Thesis and Research Data Repository Leeds Beckett University
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An Evaluation of the Adoption of Timber Frame Construction within the Residential Housing Sector in the United Kingdom
No full textThe Architectural, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) sector has been called to innovate in delivering its products towards driving the sustainable construction agenda (social, economic, and environmental). Also, such innovation will be beneficial in meeting the demand for residential buildings in the United Kingdom (UK) and globally. Therefore, this study aims at evaluating the level of adoption of timber frame construction within the residential sector in the UK. The study adopted a qualitative research approach using a semi-structured interview. Interviews were carried out with eight (8) senior staff members working for a residential property development company. The interview explores the benefits and barriers to adopting timber frame construction in residential buildings. Interview findings revealed that adopting timber frame construction is a driver in promoting sustainability's social, economic, and environmental targets. Some benefits are speed in construction, enabling a safe working environment, apprenticeship opportunities, and less environmental pollution. However, lack of knowledge, consumer/client perception, and site logistics are barriers and challenges against adopting timber frame construction. Therefore, the study suggests the need for creating awareness and educating construction clients on the advantages and benefits of adopting timber frame construction in residential buildings.</p
Assessment of Project Monitoring and Control on Public Buildings Projects: A study of Municipal Building Projects in Nigeria
No full textOver the past decades, the construction project control system has struggled with some global challenge that hinders infrastructural projects' time delivery and budget. The threat is the most common, expensive, and risky problem associated with publicprivate construction projects. Within this context, this study aimed to assess the effectiveness of project monitoring and control strategies on municipal buildings project in Nigeria. A random sampling method was used to obtain data from 119 respondents. Descriptive and inferential statistics, including mean and standard deviation, multiple regression and Pearson correlation, were used to analyse the data with SPSS software. The study found that effective project monitoring and control strategies were associated with timely completion of building projects, satisfaction with project performance, and cost reduction. The factor influencing project monitoring and control include conflicts of construction information between project stakeholders, lack of resources allocation to the monitoring and control unit, and corruption between government agencies and project contractors. The study also found a moderate relationship between the variables under consideration with a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.45, which was significant at a 95% confidence level. The results suggest that project monitoring and control strategies play a crucial role in determining the success of public building projects. This study highlights the importance of effective monitoring and control strategies and provides insight into the factor that influence project success in the construction industry in Nigeria.</p
Classed Femininities of Black Women: Subjectivities and Agency in Body Reshaping and Body Management Practices
No full textThis thesis presents research investigating how Black women’s intersecting racialised, gendered, and classed identities shape their body management and body reshaping practices through a critical and feminist relational discourse analytical lens. This represents a move away from positivist and essentialist epistemologies which have been used to subordinate and pathologise Black women’s bodies and body management practices. There is vast scholarship on the subordination and marginalisation of Black women by hegemonic cultural ideals typifying Whiteness, White facial features, and thinness as the ideal standard of beauty. This marginalisation has been posited as disadvantageous and impacting upon Black women’s wellbeing (see Bryant, 2013). There is also a call for research to explore the role of social and cultural identities on body reshaping practices in British ethnic minority women (Swami & Hendrikse, 2013) and in Black women (Tallyrand et al., 2017). It is therefore imperative to understand the discursive negotiations of classed femininities of Black women (i.e., class, gender, and race) in the context of their body reshaping and management practices as there is under-representation of Black women in research on body management practices (Goode et al., 2017). As such, this study aims to examine how Black women’s multiple identities influence their body reshaping and body management practices using a two-study analysis: a media-text study and an interview-based study.
For the first study, a Critical discourse analysis (Mullet, 2018) was used to analyse video introductions and talk from the comment sections of five YouTube videos. Three discourses originated from this analysis. First, the curvy body was constructed as natural for African/African-heritage women. Second, the curvy body was constructed as a form of Black female empowerment – where empowerment was constructed through a neoliberal rhetoric of autonomy, choice, and empowerment. As such, participants drew on racialised body discourse and post-feminist/neoliberal discourses. The third discourse pertained to female empowerment and body acceptance. This was found to be contradictory to the second discourse, as female empowerment was related to and performed within a feminist-politics context where body acceptance and self-love were key to doing gender.
The second study of this research adopted a Feminist relational discourse analysis (Thompson et al., 2018) to analyse the discourse and voices in the interviews with Black women and their self-written diaries. Two discourses originated from the first phase of the analysis: curvy body as the ideal body, and reshaping as a (un)healthy pursuit. The I-poems in the second phase demonstrated how Black women position themselves within these broad discursive patterns and dominant discourses through several voices, such as guilt, constructing the self as deficient, normalising pain, constructing feelings of injustice and resistance to a class-based deficient self, and, as such, presenting body work as not providing the desired freedom sought but an arterial for continuous domination. In conclusion, this thesis has focused on Black women's voice and posited that the curvy body, and indeed any body ideal, should be seen as potentially both an oppressive ideology and a form of resistance for Black women. Therefore, targeting healthy body reshaping and body management practices in minority communities is paramount, requiring education and health initiatives that consider and properly understand the multiple and often intersecting identities of Black women.</p
Intelligent Kindness in UK student nurse practice placements? A Mixed Methods study
No full textThe study aim was to examine the impacts of the theory and practice gap in UK pre-registration nursing student`s practice education, fifty percent of their undergraduate programme. Nursing student`s real- world clinical learning environments are crucial for progression to the professional register because this is where they learn to become nurses. This element of UK nursing student`s educational programmes is currently challenging, both in resources and organisational culture.This study used the Clinical Learning Environment Scale (CLES) (Saarikoski & Leino-Kilpi 2002) and lens of intelligent kindness (Ballatt & Campling 2011) to understand nursing student`s experiences in practice settings. This is a new conceptual application of this theory, examining this area of concern, and provides one element of this study`s originality. A convergent mixed methods research design with a longitudinal approach, and three-point data collection, was used. The CLES framework (Saarikoski & Leino-Kilpi 2002) provided the data collection instrument for the quantitative phase and informed the focus group questions in the subsequent qualitative phase. The integrated findings resulted in the development of an original new model, the Clinical Learning Environment Relationship Model (CLERM), which represents the main element of this study`s contribution to the knowledge for this area of concern. This study`s findings confirms the hypothesis, in the literature, that the supervisory relationship, at the micro level of influence, is pivotal for student nurse`s practice education. The CLERM, with intelligent kindness (Ballatt & Campling 2011) as the central conceptual framework, and study lens, moves the discourse to the wider organisational spheres of influence. Including the broader areas of responsibility and accountability impacting nursing student`s real-world clinical learning environments. Recognition of the influences across the micro, meso and macro levels of impact informed the recommendations for application to practice, healthcare policy makers and future research.</p
Developing knowledge translation mechanisms to advance Public Mental Health as a complex public health priority
No full textPublic Mental Health remains an under-developed area of policy and research, attracting limited attention and resource. One explanation of this is the complexity of mental health as a public health priority; mental health is influenced by multiple socioeconomic and environmental factors interacting with psychological and biological processes; and many sectors and organisations have a role to play in improving the population’s mental health. This synthesis explores a body of work that has aimed to overcome this complexity barrier through conceptual and empirical research to build knowledge and capacity within the public health system. The knowledge translation work took place within a national public health agency in England and, as such, contributes knowledge on mechanisms for developing and implementing evidence within a complex policy environment. This policy-oriented research shaped a new national public mental health programme, contributed knowledge on mental health complexity and system approaches and produced original knowledge translation tools to advance mental health as a public health priority. In developing knowledge translation mechanisms to advance Public Mental Health as a complex public health priority I firstly explore three underpinning themes: public mental health theory and policy, the need for a complex system approach to public mental health, and the importance of knowledge translation to public mental health. I describe why the research was undertaken, what knowledge gaps it filled and provide critical reflection and discussion on concepts, limitations, and the overall contribution of the body of work to knowledge and what gaps remain.</p
I Act Therefore I Become: Dramatherapeutically Informed Drama Teaching
No full textThis thesis considers the influence of the classroom environment and wider socio-political discourses on the embodied psychosocial-relational processes involved when students create identity-expressions in a dramatherapeutically informed mainstream curriculum-delivery drama classroom. Therefore, this thesis considers: how the classroom environment and the contents and themes of student drama relate to the wider performative and neoliberal social-political-economic context; the ways in which incompatible classroom and policy-demands influence teaching/classroom choices; and the impact those choices have on student identity-forming work.
This Practitioner Enquiry followed the curriculum drama of one mainstream class of year-9 students for an academic year. The parameters of the research design were constrained by teaching pedagogy and classroom context. Analysis was via abductive synthesis of 4-part story structure, grounded theory, and discourse analysis.
Following a scrutiny of the embodied psychosocial relational processes that underpin the negotiation of identity performance, the findings show that the drama change process is not located in the dramatherapy core processes per se but in the embodied psychosocial relational processes for which the dramatherapy core processes function as a vector, and that those negotiations take place in dialogy between the dramatherapy core processes, not in individual core processes in isolation. The 4-part structure makes the relational process visible and includes: encoding as multiple protagonists; developing the fiction; identity work – values exploration and negotiation; and cyclical re-roling and reflection. Students, whose self-narratives took shadow, consolidatory, exploratory/emancipatory, and aspirational trajectories, developed diversified role repertoires. The findings show that in group work, aesthetic distance, which mediates relationships between individual, group, and material should be conceptualised as a network not a continuum. Teacher use-of-self choices influenced student identity-work through structural, interpretational, technical, and relational means, including being both audience and witness to students.
This thesis should be of interest to teachers of all disciplines including drama teachers, dramatherapists, education policy-makers, teacher-trainers, and administrators
A BIM-based Life Cycle Assessment of Façade Cladding Materials: A Typical Office Building in Ankara
No full textBuilding Information Modelling (BIM) based digital tools streamline the environmental performance assessments of buildings during the early design phase. This study investigates the potential of BIM-LCA integration through the whole life cycle assessment of a hypothetical office building in Ankara. Three alternative building models with different façade cladding materials are modeled in Revit Architecture. The operational energy use of the alternative models is estimated with Autodesk Insight and Green Building Studio (GBS). Nevertheless, the thermal performance of building components is calculated separately considering their thermal transmittance (U-value) since there is no sensitivity in these simulation tools regarding the thermal performance of different façade systems. After determining the operational energy use of the alternative models, their global warming potential (GWP) is measured with OneClick LCA. According to the results, the alternative model with the wooden façade cladding yields the minimum greenhouse gas emissions despite being transported from abroad, and the ceramic and aluminum cladding follows it. After identifying the optimum alternative in terms of GWP, shading elements are installed on the façade. Although increased material use due to the shading elements leads to higher GWP, the overall performance of the building dramatically improves since less energy is required for heating and cooling. The results showed that using energy simulation tools can significantly improve energy performance and reduce the GWP of buildings in the early-stage design</p
Reinventing Stahlstadt – Research Methods to Reimagine Steel Towns, sustainability and collective geographies
No full textIn Jules Verne’s imaginary, Stahlstadt, the city created by Prof. Schultze in “The Begum’s Fortune” (1879) is the evil city “par excellence”: unhealthy, unfair, and based on a warfare economy; its symbol: steel. The idea of the industrial town being dangerous, treacherous, and ruthless, as opposed to the idealistic world of the hygienic city, is one of the cliches of the late XIX century, especially if we see the importance of coal and steel for the European history between 1914 and 1960s. The steel industry has been vital to industrial development and economic growth, but its environmental and health impacts have been significant. In recent years, there has been a growing concern about the sustainability of steel production, particularly in regions where environmental regulations are lax. This study investigates the relationship between steelworks and geography, with a focus on the city of Taranto in southern Italy. Taranto is home to one of the largest steel mills in Europe, and its proximity to the city has been a source of environmental and health concerns for local residents. The research utilizes data from a recently financed Horizon project that analyses the steel industry’s impact on the environment and public health, with particular reference to non-communicable diseases. The study conducted at UoS focuses on the human geography component and the policy and regulatory framework that has contributed to the sustainability challenges facing the steel industry in Taranto. It highlights the need for stricter environmental regulations and a shift towards more sustainable production processes to ensure the long-term sustainability of the steel industry in the region. Overall, the main aim is to provide valuable insights into the relationship between steelworks, heritage and geography and highlights the urgent need for action to address the sustainability challenges facing the steel industry in Taranto and other regions.</p
Factors Influencing Stakeholders’ Willingness to Embrace Smart Home Technologies
No full textThe concept of smart homes has drawn global attention towards achieving smart cities for building sustainable cities in both developing and developed worlds. This emanated from the idea of making humans acclimate to the easy usage of building facilities for actualizing a sustainable environment. This study assesses the stakeholders’ characteristics, the level of their willingness to embrace smart home technologies, and possible factors influencing their willingness to embrace smart homes. A survey of professionals, investors, and users in Lagos Island, the economic nerves of Nigeria revealed that the degree of willingness to embrace smart homes was above average and factors influencing willingness to embrace smart home technologies are Technological, Environmental, Economical, and social, as the degree of each factor varies depending on the stakeholders’ characteristics. The study recommends the synergies among stakeholders to embrace smart home technologies and that governments at all levels should create a supportive framework to accommodate proper implementation for the advancement of sustainable cities in Nigeria.</p
The Emotional Intelligence Competence: A Perception of Project Managers Construction Industry
No full textThis study aims to highlight the importance of emotional intelligence competence of project managers and their influence on Project success in the Scottish construction industry. Goleman (1998) defined EI as the capacity to recognise, analyse, and be aware of one's own and other's emotions then channel one's thoughts and actions toward cultivating peaceful, productive, success-driven environments for work. Traditionally, the construction project industry is saddled with uncertainties, stress, and frustrations arising from project failures and unresolved conflicts. Construction projects are complex, unique, and temporary, involving the management of various resources and people (Rahimi, 2015). Projects can take days or years to complete its cycle from planning to execution. A project manager is a speciality advisor who represents client’s employers and facilitates communication among team members. The project managers are expected to manage teams, run the day-to-day management of a project, and often directly participate in the projects and its activities which produces a successful project delivery as end results. Additionally, help to aid collaboration among team members to reduce the risks of project failure while maximising benefits and cost control. They operate the integral aspect of the project from design phase to evaluation and final closure. Competence such as soft skills i.e., EI are required in a sector like the construction project sector. Most often the sector focuses on technical skills lacking behind the relevant competence necessary for human interactions. Studies have shown that EI competence, such as self-awareness, social awareness, self-management, and relationship management, are vital competences that significantly influence construction workers. Therefore, this quantitative study was conducted to confirm whether components such as collaboration, communication, conflict management and teamwork are related to project managers' EI competence and their effect on project success. Twenty studies were conducted with Scottish construction project professionals. The respondents are five project leaders, three project directors, five project managers, three project team members, and other designations four. Questionnaires were completed online via Napier survey Novi website. Using a Five-point Likert scale of strongly agree to strongly disagree. The finding indicates that communication, collaboration, and teamwork in addition to EI competence are effective and significantly impacts on project managers performance 373 level in successfully delivering projects. This study recommends that EI competence should be included in the training and recruiting process of construction workers.</p