Dr Zaheer Hussain

Faculty: Education, Health and Sciences

School: School of Science

Subject Area: Psychology

I am currently a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Derby. My main teaching commitments are on a number of modules including Psychology in Practice, Social Psychology, Research Methods and Analysis, Animal Learning and Cognition and Individual Differences. I also supervise final year undergraduate research projects.

Research interests

My research interests focus on the area of Cyber-Psychology and Social Psychology. However, my research interests are generally broad. I'm interested in the psychology of the Internet, online virtual environments, social networking, e-commerce, addiction, mental health, attitude change and inter-group conflict. I have made use of interviews and questionnaires to gather data and as such, I have skills in the analysis of quantitative and qualitative data. I have expertise in self-report methods (questionnaires, interviews) and online data collection.

I would be interested in supervising research projects in the following areas:

• Addiction and Mental Health
• Virtual communities and blogging behaviour
• Internet addiction
• Computer games and gaming
• Mobile phone behaviour
• Cyber-bullying
• Internet use and behaviour
• e-Commerce and online shopping
• Virtual reality therapy
• Social networking on Facebook, MySpace, and more

Current Projects:

Teaching Informed by Research Grant (£2,500): Sustainability Web Videos: Evaluating Virtual World Content for Sustainability and Pro-environmental Behaviour in the Curriculum

Membership of professional bodies and advisory committees

• CyberPsychology Research Group
• Higher Education Academy
• Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) Research Group
• The Postgraduates who Teach Psychology Network (PGwT) representative.

Recent Conferences

• Hussain, Z. (December 2009). Social Networking and the Small World Project. Paper presented at The Nottingham Trent University Graduate School Winter Conference, Nottingham, UK.
• Hussain, Z. (September 2009). Excessive Online Gaming. Paper presented at the Annual British Psychological Society Social Psychology Conference 2009, Sheffield, UK.
• Hussain, Z. (June 2009). Excessive use of Massively Multi-Player Online Role-Playing Games: A pilot study. Paper presented at the NTU Postgraduate Psychology Conference, Nottingham, UK.
• Hussain, Z. (May 2009). Using Online Research Methods to Explore the Internet, Multi-Media and Virtual Reality. Paper presented at the Pedagogy, Blended and E-learning Education Research Seminar, Nottingham, UK.

Media experience

Invited speaker, discussant for the following media organisations:

• The Press Association
• The BBC
• www.newstalk.ie, 106 - 108 fm

The following media organisations have written about my research:

• Channel 4 News
• BBC World Service - Brazil
• MSN News

Undergraduate qualifications

• BSc (Hons) Psychology with Social Sciences

Postgraduate qualifications

• MSc Social Sciences Research Methods

Research qualifications

• PhD in Psychology

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