Research Associate (CareQuAI)

The University of Sheffield is a remarkable place to work. Our people are at the heart of everything we do. Their diverse backgrounds, abilities and beliefs make Sheffield a world-class university.

We offer a fantastic range of benefits including a highly competitive annual leave entitlement (with the ability to purchase more), a generous pensions scheme, flexible working opportunities, a commitment to your development and wellbeing, a wide range of retail discounts, and much more. Find out more about our benefits (opens in a new window) and join us to become part of something special.

Overview

The post-holder will join the international consortium project AI-driven platform care: Promoting equal and inclusive job quality in long-term care (CareQuAI). Funded through the Joint Programming Initiative, CareQuAI addresses one of the most urgent challenges facing long-term care systems: how to respond to workforce shortages while ensuring that new technologies support fair, inclusive and high-quality care work.

Across Europe, long-term care services are under growing pressure from demographic change, recruitment and retention difficulties, changing expectations of care, and rapid developments in AI and digital platform technologies. CareQuAI examines how AI-driven platforms and associated technologies are shaping care work, job quality, employment relations, equality and inclusion, and how these technologies could be designed, governed and used in ways that support better outcomes for care workers, care providers and people receiving care.

The consortium brings together researchers from the University of Eastern Finland, the project coordinator; KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; Sheffield University Management School, University of Sheffield; and the University of St Andrews. The project focuses on AI-driven platform care in Finland, Sweden and the UK.

This is an exciting opportunity to contribute to research with direct relevance to policy, practice and the future of care work. The post-holder will support UK research with platform care provider organisations, care workers, managers, worker representatives, policy stakeholders and international academic partners. The role will involve empirical research, qualitative analysis, stakeholder engagement, dissemination, and the production of evidence-based guidelines and recommendations for different stakeholder communities. It will involve UK and international travel, requiring flexibility in line with project needs.

Main Duties And Responsibilities

• Plan, develop and undertake research for the CareQuAI project, particularly the UK contribution to cross-national research on AI-driven platform care provider organisations.
• Develop literature reviews, research protocols and ethics submissions; recruit care platform organisations and research participants; conduct case study field research; organise, accurately record and analyse the data collected; prepare data for archiving; and prepare reports of research findings and other outputs.
• Analyse qualitative data through comparative within-case and cross-case analysis to identify factors and mechanisms that hinder or support job quality, care quality, equality, inclusion, recruitment and retention in AI-driven platform care.
• Support participatory research and design activities, including workshop activities exploring conversational AI and other digital technologies used in homecare.
• Manage key aspects of project administration, monitoring, reporting, quality assurance and risk management, working closely with the UK lead and consortium partners to ensure that project activities, milestones and deliverables are successfully completed on time and in line with funder, institutional and ethical requirements.
• Comply with international consortium project reporting arrangements and contribute to data validation, auditing and quality requirements. Assist the UK partner-lead to safeguard and preserve research data in agreed formats, working within consortium protocols on data management.
• Produce reports, briefings, case studies, publications, guidelines and evidence-based recommendations for academic, policy, practitioner and public audiences.
• Support stakeholder engagement, dissemination and impact activities, including dialogue events, dissemination workshops, policy-facing outputs, social media activity, communication materials and multimedia outputs.
• Be an active member of the international consortium team, attending and contributing to relevant project and consortium-wide meetings. Collaborate effectively with colleagues in partner universities and with social care, voluntary sector and industry partners.
• Contribute to high-quality academic publications, including co-authored papers in peer-reviewed journals and other agreed outputs, in line with the international consortium publication strategy.
• Present research findings at academic and policy conferences and other events, complying with agreed protocols for acknowledging funding, colleagues’ contributions and the roles of consortium partners.
• Undertake travel within the UK and, where required, internationally to partner institutions, consortium meetings, fieldwork sites, stakeholder events and dissemination activities. Work flexibly to support data collection, collaboration and project delivery across different organisational and national contexts.
• Keep abreast of relevant academic and policy developments and carry out any other duties commensurate with the grade of the post.