Professor Christine Griffin

CPsychol, FBPS

Professor of Social Psychology, Department of Psychology

One of the leading researchers in youth, identity and consumption, Christine Griffin joined the University of Bath in 2003 as a Reader in Social Psychology and became a Professor of Social Psychology in 2006. Her recent research has focussed on young people’s alcohol consumption, especially their uses of social media and digital technologies in relation to the widespread culture of intoxication. She is an elected Fellow, and Chartered Member, of the British Psychological Society.

Professor Griffin was one of only ten students to take the very first degree course in ‘Human Psychology’ at the University of Aston in Birmingham during the mid-1970s. She completed her PhD on ‘Intergroup relations and social identity’ under the supervision of Professor Michael Billig at the University of Birmingham in 1978.

During the early 1980s, Professor Griffin was appointed to a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. Here she worked on a landmark study on the transmission from school to the job market for young working class women, which was published as the research monograph ‘Typical Girls?’ in 1985. This project marked the beginning of over thirty years work on gender relations and young women’s negotiations of contemporary femininity. Professor Griffin went on to found the international journal ‘Feminism and Psychology’ with Sue Wilkinson and a group of influential social and clinical psychologists in 1991.

She is a leading exponent of qualitative research methods in social psychology, including informal interviews and focus groups, ethnographic and observational methods. She is currently at the cutting edge of multi-modal methods of discourse analysis to explore the importance of social media in young people’s everyday lives.

Professor Griffin has obtained a number of ESRC research grants over the past 15 years, including a study of young people’s experiences of ‘branded’ leisure at music festivals and free parties led by Dr Andrew Bengry-Howell; a project on clubbing and dance cultures as forms of social and political participation led by Dr Sarah Riley; and a major study on the role of branding and marketing of drinks in relation to young adults’ everyday drinking practices as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Programme on ‘Identities and Social Action’. She is currently part of an international research team, based in New Zealand, working on a Marsden Fund study of young adults, drinking and social media, including online alcohol marketing.

She said: “My research is somewhat unusual in comparison to the kind of Social Psychology that is conducted in some other Universities. I have always talked to people, listened to what they have to say, and explored this in the context of their everyday lives. I am interested in understanding young people’s perspectives, but I have also examined how and why wider adult society sometimes views young people, or particular groups of young people, as problems, as ‘at risk’, as troubling, and as a cause for concern.”

As Head of Department, she led the successful application to the South West Strategic Health Authority in 2009 to run the new Doctorate in Clinical Psychology in the South West region. She co-convenes the Childhood and Youth Research Group in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Science with Professor Tess Ridge.

Professor Griffin’s research has appeared in the most prestigious international journals in the fields of critical, social and community psychology, marketing, public health, drug policy, youth studies and sociology.