QUT offers a diverse range of student topics for Honours, Masters and PhD study. Search to find a topic that interests you or propose your own research topic to a prospective QUT supervisor. You may also ask a prospective supervisor to help you identify or refine a research topic.
Found 542 matching student topics
Displaying 409–420 of 542 results
Examining approaches to mitigating customer aggression and abuse
The pace of change associated with modern businesses (Grewal et al., 2017; Grewal et al., 2020), and the introduction of new technologies has created heightened level of stress (technostress) and aggression (Chen et al., 2019). Adding to these stressors, COVID-19, which has forced businesses to adapt their processes and customer service interface (Ahmed et al., 2021; Jiang and Stylos, 2021; Roggeveen and Sethuraman, 2020). Research now finding that continued lockdowns, social distancing, and political rancour, all adding increased levels of …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
Understanding how self-image and compassionate goals affect well-being in a social media context
There is increasing concern about the negative impact of social media use on well-being. To understand its impact, we need to move beyond simple conceptualisations of social media use and utilise strong research methods to understand the role that psychological processes play in producing positive and negative impacts. There is preliminary evidence that interpersonal goals play an important role in predicting how people use and experience social media. Self-image goals involve trying to convey a desirable image of oneself to …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
The Emotional Face
Faces are a rich source of social information communicating social categories like sex, age or ethnicity of a person, but also a person’s emotional state via facial expressions of emotion. The current research investigates how cues available on a face (social category cues, attractiveness, trustworthiness) or what we know about a person affect the manner in which we process emotional expressions.
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
Human Emotional Learning: Likes, Dislikes and Fear
There is currently broad agreement that likes and dislikes, including strong emotional responses such as fear and anxiety, are learned. However, little is known about the manner in which different forms of emotional learning interact or about how emotional learning once acquired can be modified, reduced or eliminated. In particular in the context of fear learning this is problematic as fear memories once acquired seem difficult to change and likely to return even after successful extinction – a phenomenon known …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Psychology and Counselling
Every side job starts with an idea: Exploring motivations for the ‘side hustle’
Almost 1 million Australians have lost their jobs and countless micro and small businesses have folded as a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time the pandemic has propelled innovation and new venture creation and given rise the ‘side hustle’, taking on an extra job for money. Side-hustles, supplemental income-generating work performed alongside full-time jobs, are increasingly common (Sessions, Nahrgang, Vaulont, Williams & Bartels, 2021).Technology has in part empowered and enabled people to market their skills and products …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
Small business resilience in times of economic uncertainty: Examining retailers and regional businesses
Regional Australia is undergoing significant structural, economic, social, and environmental change which is impacting the viability of small businesses (Regional Australia Institute, 2018). Regional small retail businesses, estimated to contribute $21.9bn to local economies (Australian Small Business and Family Enterprise Ombudsman, 2019) are particularly susceptible to economic shocks, have lower survival rates, more volatile revenues and are generally less resilient than larger business (Barraket, Eversole, Luke & Barth, 2019).Disruptive external events such as the acceleration of e-retailing, COVID-19 travel restrictions, …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
- Research centre(s)
-
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research
Exploring how entrepreneurs use social media to influence users' emotions and achieve virality
Social media has become an integral part of our lives – we click, like and share posts with our personal and professional networks each day. The concept of sharing is activated by psychological stimulation, be it emotional or physical (Tellis et al., 2019). But why are certain types of online content more viral than others?Achieving ‘virality’ is not random and isn’t just about creating engaging content. Instead there are mechanics that are planned to achieve this type of ‘social currency’. …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy
- Faculty
- Faculty of Business and Law
- School
- School of Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations
- Research centre(s)
-
Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship Research
Understanding capsular polysaccharide diversity is key to next generation therapies for multi-drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii infections
Bacteriophage therapy is an attractive innovative treatment for infections caused by extensively drug resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, for which there are few effective antibiotic treatments remaining.Capsular polysaccharide (CPS) is a primary receptor for lytic bacteriophage, thus knowledge of the chemical structures of CPS produced by the species underpins the identification of suitable phage for therapeutic cocktails.As many phage depolymerases cleave a specific CPS linkage formed by either a glycosyltransferase or polymerase enzyme, characterisation of these proteins are essential.However, these remain largely …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
- Research centre(s)
-
Centre for Immunology and Infection Control
Building metallo-supramolecular cages for sensing and catalytic applications
The concept of creating molecular electronic devices has resulted in the development and rapid advance of the field of supramolecular chemistry.In this project we are particularly interested in how we can use simple building blocks to self-assemble into complex, functional structures both in solution and at the solution:surface interface.These types of structures have shown great promise in applications such as catalysis, sensing, drug delivery and even in the development of molecular machines.AimsThis project aims to:design, synthesise and characterise complex metallo-supramolecular …
- Study level
- PhD, Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Advanced electron microscopy for sustainable nanocatalysis
The systematic and detailed characterisation of heterogeneous catalysts is critical for design of effective and stable catalytic materials, since it allows one to understand the correlation between their structure and physicochemical properties.Especially, it is important to monitor the structural evolution of catalytic materials and their active sites in a controllable environment and under realistic reaction conditions.Thus, we propose to use a powerful combination of aberration-corrected high-resolution TEM and in situ TEM experiments which allow us to gain extensive knowledge about …
- Study level
- PhD
- Faculty
- Faculty of Science
- School
- School of Chemistry and Physics
- Research centre(s)
- Centre for Materials Science
Exploring chemotherapy-induced molecular aging and its relationship to exercise
Ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cause of death from cancer in women, with a five-year survival rate of less than 45 per cent. However, there is emerging research that shows the benefits of exercise therapy during recovery following certain cancer treatments, and how exercise can improve and extend the lives of women with ovarian cancer.This project is a collaboration exploring these health and survival outcomes in ovarian and other gynaecological cancers, and in particular how new diagnostic testing …
- Study level
- Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
Why do epithelial cells have antigen processing machinery?
Epithelial Cells (ECs) constitute the border between the host immune system and an environment teeming with inhaled antigens. Work from us and others has highlighted that ECs have the ability to express the antigen processing and presentation machinery, Major Histocompatibility Complex class II (MHC II) that is important in initiating immune responses. MHC II expression and function on mucosal epithelial cells, is not well understood.Whilst MHC II is expressed by ECs, and is altered with inflammation, there is a paucity …
- Study level
- Master of Philosophy, Honours
- Faculty
- Faculty of Health
- School
- School of Biomedical Sciences
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