The kind of question I want to spend a doctorate on, not one I would insist on. Two empirical theses so far, each designed, run and written end to end. The question itself is better built with a supervisor, against their methods and their data, than brought in already decided.
The Through-line
Two completed pieces of empirical work, and a third at the stage both of those started from.
Psychological need satisfaction and frustration, the Dark Tetrad, and gender-role beliefs in relation to violent-extremist attitudes among university students. A study of how adverse psychological conditions become the capacity to do harm.
Moral injury and depressive symptoms among frontline healthcare workers in Pakistan, examining the roles of clinical empathy and perceived stress. Suffering that follows not from fear, but from acts that violate one’s moral world.
One study never opens just one question. Reading for a thesis pulls you into the paper that first validated the measure, then the studies that borrowed it, then the finding that fits none of them. Following those is the part I like most, and two theses have come out of doing it.
Which is why the work sits in more than one literature. The healthcare-worker study is occupational health as much as trauma; the extremism study is motivation and personality as much as social psychology.
What carries forward is not the subject matter but the way the work is done: a mechanism tested rather than a pattern described.
Research to Date
A quantitative study of a population with high exposure to morally injurious events and almost no representation in the moral-injury literature, examining how moral injury relates to depression, and what clinical empathy and perceived stress do to that relationship.
Approved and forthcoming as a publication. The earliest thread of my interest in how adverse psychological conditions become harm.
Two theses. One paper in press. That is the whole record, and I’d rather show you a small, real one than an inflated one.
Early by definition. What it carries is the method, the independence, and the appetite for the next one. A publication count at this stage would measure how long I had been at it, not what the work is.
Method & Analysis
Two theses carried end to end: design, measures, data collection, analysis, write-up. Grouped by the question each one settles, because that is what picks the model.
SPSS
SPSS
SPSS
PROCESS macro
My MS thesis is a mediation and moderation design: moral injury predicting depressive symptoms, with clinical empathy and perceived stress tested for the part they play in that relationship.
Run in SPSS and the PROCESS macro, from raw data through to reported effects.
Why Pakistan Matters
The literature in clinical and health psychology is built overwhelmingly on Western, English-speaking samples. The populations I can reach are the ones the field keeps writing “future research should examine” about.
Clinical and research access in both languages, including the ability to work with translated and culturally adapted measures, and to know when they don’t fit.
A practising clinician’s reach into hospital and community settings in Rawalpindi and Islamabad, including the frontline healthcare workers of my thesis work.
For a lab, this isn’t a diversity footnote. It’s the ability to test whether the field’s core findings hold outside the samples they were built on.
Beyond the Transcript
Everything a transcript records is accurate and complete. It still has no field for the rest of it.
What the transcript says
What it can’t show
I practise as a clinical psychologist while I research. The questions come from the therapy room, and the findings walk back into it.
Bilingual, clinician-level reach into populations the literature rarely samples. Available to a project that wants it, rather than something the rest of my work leans on.
Design, measures, data collection and analysis carried end to end, twice. Not a research assistant’s slice of somebody else’s study.
A psychology lecturer with published science-communication essays. Comfortable explaining the work to a classroom, a journal, or the public.
Contact
A collaboration, a doctoral position, or an honest read on fit. Any of the three. One email is enough to start.
Prospective therapy client instead? My practice lives here →