Charlie joined the university as a Research Associate in October 2019 to coordinate the Nuffield-funded interdisciplinary project Understanding Preventative Interventions in Youth Justice. Since February 2023 she has been working with the cross-institutional teams on the PDD project, which is evaluating police-led drug diversion schemes in the West Midlands, Durham, and Thames Valley.
Before working at Loughborough Charlie worked at the University of Leicester as a Research Associate in the School of Media Communication & Sociology and the School of Business. She was previously employed at Leicester as a Graduate Teaching Assistant to deliver sociology, sociology of education, criminology and research methods seminars. She also delivered guest lectures on old age and inequalities in education.
Before working in academia, Charlie was a social science lecturer in an FE College, teaching Access to Higher Education courses and A-levels. She also worked as a Casework Manager for a Member of Parliament during this time.
Charlie’s research interests centre around issues and inequalities which affect people’s lives at different ages. She takes an interdisciplinary and mixed methods approach to research.
In her current role, working alongside Mark Monaghan, she will be coordinating research activities for the PDD project in respect of the West Midland region and undertaking the Realist Synthesis element of the evaluation project. This evaluation of police-led diversion (PDD) schemes focusses on three areas; Durham, Thames Valley and West Midlands, and it is led by the College of Police and the University of Kent. It is funded by the Cabinet Office’s Evaluation Accelerator Fund. This interdisciplinary evaluation will focus on the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of schemes for drug-involved suspects using a combination of methods. A wide range of large-scale secondary data will be used compare the outcomes for people eligible for diversion in these three areas to the outcomes of similar people in matched areas which do not yet use PDD. Interviews and focus groups with people who work with these schemes and service users and their families will reveal how PDD schemes work in practice. The collaborative research team is drawn from the Universities of Sheffield, York and Loughborough, the Open University, Bradford Institute for Health Research, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities, the Office of the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner, Thames Valley Police, Durham Police and the charity User Voice.
Charlie previously worked as a Research Associate on the Understanding Preventative Interventions in Youth Justice project, working with an interdisciplinary team: Stephen Case, Mark Monaghan, Joanne Greenhalgh and Judy Wright. This project used a Realist Synthesis approach to review research relating to youth justice intervention effectiveness with a focus on context, mechanisms and outcomes.
Whilst working at the University of Leicester, she coordinated research activities on the Cancer Research UK Adolescent Vaping project, with an interdisciplinary team led by Jason Hughes. This project used a combination of interviews and smartphone messages, over a 6-12-month period, to understand young people’s experiences of smoking and e-cigarette use.
She also worked as a Research Associate on the British Academy Bogus Self-Employment project, with Marti Lopez-Andreu, where she used Understanding Society survey data and focus group discussions to analyse changes in self-employment in the UK. This analysis highlighted differences in the age profile of the self-employed and indicated that some industries seemed to be more effected by bogus self-employment than others. This research revealed the challenges and the benefits of being self-employed at different stages in the life-course.
Charlie has also worked as a Research Assistant. She produced a scoping review of literature, which focussed on links between social media use and mental health issues, for an Adolescent Mental Health project. She also produced a systematic literature review for QAA, concerning Access to HE Students’ Labour Market Experiences, on behalf of a team of academics from the University of Leicester, University of Southampton and the University of East London.
Her PhD research followed a life-course theme considering If Age Matters in Higher Education. Charlie examined the views and experiences of different-age groups of undergraduate students who enrolled in 2015 at an English university. She examined enrolment data, conducted yearly surveys and collected regular diary entries and interviews from a small sample students to consider how their adaptation, motivation and barriers changed during the three years of their degree. Follow-up research is still ongoing with the interview participants to understand how they adapted to the labour market since completing their studies. Charlie also analysed large-scale secondary data and conducted interviews for her MSc research: What is Old? Changing perceptions of Aging.
- Case, S, Sutton, C, Monaghan, M, Greenhalgh, J, Wright, J (2022) Understanding preventative intervention in youth justice: Executive summary, The Nuffield Foundation.
- Case, S, Sutton, C, Greenhalgh, J, Monaghan, M, Wright, J (2022) Searching for context: a review of “what works” reviews of interventions to prevent youth offending using the EMMIE Framework, Safer Communities, 21(4), pp.272-289, ISSN: 1757-8043. DOI: 10.1108/SC-04-2022-0014.
- Sutton, C, Monaghan, M, Case, S, Greenhalgh, J, Wright, J (2022) Contextualising youth justice interventions: Making the case for realist synthesis, Sustainability, 14(2), 854, DOI: 10.3390/su14020854.
- Hughes, J, Sykes, G, Hughes, K, O'Reilly, M, Goodwin, J, Sutton, C, Karim, K (2021) From gateways to multilinear connections: A qualitative longitudinal investigation of the relationships between vaping and smoking among adolescent users, International Journal of Drug Policy, 97(2021), 103341, ISSN: 0955-3959. DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2021.103341.
- Sutton. C. E, (2019) Mature Students and Social Isolation: Feeling Excluded or Choosing to be Alone? in Boeren. E & James. N (eds) 'Being an Adult Learner in Austere Times’ London Palgrave. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-97208-4