Research Library

This paper reviews and summarizes the research on parental mentalizing using the Parent Development Interview and the Reflective Functioning coding. It also describes the future developments for the measure.

Brief review of the neuroscientific findings that illuminate whether and how adverse early caregiving experiences impact on brain development and poor socioemotional outcomes in children in care, and how such evidence informs our understanding of attachment outcomes in this population.

Level Up is a novel, UK-based intervention consisting of five online group sessions, straddling the summer holidays, and providing at-risk children and their parents/carers with skills to manage their behaviour, emotions, and relationships to support their transition to secondary school. A prior evaluation of Level Up reported a need to better describe the mechanisms of change. This study therefore evaluated the experiences of children and their parents/carers regarding the facilitators and barriers to engagement and change, and the perceived impact.

The aim of the present research was to identify constructs associated with youth crime and violence amongst 6-18 year olds. A systematic review of systematic reviews of constructs associated with youth crime and violence was conducted.

In light of the dramatic rise in mental health disorders amongst adolescents seen in the past decade across the world, there is an urgent need for robust evidence on what works to combat this trend. This paper provides the first robust evaluation of the impacts on school outcomes of 6-year funding programme (HeadStart) for area-level mental health interventions for adolescents. Exploiting educational administrative data on ten cohorts of state-educated secondary school students, we use the synthetic control method to construct counterfactual outcomes for areas that received the funding. Authors: Cattan, S., Lereya, S. T., Yoon, Y., Gilbert, R., Deighton, D.

To examine the extent to which experiencing parental IPV and/or maternal depression before age 12 years is associated with depression at age 18 years at the population and individual level. Authors: Gondek, D., Howe, L. D., Gilbert, R., Feder, G., Howarth, E., Deighton, J., & Lacey, R. E.

We aimed to investigate if HeadStart was effective in ameliorating school outcomes such as absence, exclusion and attainment. We also aimed to explore if synthetic control method was an appropriate methodology to investigate the effectiveness of area level interventions.

This study aims to explore the process of collecting and using cost data from programme implementers’ perspectives, in the context of delivering a prevention and early intervention programme in a real-world setting. Authors: Stapley, E., Herbert, K., Cattan, S., Deighton, J. (2022).

This briefing summarises learning from the first year of the HeadStart programme, drawing on research interviews conducted with staff members at each partnership as part of the qualitative evaluation of HeadStart led by the Learning Team in the EBPU. Author: Stapley, E. (2017).