User:Daniel E Wight

Biography
I am a social science researcher working in the Medical Research Counci l's Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, a part of University of Glasgow, Scotland, UK.

I studied Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University, involving four months fieldwork in rural Jamaica, and graduated in 1981. I later conducted a community study in central Scotland, focussing on working class culture, unemployment, consumption and masculinity, which became a PhD (Edinburgh University, 1987). After working on applied social science projects in the fields of education, community development and nursing, in 1990 I joined the MRC Medical Sociology Unit to conduct a qualitative study of young Glaswegian men's sexual behaviour. From this I came to lead an inter-disciplinary team to develop a theoretically based teacher-delivered sex education programme (SHARE) from 1993-96, in collaboration with the Health Education Board for Scotland, now NHS Health Scotland. I led the evaluation of this programme, through a randomised trial with 25 schools complemented by a detailed process evaluation.

Since 1997 I have been involved in descriptive and intervention research in Tanzania and Uganda on sexual health and parent-child relationships. I led the process evaluation of a multi-component sexual health programme in Tanzania (Memakwa Vijana), in collaboration with the National Institute for Medical Research, Tanzania, and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and from 2001-2010 I led the Unit's partnership in two Department for International Development programmes on HIV and sexual health in low income countries.

From 2006-2015 I led the Sexual Health and Families Programme and then the Children, Young People, Families and Health Programme in the MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit. During this period I contributed to the MRC's Guidance on Process Evaluation and, with colleagues, formulated a model of the development of interventions. I am currently working on interventions to modify harsh parenting in low income countries and lead a research theme on the transferability of interventions.