Dr Philippa Waterhouse

Professional biography

Philippa’s research expertise lies at the intersection between Demography and Sociology. Her main research interest centres on the consequences the individual’s occupancy of multiple roles (for example as parent and worker) can have for individual, family, and organisational wellbeing. Her work can be broadly divided into two streams.

1. The work-family-study interface and student wellbeing

Philippa’s research seeks to understand how students who have work and/or family responsibilities in addition to their student role manage their multiple responsibilities as the consequences for students’ outcomes. Her work aims to generate strategies that can be considered at the course design and delivery stage to support students who might be experiencing role conflict or overload. She was the Principal Investigator for a PRAXIS (Faculty of WELS scholarship centre) funded project ‘Wellbeing of Level 3 Distance Education Students: the importance of work and family factors’, leading the quantitative workstream from data collection to analysis. Currently, Philippa is the work-package lead for Positive Digital Practices (in collaboration with University of Bradford, University of Warwick, StudentMinds, and JISC). Her research aims to develop digital resources, including an interactive, that supports students’ navigation of their student journey alongside their personal circumstances, such as work and family responsibilities. 

1. Work-family balance of women in sub-Saharan Africa

Philippa’s ESRC funded PhD used interviews with mothers of young child and statistical analysis of secondary datasets to explore the experience of working mothers of children in Accra, Ghana. Specifically, her research explored the strategies women used to combine their economic roles with their childcare responsibilities and impacts for mothers’ self-reported health and children’s wellbeing (with a particular focus on education). Since then, her work in area in this area has drawn upon advanced statistical analyses, such as sequence analysis, of secondary datasets. She has explored topics such as young women’s work and family work transitions and the relationships between maternal work and maternal and child health outcomes, such as self-reported health, educational attainment and vocabulary development.

Philippa has held substantive roles in the Faculty of Wellbeing, Education and Language Studies postgraduate research studies teams, including:

• PhD Convener for Health, Wellbeing and Social Care (2017-2019),
• Programme Leader for the Professional Doctorate in Health and Social Care (DHSC) (2019-2022), and
• OU Health and Wellbeing Pathway Lead for the Grand Union Doctoral Training Partnership (a collaboration between Brunel, Oxford and Open University) (2018-present).

Philippa has a passion for the harnessing of technology to enhance study quality of learning and student success. As the DHSC Programme Leader she led the development and delivery of the WELS new blended-learning professional doctorate programme which launched in October 2019. She also lead the development of a 'Map my skills' interactive tool In K311 (Promoting public health: skills, perspectives and practice)  to aid students in the collection of evidence for professional registration - a tool that has potential for application across a range of disciplines. 

Philippa’s expertise has also led to her contributing to the development of teaching materials focusing on timely and contemporary debates on health. She is currently involved in the development of a new public health degree at the Open University, including chairing the production of K119 ‘Wellbeing and the LifeCourse’ and writing on K310 Public health: health promotion and health security.

Philippa's research is explicitly designed to provide insights into the health of marginalised groups, in particular challenging strongly engrained assumptions. For example, her work on work-family balance in sub-Saharan Africa challenges assumptions around the compatibility of informal labour and childcare, and argues for the greater recognition of th relationship between women's work and other development goals. Her work also considers the application of knowledge, theories and concepts to under-researched contexts.

Philippa is committed to the development of open educational resources, which engages the public in key health debates. For example, she was one of the lead academics on the OpenLearn interactive 'Type 2 diabetes across the globe: What's going on?', which approaches a complex health topic in an accessible and engaging way.