is impacting them.

On top of that, I mean, I think it’s that intersection of disability and age together that kind of almost creates a double disadvantage for those people with learning disabilities, where they’re not necessarily viewed as able to use the internet or technology, so it’s just assumed that because they’re digitally excluded, they tend not to have that risk in their lives because they’re not on the internet, but actually some people are, and I think that’s sometimes underestimated and not thought about. And the idea that we have almost like a huge iceberg of people with borderline intellectual disabilities who live in society, who don’t have a diagnosis and not in touch with services or supports, but actually will kind of experience some of the same negative interactions online and probably more likely to use technology. That’s a really good point, because it’s kind of slightly milder than mild.

They don’t feel that they’ve got it bad enough or that they kind of feel as though they don’t want to get diagnosed because it might set them at risk if they go to the employer and say, well, actually I’ve got intellectual disabilities. So you talk about harassment as one of the main things that they deal with. What is online harassment in terms of cyberbullying? What does it mean to be harassed? Do you have examples? In terms of, if I go first with just kind of the definition that we use, so we, I mean in terms of the kind of taxonomies that are used for cyberbullying behaviours, there’s actually, it’s something that’s not really been updated in I suppose the more current literature, so kind of the most, I’d say one of the most commonly used ones that I came across in literature was Willard 2007.

But it doesn’t include, so a lot of the behaviours we mentioned earlier are part of that, but it doesn’t include some of the newer ones. So I think there is probably room for a bit of updating. But in terms of how they would define it, they defined it as kind of that interacts, so kind of a negative communication directed towards someone.

So it might include things such as insults, mocking, making fun of someone, and sometimes receiving threats. And it kind of differs from flaming in terms of how they would define it in the taxonomy, and that flaming tends to be a two-way interaction. So there would be the kind of victim might be responding back, whereas in the harassment it tends to be that one-way communication towards the person who’s been victimised.

It kind of mirrors a lot of the offline bullying that people would like to experience, so being made fun of, or being pointed out as different, and being targeted and relentlessly attacked as well online. And I think that was one of the worries that, and one of the things I thought was interesting about Fiona’s work was that idea that offline people tend to be bullied in catapult places, like on buses, and young adolescents tend to be the main perpetrators of bullying offline. But actually online, we didn’t know.

We didn’t know who it was going to be and whether it was going to happen to the same degree, but there was that fear that you can’t get away from it in the same way, because it’s online and you often take your technology with you to different places. Do you think those with intellectual disabilities might have their technology with them more often than those without, or is it just that there is no distinct difference that you can learn about? The amount of use has increased since Covid, very, very much so, and the main kind of devices people have are tablets from some of the international literature. And a lot of the literature looking at what devices people have doesn’t disaggregate people with intellectual disabilities from people with disabilities more generally, so it’s very hard to say for sure.

So we still need more research on that, looking at what technologies they use, how they use them, and how often. And often they are systematically excluded from the big studies that look at technology uses, just by the nature of having an intellectual disability, so that’s kind of missing too. But in general, when people have the research that Chris and I had done before Fiona had done her kind of thesis, indicated that people often use technology in the same ways that everybody else does, but just slightly differently in terms of needing more support.

So in terms of the research that you’ve done, Fiona, just with your doctor as well as this study and all the other stuff around intellectual disabilities and internet use, what practical application does this have, and how can the general public or those in business or those in the NHS use this information? So if I start with the study first and then can talk about the doctorate and more general implications. I think one of the key recommendations really, or things that we felt based on the literature today, was that there is differences in terms of the types of cyberbullying, and as I say, the harassment came out as kind of the main one across the papers, but actually more research is needed, particularly into these newer behaviours that are coming up, as we mentioned, griefing, shaming, couldn’t find any literature or any studies that have kind of examined that, and on impact, is there something that people are experiencing, and kind of what’s going on for them in terms of the psychological impact of that. And I think in terms of why it’s important, I think by knowing the specific types of experiences and behaviours that people are experiencing, we can then, that can inform specific interventions to support people.

So as Darren said, it’s about supporting people to independently be able to use these technologies, and I think that was a key thing throughout, thinking about the wider doctorate, was that people wanted to be online, even being able to facilitate their involvement in my research. It was during COVID, so we had to use Zoom, but actually the reason a lot of participants were able to use Zoom was, it was actually due to COVID, because it was through advocacy groups. They’d been supported to get online because of COVID, because their main social contacts had been stopped.

So they had that individual support to get online, be able to access things like iPads. So I think it’s really important if we understand these sorts of risks and the specific risks, we can support people to manage them, and as part of the research, what came out of those who had experienced these risks, in terms of the rest of the research I did, was that it wasn’t always a negative, that people felt they built resilience quite often, in terms of they might have had some negative experiences online, but if they had the right supports, and that links to another finding that came out for us, was around supports, and having the right supports to navigate those risks if they do happen. So I think it’ll inform specific interventions.

I think you’ve summarised that really well, Fiona, but it adds to the digital literacy information we have generally. I mean, at the moment, we’ve got all these big arguments, debates about whether we should be banning technology for certain age groups, or limiting technology for certain age groups, and actually it builds on that stuff where if we’re too risk aversive, and we stop technology, how are we going to teach people about technology? You know, we live in a technological world, we can’t just say let’s not use it anymore, so I think that finding is so important, just generally around the digital literacy research, to say that actually we shouldn’t be too scared of online risks, you know, there’s a way to manage it, and understanding people’s experiences can help us figure out the best ways to support people to manage these things. Darren, I don’t know if you’ve got anything to add? I suppose just kind of extending that a little bit in a kind of broader global sense, we’ve got a kind of, as a country, we’ve ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of Disabled People, so in doing that, we’ve said that people have the right to be part of the community, and a lot of our communities are now online, a lot of our interactions and the things that we do every day, and the ways that we talk to each other and spend time together are facilitated and mediated by technology, and what we don’t want is a world where there is systematic, there’s a systematic exclusion of particular groups of people, just because they’re viewed as more vulnerable, when actually the small amount of literature that does exist suggests that with the right support, and with the right guidance, and with the right kind of freedoms as well, people can exercise their right to potentially make bad decisions as well as good decisions online, but navigate and negotiate them in a way that kind of helps them, as Fiona said, build their resilience, and as Lisa said, we can’t be risk averse, we can’t be exclusionary of certain groups of people, because it’s inequitable and unfair ultimately, so I think, yeah, that’s the kind of the headline for me.

That’s a good point, Darren, because we are living in a democracy, and that’s what a democracy is all about, rather than denying certain people certain rights, because they have certain characteristics, whether it’s intellectual, physical, or mental, whatever that looks like, it’s, and we are democracies by education, and awareness, and supporting, and giving people tools, where there are risks, and helping them understand what those risks are. So Fiona, just zooming out slightly, just in terms of now, or last two years at least, since you finished your doctorate, and possibly before, you’ve been working in the NHS, are you going to be doing any more research in this area, or are you just finished focusing on your practical work in the NHS? Luckily, we still have actually some findings that we’ve not published yet, so we are working on a paper on one of the themes that we’ve discussed today, which is support, and understanding kind of, you know, what support is accessed, when we might experience an online risk, and kind of, what does that look like, and what is kind of the specific sorts of, you know, things that are involved in that support, but also thinking about, you know, from the perspective of people with intellectual disabilities, what kind of support would they like, and really, I suppose, hearing their voices, because quite often, you know, in the intellectual disability research, a lot of research doesn’t actually look at the voices of people with intellectual disabilities themselves, sometimes it’s more from carers, or kind of third party, you know, voices that are given, so we felt it was really important to understand actually, what is it that the individuals themselves think, and would be helpful, so that’s kind of one area I’m working on, and a completely different tangent, and it’s part of my work in the NHS, and eating disorders, and so I am doing a bit of research at the moment, and it’s not similar along the lines in terms of inclusion, but looking at particularly individuals who struggle with kind of binge eating disorder, and kind of weight shame and stigma, so I’m really looking at kind of inequalities actually within eating disorders, and because there is actually a big barrier for people with binge eating disorder to get picked up in terms of, you know, to be identified, but also for them to access services, because of the stigma in society around weight, and because quite often, individual struggling with binge eating disorder might be of a higher BMI, and people kind of miss kind of the underlying psychological distress, and so in particular, I’m looking at the evidence around, and kind of with one of the assistant psychologists, around the research around the importance of compassion focused interventions, because a lot of the evidence base is based on kind of more traditional cognitive behavioural therapy, but more third wave interventions bring in compassion, and that’s been shown to help with shame and stigma, and so it’s something that I’m hoping, and I know a lot of services in the UK are using compassion focused interventions, but it’s not in the nice guidance yet for eating disorders, so I’m quite keen to kind of improve the accessibility of treatment, but also treatment outcomes for people with binge eating disorder. So going on to Darren, you’ve been part of the Wolverhampton Intellectual Disability Network, and your passion is around digital inclusion for people with intellectual disabilities, so why is this such an important focus area for you? I suppose this kind of comes from when I was younger, and I did my psychology, and I did a placement working with people with learning disabilities, and that led to me doing a module on that, and then PhD, looking at older people, and their quality of life, and their community, and social inclusion, and I think as part of that, I realised how people are, like very few, like a very tiny percent of people with learning disabilities have paid employment, very few people have relationships where they get married, and they’re homeowners, and lots of the things that most people who are typically developing without an intellectual disability have, people without intellectual disabilities, people with intellectual disabilities are excluded from, or prevented from having, so that’s something that I’ve always been really passionate about, so moving to the digital world, that kind of became the thing that I was most interested in really, because I spend a lot of time online, although I’ve changed from one of those people who used technology a lot, and was very good at it, to someone who really just struggled with it, just like everybody else does as they get older, so that’s a change that’s happened over time, so I’m kind of interested in how people with learning disabilities navigate that, and currently I’ve got some projects that we’re doing looking at digital health inclusion of people with disabilities, and also the one I mentioned before, Include Age, that’s looking at older people, so I think it’s really important because for a kind of, I always think a measure of a society is kind of how it treats those people who are often disadvantaged, and I think a good measure of our society is how well included those people who we might classify as the most vulnerable or the most disadvantaged are treated, and I think people with intellectual disabilities sadly are still one of those groups, so that’s why I think it’s really important, and I also think it’s not going to change, so many of our public services are going online, with scant kind of thought about how those people without disabilities, sorry, those people with disabilities and older people are going to navigate that change and the supports that are available, so I think that that’s an important thing that really needs to be, it’s a key societal pressure that’s going to carry on as we move forward.

How that operates in kind of global majority countries, we have no notion of either, so 80% of all children with disabilities live in global majority countries, but we have very, very little information about the supports they receive, the supports their families receive, or how they use technology and how technology can help them navigate a world where there isn’t as much support for them, so there’s loads of really fascinating questions still out there, so that’s why it’s really important to still look into it, and lots of social change that we need to enact so we’ve got a better world. And you’re currently based at John Moores University in Liverpool? Yes, I sadly left Wolverhampton University 18 months ago, and I do miss all my colleagues though, it was lovely, but I had to come back to the north to be nearer to family, and I’m enjoying being at John Moores and running my projects there at the moment, it’s really fun. Brilliant, so what kind of undergrad and postgrad options do you offer in cyberpsychology, because there’s quite a few parents and young potential students who are wanting to do cyberpsychology, and as Fiona said, there’s so few universities in the UK that offer anything in undergrad and postgrad, so what do you offer at John Moores University? At John Moores we don’t have a cyberpsychology module at the moment, but hopefully, fingers crossed, in the future we will be developing a level six module for there, there are talk about potential new postgraduate programmes, but I’m not sure whether that will be one of them, it’s probably better to ask Lisa this, because I think Lisa has much more.

But you still are available as a supervisor on specific areas, especially if it’s intellectual disabilities. Yeah, so I’ve got a lot of projects I’d really love to do, and if people would love to do them with me, I’d be very happy to supervise people in digital inclusion and disability research. There are a lot of poster notes with just a lot of questions waiting to be answered.

So Lisa, you’re at Wolverhampton University and you do quite a bit of research around social media use, and especially uses and gratifications in social media, but you also do research on the role of technology with infant feeding decisions, so why is understanding why people use social media such an important area of research? I think, so I’ll hold my hand up and say I’m one of these people that actually love social media. I get so engaged, it’s ridiculous how much time I waste on social media. And so part of this question is based on my own curiosities of what it is that draws people in.

I think, you know, as a psychologist, there is nothing better than observing human behaviour online, because you see the whole spectrum of possibilities from people and how they interact. And I’m also one of these people that has a bit of a tendency to get sucked into all the new latest trends in cyber. So if I go to a cyber psychology conference, I’m sitting there and thinking, oh, I want to try that now, and I want to try that now.

So I think social media is one of those that it’s so broad that you can dip in and out of different kind of subsections of cyber. But in terms of the infant feeding decisions, you know, again, this is something that’s really interesting to me is about kind of smaller communities online and how different communities interact. And the breastfeeding community online is quite a small niche community in that, you know, within the UK, we have very poor breastfeeding rates.

And so I was always interested in how that community forms support online and how that perhaps differs from the offline support that we have. So I think it’s just about understanding what it is that social media can offer us. And I’m not really one for the negatives of social media.

Yes, you know, I appreciate there are negative social media. But there’s a reason why so many people love it so much is the reason why it draws us in. And that’s the great thing about use and gratifications.

It’s such a positive theory, that actually, we know what we’re doing when we’re on social media, we’re getting something out of it, and we choose to use it as opposed to being like a slave to technology. So it’s just a way of understanding what it is, you know, what it satisfies in us in terms of our human needs. So yeah, just all that kind of introspection of my own usage, I guess.

I only came across the term use and gratification when I was doing my masters. And I think it’s great to be able to, as a social media user, think about why I actually use it. What am I spending all this time on social media for, because we get told off so often about how long we spend on social media, without understanding why I’m doing it.

And I often use the example of during COVID, because my family’s all over the world, it was really great way of me keeping in contact with them. So that was a huge gratification and a great use of social media for me. And I didn’t want someone to tell me that I spend too long on it, because actually, this was my little safe space and was like, actually, everyone’s okay, and I feel better about life space.

And so it’s just such a great concept to talk about, and let people engage with that in a way of actually, I do use it for a really good reason, kind of like what you just said, Lisa, in terms of, I use it, and I love it. And this is why I use it. And I’m okay with that.

Well, I mean, I feel like the world would be better if we all had more dog and cat videos, like if we all had more memes and gifs or however you pronounce that word. So yeah, I think the internet just offers a lot for us. Lots more animal videos, I’m up for that.

So you are at Wolverhampton University, and that you offer what’s kind of seems to be one of the main hubs of cyber psychology in England, and where it can start in England. So what is it that you offer from an undergrad and postgraduate perspective and for someone wanting to study cyber psychology? Yeah, so at our undergraduate level, we have an undergraduate in psychology. And as part of that, the level six includes an optional module of cyber psychology.

And that’s very much a whirlwind tour of what cyber can be. So there’s a lesson on social media, on gaming, on online disinhibition and trolling behaviours, on cybercrime, you know, really mixed bag of everything that cyber can encompass. Unfortunately, in terms of our masters in cyber psychology, we have temporarily shut that down.

I’m not sure logistically if that’s coming back anytime soon. However, we do have PhD options. So anyone interested in a PhD, you can find out more about cyber psychology research on our Wolverhampton University website and find out all about our interests within that.

And we have the the counselling psychology doctorate that Fiona did. And, you know, I think the fantastic thing about cyber is you can dip it across all these different things. So there are so many questions you can ask from a counselling and cyber perspective.

And so, you know, Fiona has shown how to do that with her work, but I’ve done things like looking at negative content online and how that affects wellbeing and things like that. So there are lots of questions you can ask if you’re interested in doing the counselling psychology doctorate, but dipping your toe into cyber as well.