Alan is an Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology in Social and Policy Studies at Loughborough, and was one of the founders of the undergraduate programme in Social Psychology that received its first intake of students in 1974.
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.
- Radley, A. Works of Illness: narrative, picturing and the social response to serious disease. Ashby de la Zouch: InkerMen Press, 2009.
- Radley, A. and Payne, S. A sociological commentary on the refusal of treatment by patients with cancer, Mortality, 14, (4), 2009.
- Radley, A., Mayberry, J. and Pearce, M., Time, space and opportunity in the outpatient consultation: ‘the doctor’s story’. Social Science & Medicine, 66, 1484-1496, 2008.
- Radley, A. and Bell, S. Artworks, collective experience and claims for social justice: the case of women living with breast cancer. Sociology of Health and Illness, 29 (3) 366-390, 2007.
- Radley, A. and Hodgetts, D. and Cullen, A. Fear romance and transience in the lives of homeless women, Social and Cultural Geography, 7, (3), 437-461, 2006
- Radley, A. and Hodgetts, D. and Cullen, A. Visualising homelessness: a study in photography and estrangement, Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 15 (4), 273-295, 2005.
- Radley, A. The aesthetics of illness: narrative, horror and the sublime. Sociology of Health and Illness, 21, 778-796, 1999.
- Radley, A. and Chamberlain, K. Health psychology and the study of the case: from method to analytic concern, Social Science and Medicine, 53, (3), 321-332, 2001.
- Portrayals of suffering: on looking away, looking at, and the comprehension of illness experience. Body & Society 8 (3) 1-23, 2002.