About
Dr Rachel Harrad is a lecturer in Psychology; she leads the First year module ‘Professional Development and Applications of Statistics and Research Methods’, previously lead the Year 3 elective module ‘Cyberpsychology’ and teaches on the ‘Postgraduate Academic Skills and Development’ module. Rachel supervises student research projects at Final Year Undergraduate and MSc level.
Research interests are broad but fall into the following main themes:
Rachel has an interest in work which improves the student experience and aims to incorporate a Cyberpsychological stance in her work. This includes the Online Student Engagement scale, which with colleagues has been used to assess the impact of factors including personality on students’ engagement with an online learning environment and with international colleagues she has worked to validate the scale into the Italian language to permit its use beyond English speaking countries.
Rachel is Section Editor for the Sex and Relationships Section of the upcoming Palgrave International Encyclopedia of Cyberpsychology.
Rachel has research interests in student academic integrity and academic misconduct with particular emphasis on understanding demographic and wider factors that may influence encountering academic misconduct processes, in terms of protective and risk factors, with a backdrop of a critique of the terms academic misconduct and academic integrity, specifically the potential for unintended mistakes being conflated with a lack of integrity or intentional misconduct.
Rachel also maintains an interest in nursing and healthcare related issues and has carried out work into peri-natal mental health during COVID-19. Rachel has been involved in work examining the value of an ecotherapy planting intervention via an online community in terms of wellbeing and quality of life and is interested in alternative prescribing and how this can improve patient outcomes.