Projects Funded in Round 2

Our 2nd funding round closed in September 2020. See below for the 7 exciting and innovative projects we are supporting! Our 3rd and final funding round will be launched in January 2022.

• Delphi study with young people, families and professionals to prioritise focus, content and digital tools in the co-development of digital tools to support young people with long-term health conditions

• Hacking the system: Young people’s views on the potential and risk of Internet of Things in their school

• Supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships

• The negotiation of pleasure, risk and harm in young people’s digital lives: A scoping project on the mental health and wellbeing implications of online ‘transgressive’ behaviours

• Empowering pre-teens online through a digital ethics of care framework

• A digital ‘Talking Tool’ for Young People

• Third Culture Kids’ Digital Environments and Mental Health

Delphi study with young people, families and professionals to prioritise focus, content and digital tools in the co-development of digital tools to support young people with long-term health conditions

Lead applicant: Dr Angeliki Bogosian, City, University of London

Co-applicants/partners:
Dr Kathleen Mulligan, City, Unversity of London
Dr Michelle Heys, East London NHS Foundation Trust, London, and University College London
Polly Livermore, Great Ormond Street Hospital
Suzy Gray, Great Ormond Street Hospital

Grant awarded: £9928

Duration: 12 months

Project summary
One in ten children will develop a long-term condition that limits their daily life substantially and demands extended care, supervision and self-management strategies. These conditions include diabetes, neurodegenerative conditions, cancer, sickle cell disease, asthma, and chronic pain, among others. Children and adolescents with long-term conditions have significantly higher rates of mental health problems compared to ‘healthy’ children. Chronic physical health concerns in young people also have a significant impact on parental stress and family functioning. The World Health Organisation calls for more research into potential interventions to support young people with a long-term condition. Little is known about the potential for digital technology to support good mental health for young people with a long-term condition.

Our overall aim is to prioritise the focus, content and tools with which to co-develop a digital intervention to support the mental health of young people with long term conditions. Our objectives are:

1. (FOCUS) to identify and prioritise key mental health themes to be addressed.

2. (CONTENT) to identify the most effective psychological techniques and interventions to be incorporated.

3. (TOOLS): to identify and prioritise digital tools (e.g. website, mobile app, social media, virtual reality) with which to co-develop a mental health intervention.

Hacking the system: Young people’s views on the potential and risk of Internet of Things in their school

Lead applicant: Dr Katherine Easton, University of Sheffield

Co-applicant: Dr Victoria Betton, Mindwave Ventures

Grant awarded: £26,762

Duration: 12 months

Project summary
The primary aim of the project is to understand young people’s (YPs) experience of the Internet of Things (IoT) specifically in a secondary school environment through two qualitative co-creation hacks.

The secondary aim is to share knowledge on this topic with a range of stakeholders and ultimately apply for follow on funding to progress practice in this area.

The project builds on previous experiential work where adult MH service users explored IoT and created use cases and identified barriers. The outputs were a number of storyboards and an animation showing the vital importance of involving service users in the development and implementation of IoT solutions. The project was led by the University of Sheffield in collaboration with the University of Oxford through a Research England Connecting Capabilities Funded project, Pitch-In.

Main objectives:

1. Undertake participatory work with YP who are affected by MH issues or who may, in turn, experience unintended negative consequences of the adoption of IoT in their school.

2. Co-create ideal prototype IoT systems.

3. Have an expert adult/youth panel appraise the system/s.

4. Disseminate the findings as slide decks, blueprint, animation and an end of project webinar.

Supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships

Lead applicant: Dr Rose Capdevila, The Open University

Co-applicants/partners:
Dr Lisa Lazard, The Open University
Dr Charlotte Dann, University of Northampton
Prof Abigail Locke, Keele University
Dr Sandra Roper, University of Bedfordshire
Sophie Linington, Parent Zone

Grant awarded: £28,640

Duration: 9 months

Project Summary
This project will underpin our research programme on supporting children’s mental health through familial online relationships. Within this broader trajectory, this proof of concept study will ask: How do young people make sense of their parents’/caregivers’ online sharing? Research has highlighted the critical role of everyday interactions and relationships in producing and maintaining nurturing environments that support children and young people’s development and mental health. Whilst research in the area of family digital practices is burgeoning, the focus has almost exclusively been on problematising children’s practices; when parents are the object of study, the focus has been primarily on ‘sharenting’, rights, ethics and privacy (Lazard et al, 2019). This proof of concept study will explore how young people’s experiences of well-being and mental health are affected by adult led social media practices, along with the affordances of different platforms, within the wider family ecosystem. Attention will be on supporting children’s mental health rather than addressing mental illness. The future research funding bid, underpinned by this pilot, will investigate the dynamics of family online practices, harnessing elements of existing online practices to support constructive and protective engagements within the family on and offline through the development of guidance and design principles.

Reference
Lazard, L., Capdevila, R., Dann, C., Locke, A and Roper, S. (2019). Sharenting: Pride, affect and the day to day politics of digital mothering. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 13(4), DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12443.

The negotiation of pleasure, risk and harm in young people’s digital lives: A scoping project on the mental health and wellbeing implications of online ‘transgressive’ behaviours

Lead applicant: Dr Bina Bhardwa, Birkbeck, University of London

Co-applicants/partners:
Prof Jessica Jacobson, Birkbeck, University of London
Gillian Hunter, Birkbeck, University of London
Prof Daniel Monk, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr Emily Setty, Surrey University
Dr Mini Tatlow-Golden, The Open University
Fiona Lacey, YoungMinds
Young Advisors, YoungMinds

Grant awarded: £24,170

Duration: 9 months

Project summary
Our project is scoping study on young people’s online ‘transgressive’ behaviours, such as ‘sexting’, cyberbullying, accessing extremist and pornographic material, posting images of sexual activity and drug-taking on social media, and gambling. Covid-19 has seen an intensified ‘shift to the digital’, but young people’s perspectives on these changes and associated ‘new norms’, and the impact on mental health and wellbeing, are largely unknown. Critical of top-down, outdated, official narratives that construct binaries of online risk and opportunity, we recognise young people’s agency in negotiating pleasure, risk and harm in their digital lives.

We will explore:

1. Impacts of Covid-19 on online 'transgressive' behaviours.

2. How young people variously draw and navigate boundaries between ‘healthy’/‘unhealthy’, ‘risky’/‘safe’, ‘moral’/‘immoral’, ‘illegal’/‘legal’, online behaviours; how conceptions of ‘fun’, ‘excitement’ and ‘pleasure’ intersect these boundaries.

3. Young people’s views on policy, practice and legal responses to online ‘transgressive’ behaviours, and on the language and concepts used in digital safety information and education.

4. How socio-structural factors (e.g. access to digital technologies and digital literacy) shape online behaviours.

5. We plan to use the findings and methodological insights arising from the scoping research to develop larger-scale work on mental health and wellbeing implications of online ‘transgressive’ behaviours.

Empowering pre-teens online through a digital ethics of care framework

Lead applicant: Dr Michelle O’Reilly, University of Leicester

Co-applicants/partners:
Sarah Adams, University of Leicester
Diane Levine, University of Leicester
Simon Genders, Safeguarding lead, Leicester City Council
Ann Davey, Chief Executive officer, Pathway schools

Grant awarded: £17,659

Duration: 5 months

Project summary
Our preliminary research with 11-18-year olds led to a novel ‘digital-ethics-of-care’ conceptual framework which prioritises children’s autonomy, empathy and caring practices online for mental health promotion and positive behaviour (O’Reilly et al., 2020). Our Adolescent Advisory Group (n=12) suggested this framework is equally important for pre-adolescents.

Our overarching aim is to explore whether this interdisciplinary, flexible theory of moral conduct online can be adapted for 10-11-year olds. We focus our energies on schools/peers; in digital societies, schools need new tools to address social issues. Evidence shows disconnects between moral reasoning and behaviour behind screens (Flores & James, 2013), negatively impacting the mental health of users and recipients.

We have four objectives:

1. Explore the relevance of the concept ‘digital-ethics-of-care’ to pre-adolescents.

2. Scope the benefits and challenges of a paired interview approach with children as researchers, using online data collection tools.

3. Test the feasibility of adapting co-production methods to an online space.

4. Co-produce several story-based moral scenarios with children for teachers to use in education and for us to use for a later larger-scale funding bid.

This provides a toolkit of methods and co-produced scenarios that have been quality-assured for use in developing educational outputs for schools.

References
O’Reilly, M. (2020). Social media and adolescent mental health: The good, the bad and the ugly. Journal of Mental Health, 29(2), 200-206

Flores, A., and James, C. (2013). Morality and ethics behind the screen: young people’s perspectives on digital life. New Media and Society, 15(6), 834-852

A digital ‘Talking Tool’ for Young People

Lead applicant: Dr Sara Tai, University of Manchester

Co-applicants/partners:
Dr Anamaria Churchman, University of Manchester
Patrick Bek, STEAMhouse, Birmingham City University
Young People from:
Stockport School, Broadoak School, Altrincham Grammar School for Girls, Wellington School

Grant awarded: £40,092

Duration: 12 months

Project summary
Although one in eight young people (YP) aged 5-19 experience mental health issues, only 25.2% gain access to specialist services. Half of those with mental health problems seek help from informal sources; usually family and friends, who report not feeling skilled to respond appropriately.

This project aims to address this need by developing a digital talking tool to facilitate YP receiving appropriate support from family and friends. Such a tool could positively affect interpersonal relationships and reduce emerging mental health issues.

We previously developed a paper-based communication tool for YP (11- 16 years) and their parents to facilitate helpful conversations targeting YP’s distress. Pilot work demonstrated potential for the tool to positively affect parentchild interactions, increase wellbeing and decrease distress (Churchman et al., 2020).

Our aim is to adapt the tool by creating a digital ‘app’ version which will increase ease of access and enable YP to use it with peers and other trusted adults. This will provide access to support in a way that fosters positive, destigmatising interactions with significant people in their lives. The tool facilitates helpful, guided conversations about mental health issues, with potential as a low cost and scalable approach that could be disseminated through schools.

References
Churchman, A., Mansell, W., & Tai, S. (2020). The development of a parent–child activity based on theprinciples of perceptual control theory. The Cognitive Behaviour Therapist, 13.

Churchman, A., Mansell, W., & Tai, S. (2020). A school-based case series to examine the feasibility andacceptability of a PCT-informed psychological intervention that combines client-led counselling (Method oflevels) and a parent–child activity (Shared goals). British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 1-16.

Churchman, A., Mansell, W., & Tai, S. (2020) Experiences of adolescents and their guardians with a schoolbased combined individual and dyadic intervention. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, In Press

Third Culture Kids’ Digital Environments and Mental Health

Lead applicant: Dr Laura Cariola, University of Edinburgh

Co-applicants/partners:
Dr Kareena McAloney-Kocaman, Glasgow Caledonian University
Dr Billy Lee, University of Edinburgh
Moira Leslie, Royal Caledonian Education Trust
Katie Rigg, Council of International Schools

Grant awarded: £40,037

Duration: 12 months

Project summary
The term “Third Culture Kid” (TCK) describes children whose parents are in globally mobile employment, such as members of the armed forces, missionaries, and intergovernmental employees (Pollock & Van Reken, 1999/2009). TCKs accompany their parents, resulting in a transnational lifestyle that is constantly in flux. As such, TCKs tend to have unstable in-person networks with often only their parents as a constant in their lives. To maintain a sense of belonging and connectivity with their peers who share similar lived experiences, TCKs largely rely on digital technologies, including social media. Using an online-facilitated community-based participatory approach to better understand a largely under-researched youth population, we aim to answer the following research questions:

• How do TCKs engage and negotiate the interplay between online and in-person support networks?

• Specifically, how do TCKs use and experience digital technology differently to mono-cultural children?

• How do TCKs perceive the risks and opportunities of using digital technology, and how can these risks be minimised and the benefits enhanced?

• How do TCKs experience the relationship between their use of digital technologies and their mental health?

• What training do families and professionals need to support TCKs’ safe use of digital technologies and positive mental health?