Dr. Kristin Hadfield

Summary

Community-led, shared book-reading interventions can improve early childhood development and reduce inequity. One such program, We Love Reading (WLR), was implemented in Jordan in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and involves mothers reading stories to children. We will examine the potentially transformative nature of WLR, by (a) evaluating WLR qualitatively and quantitatively and (b) interviewing the people who developed and implemented WLR (WLR Ambassadors, women trained in WLR, children who took part) to create a toolkit for effectively developing and implementing non-formal education resources elsewhere. To address the first aim, we will conduct a grounded theory analysis of interviews with stakeholders (i.e. parents, children) and will conduct a quantitative randomized controlled trial with Syrian refugee women and children. This will allow us to understand how an education intervention may impact children's educational trajectories during war and displacement, and how we can effectively intervene in other humanitarian crisis contexts. For more information on the project, see: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/projects/education-learning-in-crises-developing-implementing-transformational-intervention/

Funding Agency

British Academy, Provost's PhD Project Award

Programme

Education and Learning in Crises

Summary

APOLLO is a European Commission-funded research collaboration between researchers located across Finland, France, Italy, Ireland, Lithuania, Sweden, and the United States. The objectives of APOLLO are to: (1) identify (i) individual, (ii) organisational, and (iii) meso-organisational (team, middle-manager) level factors that affect the physiological and mental health, wellbeing and resilience of health and healthcare workers and, (2) use this understanding to provide stronger and more cost-efficient managerial tools that can be used to better train team managers and directors of hospitals on methods to enhance the resilience of healthcare professionals and, (3) in turn, improve and increase collaboration between policymakers and stakeholders to jointly fight against factors causing stress in the workplace.

Funding Agency

European Commission

Summary

Prenatal anxiety has been associated with poor health outcomes of mothers and children, but much of the evidence is based on high-income nations using measures that have been developed for the use in Western populations. Hence, we need first to systematically review research on prenatal anxiety in order to get a clear overview of levels of pregnancy-related anxiety and relations with maternal and neonatal mortality. Then, we will apply a bottom-up approach, using focus group discussions to investigate the domains of pregnancy-related anxiety in Ghanaian women. This will inform the adaptation and validation of a measure of prenatal anxiety that is culturally relevant and adapted to the context in Ghana. The adapted measure will be pilot tested in a survey study of 575 pregnant women in northern Ghana.

Funding Agency

UK Medical Research Council

Programme

Global Maternal and Neonatal Health 2019

Summary

The Environmental Protection Agency commissioned this systematic review to explore attitudes towards climate change through a person-centred lens, recognising the paramount role of individual and collective human actions in both the genesis and mitigation of climate change. Underpinned by Bronfenbrenner"s Bioecological Systems Theory, in this project we explore the multifaceted nature of perceptions of climate change, highlighting key influences on climate change attitudes. At the heart of this exploration is the recognition that human activity significantly influences climate change, making individual actions and the internal processes driving these actions critical to addressing environmental challenges.

Funding Agency

Environmental Protection Agency

Summary

This aim of this project is to measure the psychological impact of forced migration on children's interpersonal skills, which are a strong predictor of their future mental health. Specifically, we ask whether the foundation of communication, emotion recognition, is impaired in these vulnerable children. Facial emotions convey critical information about state of mind and the inability to interpret emotional expressions is associated with clinical disorders. Sensitivity to facial emotions is impaired in children that have suffered abuse and it is therefore likely that refugee children who have endured or witnessed trauma may also have impaired emotion recognition, disrupting healthy social communication and increasing vulnerability to mental health issues. We will test this hypothesis and will evaluate the potential benefits of a low-cost, scalable intervention. To achieve this ambitious goal we have built a multidisciplinary team that joins world leading scientists and the multiple-award winning NGO "We Love Reading" (WLR), who bring story-telling to young refugee children in Jordan. Hearing and reading stories is a major source for learning social rules that can help children understand another person's emotional state. The collaboration therefore provides a unique opportunity to assess whether an affordable and easily implemented intervention can mitigate the effects of early adverse experiences on emotion recognition in children. Our proposal offers significant potential for academic and non-academic impact including for policy development in response to the growing refugee crisis.

Funding Agency

The Waterloo Foundation

Programme

Child Development Fund