The University of Sheffield
Department of Human Communication Sciences

Tom Muskett BSc, MMedSci, PhD, RegHPC

Department of Human Communication Sciences
The University of Sheffield
31 Claremont Crescent
Sheffield
S10 2TA
UK
Tel: +44 (0)114 22 22413
Fax: +44 (0)114 273 0547


email : t.muskett@sheffield.ac.uk

Biography

I am a Speech and Language Therapist registered with the Health Professions Council. I have a particular clinical interest in working with children and young people with complex profiles of mental health and/or learning difficulties. This includes, but is not limited to, children and adolescents on the autism spectrum.

I work at HCS on Mondays, where I am the undergraduate admissions tutor for the BMedSci Speech clinical programme, and contribute to teaching across a number of undergraduate and postgraduate modules.
For the remainder of the week, I am the Research and Development Manager at the Northern School of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy (NSCAP), hosted by Leeds Partnerships Foundation Trust.

Research interests

Complex interventions for complex individuals: Within Child and Adolescent Mental Health services (CAMHS), many of the children, young people and families who need the most help do not have problems that neatly fit diagnostic categories. Nor can their problems typically be resolved through a single intervention delivered by a single professional. Instead, what is usually required (and is currently promoted within CAMHS) is multi-agency working, complex care pathways and integrated long-term support. The benefits of such an approach are clear given the complex and heterogeneous populations that access CAMHS, but there is still relatively little research to inform the decision-making of service providers and professionals who work in this field. It is these issues that frame my work at NSCAP, where I am responsible for developing a research capacity within child and adolescent psychotherapy in the region.

Discourse/ conversation analysis: My other research interest is much more theoretical than the above. Here, I am interested in closely examining video recorded, naturally-occurring social interactions in excruciatingly fine-grained detail using qualitative methodologies such as conversation analysis. In particular, I am interested in analysing interactions involving individuals who are categorised as 'disordered', be this in terms of their communication, learning or behaviour most generally (so for instance, in my PhD thesis I examined interactions involving children with autism spectrum disorders - but my interests are wider than this). Looking closely at real interactions involving such individuals can provide some very interesting insights. Certainly, it helps explicate the nature of the problem(s) that they might have during social interaction in very close detail, but it also tends to tell you a lot more: for instance, how the contributions of the 'non-disordered' participant affect (positively or negatively) the unfolding interaction, and how the 'disordered' participant may actually be a lot more socially competent than they are given credit for. I am currently working with Dr Richard Body and Professor Mick Perkins, both to build upon ideas from my PhD and develop new projects with different clinical populations.

Collaborators

Publications