The Anna Freud Centre’s online research library contains a collection of evidence-based material on children and young people’s mental health, written and co-written by our team. The research explores factors relating to:
anxiety | behavioural difficulties | depression | digital mental health | empowering young people and families | early years | evaluation | fostering and adoption | intervention | maltreatment and abuse | measures | mentalization | methodology | neurodiversity | parents and carers| prevalence and trends | prevention | psychological therapies | resources | risk and resilience | social care | trauma | wellbeing
The library is managed by our team of evidence experts. It is updated on a regular basis and currently consists of research published between 2018 and 2023.
Please be aware that links to our open-access papers lead to external sites and that the management, data handling and administration of these external sites is not the Anna Freud Centre’s responsibility.
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Studying the process of psychoanalytic parent-infant psychotherapy: embodied and discursive aspects
This paper presents findings from an intensive, mixed methods case study of one session of psychoanalytic parent–infant psychotherapy addressing early relational trauma, and aims to shed light on the multimodal interactive processes that take place in the moment-to-moment exchanges comprising the therapeutic encounter.
Authors: Avdi, E., Amiran, K., Sleed, M., & Baradon, T. (2020).
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The factor structure of the Working Alliance Inventory short-form in youth psychotherapy: an empirical investigation
This study investigated the factor structure of the WAI-S in psychotherapy for adolescent depression and explored its measurement invariance across time, therapeutic approaches and patients’ and therapists’ perspectives.
Authors: Cirsola, A., Midgley, N., Fonagy, P., Impact Consortium, Martin, P. (2020).
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Exploring the structure, quality, and associations of Palestinian mothers’ high-risk mental representations in war conditions
This pilot study examines the feasibility of a novel coding system for the Parent Development Interview (PDI) interview (ARR, Assessment of Representational Risk) in assessing 50 war-exposed Palestinian mothers’ caregiving representations.
Authors: Isoavi, S. & Sleed, M. (2020).
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Pride before a fall: shame, diagnostic crossover, and eating disorders
This paper discusses the findings of qualitative research that examined the accounts of five 'mostly recovered' ex-patients who had experienced transition between two or more eating disorder diagnoses.
Authors: Mortimer, R. (2019).
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‘What support would you find helpful?’ The relationship between treatment expectations, therapeutic engagement and clinical outcomes in parent-infant psychotherapy.
The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of pretreatment expectations on clinical outcomes and engagement in Parent–Infant Psychotherapy (PIP).
Authors: Ransley, R., Sleed, M., Baradon, T., Fonagy, P. (2019).
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Prognostic implications for adolescents with depression who drop out of psychological treatment during a randomised controlled trial
This study aimed to examine clinical outcomes in adolescents with depression who dropped out of psychological therapy and to determine whether this varied by treatment type.
Authors: O'Keefe, S., Martin, P., Goodyer, I. M., Kelvin, R., Dubicka, B., IMPACT Consortium., & Midgley, N. (2019).
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‘I just stopped going’: a mixed methods investigation into types of therapy dropout in adolescents with depression
This study aimed to identify whether there were more meaningful categories of dropout than the existing dropout definition, and to test whether this refined categorization of dropout was associated with clinical outcomes.
Authors: O'Keefe, S., Martin, P., Target, M., & Midgley, N. (2019).
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Supporting foster carers to meet the needs of looked after children: a feasibility and pilot evaluation of the Reflective Fostering Programme
This study presents the feasibility and pilot evaluation of the Reflective Fostering Programme, a recently developed, group-based program to support foster carers, based on the concept of 'reflective parenting'.
Authors: Midgley, N., Cirasola, A., Austerberry, C., Ranzato, E., West, G., Martin, P., Redfern, S., Cotmore, R., & Park, T. (2019).
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Reflective functioning on the Parent Development Interview: validity and reliability in relation to socio-demographic factors
The aim of this study was to examine the distributions and discriminant and criterion validity of the Reflective Functioning coding of the Parent Development Interview (PDI-RF) scale in relation to a number of demographic and socioeconomic factors.
Authors: Sleed, M., Slade, A., & Fonagy, P. (2018).
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Therapists' techniques in the treatment of adolescent depression
The aims of this study were: to establish the fidelity of two established psychological therapies – cognitive behavioural therapy and short-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy – in the treatment of adolescent depression; and to examine whether they were delivered with adherence to their respective treatment modalities, and if they could be differentiated from each other and from a reference treatment (a brief psychosocial intervention; BPI).
Authors: Midgley, N., Reynolds, S., Kelvin, R., Loades, M., Calderon, A., Martin, P., & O'Keeffe, S. (2018).