Research Assistant (Right to Roam)

Fixed Term (for a period of 10 months)

Part Time, 14 hours per week

Abertay is a modern university with a global outlook, rooted in its local and national communities. Recently we marked the 125^th anniversary of our foundation as an institution dedicated to supporting science, industry and the professions with a distinctive interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary approach to teaching, research and knowledge exchange. 

The University seeks to appoint a Research Assistant within the School of Design and Informatics, commencing in October 2024. The School of Design and Informatics is the home of Abertay’s undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in games, digital arts, cybersecurity and applied computer science. Abertay was the first university to offer degrees in Computer Games and Ethical Hacking and continues to be recognised as an international leader in its fields. The School is designated the National Centre for Excellence in Computer Games Education, and we are a leading partner in Sony’s PlayStation First initiative, and home to one of the largest PlayStation teaching labs in Europe.

The RA will work on the Carnegie Trust – funded project ‘Right 2 Roam - developing community civic engagement through boardgame design’ which is scheduled to run from October 2024 to September 2025. This is an opportunity for the candidate to develop research experience with collecting data using board games and work closely with the project team and Student Associations in Dundee.

The role requires an experienced researcher with training in qualitative data collection and analysis to organise, run, record, transcribe and analyse a series of 15 workshops with students to examine how boardgames can be used to 1) catalyse discussion and civic engagement around equitable access to public spaces and 2) capture lived experiences of the inequalities of accessing public space and walking alone. This research will be conducted using Right 2 Roam (R2R): an original tabletop boardgame designed in response to media coverage and personal stories of women walking alone in public spaces. We will use the game to investigate how boardgames can prompt discussion, elicit civic engagement around serious topics, and generate an archive of lived experience through game customisation features and post-play discussions in a workshop setting.

The role will be part-time, 0.4FTE over 10 months: October 2024 – August 2025 and will entail data collection in a workshop setting and qualitative data analysis. The candidate will be responsible for organizing 15 workshops in collaboration with DUSA, ASA and D&A Student Associations, recruiting the participants, and recording qualitative data from 60 Dundee students (4 players/session) during gameplay and post-play focus group discussion. The workshops will run at Abertay University, University of Dundee and Dundee and Angus College. The candidate will be required to transcribe the recordings using Otter AI and perform data analysis using NVivo.

The candidate will also be required to support the project team in curating the data into an Archive of Lived Experience on the Pure research repository system and will be invited to co-author a paper with the project PI and collaborator.

If you believe you have the skills and experience for this exciting and challenging role, please submit your application through our online recruitment system, which can be found at 

Please note that we will only accept applications through our online recruitment system.

Committed to Equal Opportunities

Abertay University is a Scottish Registered Charity,

No: SC016040

Advert information