His research interests have centred upon the social and psychological aspects of health and illness, particularly the ways in which people live with the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. He has worked on a number of funded projects, including family response to one of its members receiving coronary bypass graft surgery, women living with heart disease, the role of counsellors in GP surgeries, the needs of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in the outpatient consultation, and recovery in hospital using photo-production as a technique. Recently he has studied the experience of homelessness using photo-production techniques, first in London and now in Auckland, New Zealand (in collaboration with Dr Darrin Hodgetts).
His work has been published in a range of journal papers and chapters, as well as in his own books that include, Prospects of Heart Surgery (Springer, 1988); The Body and Social Psychology (Springer, 1991); and Making Sense of Illness (Sage, 1994). He has also published a text, In Social Relationships, (Open University Press, 1991), edited the volume Worlds of Illness (Routledge, 1993) and contributed to Ideological Dilemmas (Sage, 1988), with colleagues in Social Psychology at Loughborough.
