Postdoctoral Research Assistant in Physical Activity

A Postdoctoral Research Associate position in physical activity is available, full-time, for a period of 2 years within the Department of Sport and Exercise Sciences. The post provides an exciting opportunity to make a major contribution to join the £1million+ funded ‘Moving Social Work’ project as part of specific work packages called ‘Physical Activity Social Work Champions’ and ‘Multiple-agency Physical Activity Promotion’. Working in partnership with Disability Rights UK, Moving Social Work is a co-produced programme of research that aims to embed physical activity advocacy with and for disabled people into the education, training, and routine practice of social work. We are seeking creative, high-quality researchers with a background in sport an d exercise sciences, social work, health psychology, sociology, critical disability studies and/or other relevant disciplines/areas that can strike a balance between research, practice, and knowledge translation skills. The successful applicant will create, evaluate, and implement a social work physical activity advocates programme and multiagency/interprofessional approach to physical activity promotion. This work has three core aims: to create and test training for social workers to train social work students and professionals in advocating physical activity to and with disabled people; to produce and evaluate research that identifies how social care and health professionals can effectively work with each other to coordinate and promote physical activity; with the research manager, to build and support a network of trained social work physical activity champions to maintain quality training, multiagency/interprofessional working, and the uptake of training. The successful applican t will be expected to co-ordinate day to day research activity including study set-up, recruitment of champions, mixed methods data collection, qualitative and quantitative analysis, creation of resources and toolkits, write up of findings, drafting of progress reports, and knowledge translation activities. They will work closely with the Moving Social Work team to support co-production, enable transdisciplinary work to flourish, and ensure findings are integrated into the research programme and implemented in practice. The position will provide the opportunity to develop one’s career by, for example, enhancing leadership and management skills, learning about and implementing new research methods, leading and contributing to research outputs, and learning more about and delivering impactful research in collaboration with different partners and the research team.

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