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Publications
Publications (170)
Objective: We tested if baseline disruptive child behavior problem severity predicts parental attendance at sessions of a parenting group program. Method: We used a database of randomized trials of the Incredible Years parenting program in Europe and restricted the sample to participants randomized to the intervention arm. Using baseline Eyberg Chi...
Background
The term ‘care‐experienced’ refers to anyone who is currently in care or has been in care at any stage in their life. A complex interplay of factors leads to care‐experienced children and young people (CECYP) experiencing poorer oral health and access to dental care than their peers. A rapid review of the co‐production of health and soci...
Background: Children and young people (CYP) in care experience poorer physical health and overall wellbeing in comparison to their peers. Despite this, relatively little is known about what their oral health needs and behaviours are. The aim of this scoping review was to provide a global perspective on the oral health status and behaviours of CYP i...
Aims: This scoping review aimed to explore three research questions: 1. What is the dental care access for children and young people (CYP) in care and care leavers? 2. What factors influence CYP in care and care leavers’ access to dental care? 3. What pathways have been developed to improve access to oral health care for CYP in care and care leaver...
Aims: This scoping review aimed to explore three research questions: 1. What is the dental care access for children and young people (CYP) in care and care leavers? 2. What factors influence CYP in care and care leavers’ access to dental care? 3. What pathways have been developed to improve access to oral health care for CYP in care and care leaver...
Background
Depression is a public health problem and common amongst adolescents. Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is widely used to treat adolescent depression but existing research does not provide clear conclusions regarding the relative effectiveness of different delivery modalities.
Objectives
The primary aim is to estimate the relative eff...
Autistic people demonstrate poor outcomes on objective measures of wellbeing, yet research centring lived experience provides a more nuanced picture. There is growing support for person-centred, holistic and community approaches to enhancing wellbeing for autistic people. Social prescribing may be one such approach. This qualitative study explored...
There is a pressing need to prevent and address youth crime and violence owing to its prevalence, harms and cost to society. Interventions with proven effectiveness in doing this exist. Adopting and adapting them in new contexts is potentially cost-effective. However, more research is needed into how to make adaptations that enhance intervention im...
Child poverty is associated with poorer physical and mental health, negative educational outcomes and adverse long-term social and psychological consequences, all of which impact on service demand and expenditure. Until now, however, prevention and early intervention practice has tended to focus on enhancing inter-parental relationships and parenti...
Aim
The present study aimed to investigate barriers to healthcare and their relationships to social and emotional well-being and intersectional inequalities for autistic adults during COVID-19 restrictions in the UK.
Background
Autistic adults experience severe health inequalities and report more barriers to accessing health services compared to o...
Addressing youth violence is a public health priority given its prevalence, harms and costs to society. Services designed to prevent or reduce youth violence exist. However, their effectiveness depends on youth engaging with them. To our knowledge, there is no overview of the evidence on how to support this process. This article therefore aims to i...
There is a social gradient to the determinants of health; low socioeconomic status (SES) has been linked to reduced educational attainment and employment prospects, which in turn affect physical and mental wellbeing. One goal of preventive interventions, such as parenting programs, is to reduce these health inequalities by supporting families with...
Improving child and adolescent mental health requires the careful development and rigorous testing of interventions and delivery methods. This includes universal school-based mindfulness training, evaluated in the My Resilience in Adolescence (MYRIAD) trial reported in this special edition. While discovering effective interventions through randomis...
Objective: The aim of the study was to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of a therapeutic parenting program that targets parents of children aged 6 to 11 years identified as having behavioral and emotional difficulties. The intervention comprises two parts, delivered sequentially: a 10-12-week group-based program for all parents, and on...
The last decade has seen a proliferation of online registries of evidence-based interventions designed to improve child and youth psychosocial outcomes. The purpose of these resources is typically to help decision-makers make sense of the evidence and thereby inform their decision-making about investment in interventions. Most registries are underp...
Adults on the autism spectrum are affected by health disparities which significantly reduce life expectancy and experience barriers to accessing healthcare. Social prescribing is a holistic approach that diverts patients from primary care to health‐enhancing activities in communities. However, there has been a lack of research attention to how auti...
Background
Primary care trainees are traditionally taught to use a consultation model which focuses on eliciting the patients’ main reason for consulting “today”. As the number of patients with multi-morbidity increases, this approach is often inappropriate or unhelpful. Patients can be left without an understanding of their interacting health issu...
UK general practitioner (GP) trainees are taught a consultation model which elicits the patients' main reason for consulting 'today'. This approach will often miss important issues for the increasing number of patients with multimorbidity. We developed the SHERPA model as a person-centred biopsychosocial framework for consulting patients with multi...
This chapter reports the results of administering the Communities That Care Youth Survey (CTC-YS) to a very large school-based British national representative sample of 14,445 students aged 11–16. This survey is unique not only in being based on a large national sample of schools but also in its extensive measurement of risk and protective factors...
There can be a tendency for investigators to disregard or explain away null or negative results in prevention science trials. Examples include not publicizing findings, conducting spurious subgroup analyses, or attributing the outcome post hoc to real or perceived weaknesses in trial design or intervention implementation. This is unhelpful for seve...
Objective
The aim of the study was to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of a therapeutic parenting program that targets parents of children aged 6 to 11 years identified as having behavioral and emotional difficulties. The intervention comprises two parts, delivered sequentially: a 10-12-week group-based program for all parents, and one...
The study, a two-arm, randomized controlled, parallel group, superiority trial, aimed to evaluate the implementation and effectiveness of a 12-month one-to-one volunteer mentoring program designed to improve behavioral and emotional outcomes in children aged 5 to 11 years who have teacher- and parent/carer-reported behavioral difficulties. Particip...
The study evaluated the implementation fidelity and effectiveness of KiVa, an evidence-based program that aims to prevent and address bullying in schools, with a particular emphasis on changing the role of bystanders. The study was a two-arm waitlist control cluster randomized controlled trial in which 22 primary schools (clusters) (N = 3214 studen...
This is the protocol for a Campbell review. The primary aim is to estimate the relative efficacy of different modes of CBT delivery compared with control conditions for reducing depressive symptoms in adolescents. The secondary aim is to compare the different modes of delivery with regards to intervention completion/attrition (used as a proxy for i...
This chapter summarizes evidence on (i) the prevalence and effects on the unborn and newborn infant of exposure to teratogenic substances such as tobacco, alcohol, or substances during pregnancy, and (ii) what works during the perinatal period in terms of universal and targeted interventions for smoking cessation, and preventing and treating alcoho...
The effect of the environment on a child’s development starts in the womb. Many studies have shown that if the mother is stressed, anxious, or depressed during pregnancy, this increases the risk of a range of physical and neurodevelopmental problems for the child, even after allowing for relevant confounders. There is also strong evidence concernin...
Background:
There is a need to build the evidence base of early interventions to promote children's health and development in the UK. Chance UK is a voluntary sector organisation based in London that delivers a 12-month mentoring programme for primary school children identified by teachers and parents as having behavioural and emotional difficulti...
Background:
There is a need to build the evidence base of early interventions promoting children's health and development in the UK. Malachi Specialist Family Support Services ('Malachi') is a voluntary sector organisation based in the UK that delivers a therapeutic parenting group programme called Inspiring Futures to parents of children identifi...
Across Europe many states are experiencing severe pressures on public services, both from escalating need and from diminishing budgets. As a result, there is increasing interest in understanding how much is spent on services for children and to what effect. All government departments and selected voluntary organisations in Northern Ireland were ask...
This chapter focuses on programme fidelity in relation to parenting interventions. It discusses the importance of fidelity, outlines strategies for promoting fidelity, and emphasises fidelity and evidence-based parenting programmes. Two major barriers to high fidelity are intervention complexity and a lack of fidelity-facilitation strategies, such...
In their article ‘A marriage made in hell: Child protection meets early intervention’, Featherstone et al. (2014) question the value of early intervention in preventing or addressing early signs of child maltreatment. In this article, we summarise and critique their main contentions. Among the issues we cover are the difference between intervention...
Community coalitions are a strategy to coordinate activities and resources to prevent adolescent substance use and delinquent behaviour. They can bring together diverse community stakeholders to address a common goal and have the benefit of mobilising communities in prevention and health promotion initiatives.
The Communities That Care (CTC) approa...
The prognosis for children with early-onset conduct disorder is poor. Conduct disorder also has a social cost for families and communities, and an economic cost for society through the increased use of health, education, social, legal and detention services. In this study, the Incredible Years (IY) BASIC programme was delivered to parents of pre-sc...
There are a growing number of school-based interventions designed to promote children’s social and emotional learning. One such intervention, PATHS (Promoting Alternative Thinking Strategies), was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial involving 5074 pupils aged 4–6 years at baseline in 56 primary schools across a large city in the UK. The prog...
Background
Bullying refers to verbal, physical or psychological aggression repeated over time that is intended to cause harm or distress to the victims who are unable to defend themselves. It is a key public health priority owing to its widespread prevalence in schools and harmful short- and long-term effects on victims’ well-being. There is a need...
3. There is growing acknowledgement of the limitations of single system interventions (e.g. classroom-based curricula) and the need to intervene simultaneously in other systems (e.g. working with families and communities) (e.g. Shonkoff, 2010; Langford et al., 2014). There is some evidence of the impact of multi-faceted approaches, but more evaluat...
Background:
Secure attachment is associated with optimal outcomes across all domains in childhood, and both insecure and disorganised attachment are associated with a range of later psychopathologies. Insecure and disorganised attachment are common, particularly in disadvantaged populations, pointing to the need to identify effective methods of ad...
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to describe how and why school-based programmes to prevent or reduce bullying involve parents, and what impact involving parents has on bullying.
Design/methodology/approach
– A review of relevant literature, in particular systematic reviews and meta-analyses.
Findings
– The logic of involving parents in sch...
This chapter focuses on the objective-subjective debate in defining and measuring child well-being. It starts by outlining the underlying philosophical perspectives and how this is reflected practically in conceptual and policy frameworks for child well-being. Particular attention is paid to the concepts of outcomes and risk and protective factors....
Introduction
Evidence-based family skills training and parenting programs can improve the well-being of children and families significantly. However, their market penetration is poor. When they are adopted, services often struggle with recruitment and retention, particularly with so-called ‘hard to reach’ families. Such programs often jar with cul...
Realising Ambition is a UK-wide initiative that is investing £25million in a portfolio of 25 prevention and early intervention projects aimed at 10-14 year-olds and targeting pathways into offending. Projects receive support over 3-5 years to replicate ‘model’ interventions or to enable ‘promising’ interventions to develop their evidence-base throu...
Blueprints is a publicly accessible online database of evidence-based programmes covering multiple outcome areas across developmental stages from infancy to early adulthood. Blueprints programmes must have been tested by at least one good randomised controlled trial or two good quasi-experimental studies, with a preponderance of evidence demonstrat...
Introduction:
Data on the well-being of children and young people is central to many efforts to prioritise outcomes, risk and protective factors for improvement and to guide the selection and implementation of evidence-based programmes. However, whilst methodologies exist for collecting these data on broad populations of children (e.g. Communitie...
The influence of international governmental organisations (IGOs) on child welfare policy and practice in individual sovereign states is little explored. This article sets out the nature of these bodies’ main work with children. It then considers the mechanisms through which they seek to influence national child welfare policy and practice and the e...
Evidence-based programs (EBPs) are increasingly being implemented in children's services agencies in developed countries. However, this trend is meeting resistance from some researchers, policy makers and practitioners. In this article we appraise the main critiques, focusing on scientific, ideological, cultural, organizational and professional arg...
The Birmingham Brighter Futures strategy was informed by epidemiological data on child well-being and evidence on "what works," and included the implementation and evaluation of three evidence-based programmes in regular children's services systems, as well as an integrated prospective cost-effectiveness analysis (reported elsewhere). A randomised...
When evidence-based parenting programs are implemented in real-world settings they often fail to produce the results shown in efficacy trials. One reason for this is difficulties in engaging parents. This paper identifies lessons from a review of literature on engaging parents in parenting programs and presents a case study of the implementation of...
Four universal principles for developing and sustaining socially inclusive human service delivery
A framework for ensuring that evidence-based parenting programmes are socially inclusive Discussion paper – August 2012 Professional Practice Board
The presentation was given at the launch conference for the British Psychological Society paper “Technique is not enough: a framework for ensuring evidence based parenting programmes are socially inclusive” held at Middlesex University in September 2012. The paper is a summary of the BPS document and it’s findings in terms of good practice and the...
This article describes the Blueprints database of evidence-based programmes (EBPs) and its potential application in children's services in European countries. It outlines relevant aspects of the European context, including a tendency to be skeptical about programmes imported from the US, and the need for a pan-European source of information about E...
Lots of child well-being data is collected but it is rarely exploited fully. In this article we set out the data that directors and service commissioners in children’s services need and methods to help them analyse it optimally. Using a case example we show how this will help with critical but complex tasks, such as choosing which outcomes to addre...
Measuring child well-being is an important basis for planning needs-led children’s services and charting their impact on outcomes.
The quality of this work in the UK varies widely and little of it gets used in policy and practice. This article examines
an attempt to develop and implement a new instrument to address these problems. The setting is an...
GrayMel, PlathDebbie and WebbStephen A. (2009), Evidence-based Social Work: A Critical Stance. Abingdon: Routledge. £22.99, pp. 216, pbk. - Volume 40 Issue 2 - NICK AXFORD
Axford N. Children and global social policy: exploring the impact of international governmental organisations
International governmental organisations (IGOs) seek to influence child welfare policy and practice in individual sovereign states. But do they succeed and, if so, in what way? This article outlines the nature of selected IGOs' work, explor...
The measurement of child well-being in the UK for needs-led service planning and outcome assessment has tended to be poor.
This article sets out the broad results from the application of a new methodology to assess the health and development of
children aged 0–18 in a large local authority in England. It discusses briefly how these data helped info...
Interest in evidence-based programmes and the science underpinning them has mushroomed in the UK and Ireland in recent years as policy-makers and senior managers seek tried-and-tested methods of improving child well-being. This article examines whether study tours, a form of experiential learning, can help to promote evidence-based policy and pract...
The measurement of ‘service’ in children's services is highly varied. We do not know in a meaningful sense what services children and families get. This paper sets out why it is important to measure services well. It outlines the dimensions of ‘service’, how they have been measured in research, policy and practice contexts, and the strengths and we...
The concept of social exclusion has a high profile in children's services in the UK. But how does a focus on exclusion change the way in which services seek to define vulnerable children and help them? In particular, how does it compare with (i) a risk and protective factor model and associated attempts to meet need and (ii) efforts to tackle pover...
Recent years have witnessed a revival in the popularity of measuring need in developing and developed countries as a precursor to distributing health, education, housing, social security and social care resources. The concept of needs-led children's services has particular purchase in England and Wales, where there is a legal requirement for local...
Children's services in England and Wales are legally required to determine the nature and extent of children's needs in their areas as a precursor to providing needs-led services. However, few needs assessments are ever published. This article analyses 83 such reports conducted between 1999 and 2007 in two local authorities in England (one urban, o...
ABSTRACT‘Well-being’ has entered policy rhetoric in children's services in the UK and other Western developed countries as a companion to other buzzwords of recent years. In order to improve children's well-being, we need not only a better understanding of what it is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being...
Recent years have seen a growing level of concern about children's behaviour and emotional well-being in Western developed countries, in particular the United Kingdom. This has given rise to a plethora of parenting programmes and increasing attention to children's nutrition. These developments are rooted partly in evidence that some parenting inter...
