For detailed listings of major projects within this programme, please click here.
We need methodological innovation to study such issues as the 'careers' of children in public care; the delivery of social support to families with children at risk or in need; the assessment of social dysfunction; and the potential benefits of organizational consultancy for the management of Health and Social Care. For example, it is necessary to study interventions in large, and typically conflictual, family and multi-professional networks. The research will guide organizational development and service delivery, as well as the clinical assessment of mental stress in individuals and carers.
This Programme combines two formerly separate but complementary areas of existing work: a) the development of new methodologies and research instruments for assessing complex social interactions in the delivery of psycho-social and organizational services, and b) a range of studies in which we employ such methods to evaluate work in the context of Health and Social Care, and assess the impact of therapeutic/consultancy interventions. We have special experience of consultancy and other interventions with children in public care and in placement networks. The care of vulnerable children is a major focus.
The overall objective is to advance understanding of psycho-social processes and interactions, including organizational functioning, as they affect and are affected by complex, multi-professional clinical interventions. A second objective is to strengthen existing and to develop new theoretical and methodological foundations for research of this kind. Thirdly, we shall assess the impact of interventions based on such understanding in contexts of Health and Social Care.
Publications 2000/2001 = 33
External funding
1999/2000 = £27,000;
2000/2001 = £16,000;
2001/2002 = £79,000
This programme integrates a number of established strands of research within the Trust, and draws upon the core clinical, consultancy and training activity of the institution:
We have a substantial collaborative grant (£371,991) from PPP to evaluate the outcomes of early Home Start interventions. This is an important instance of how we are able to apply measures of social, psychiatric and psychological functioning in both adults and children to a context of intervention that may prove to have a significant impact on preventing morbidity. Home Start involves training for scheme co-ordinators and volunteers to provide a service to women in pregnancy and/or soon after the birth of their children. Controlled measures will include those of child health and development, social support, involvement with services, and family stress, over the first year of infants' lives.
With regard to methodological innovation, we have provided the major psychometric expertise for the development of an influential measurement system for assessing adults' psychological state, the Clinical Outcomes in Routine Evaluation. Importantly, this is also a measure for psychotherapy outcome. The CORE system is currently being developed as a service management system for psychological therapy services. In addition, measures of idiographic and qualitative characteristics of individuals and systems are often needed for work in this area (eg, to assess placements of looked-after children); we have experience of devising such measures and validity checks, and we shall continue to develop this line of work.
Our clinical studies incorporating new measures for the study of psycho-social processes in children in care will come to fruition in the next two years. We are exploring the Object Relations Test to measure change following individual and family therapy, elaborating on a novel measure called the Personal Relatedness Profile for the psychodynamic assessment of interpersonal functioning, and evolving new outcome measures with respect to psychotherapy and counselling.
The imminent appointment of a Professor of Child Psychotherapy to a newly established post will considerably strengthen our capacity to develop the area of work with respect to vulnerable children, and to attract new partners and external funding.
This Programme has a particular need of Priorities and Needs support to complement our external funding. A major reason is that the innovative nature of our work, and its emphasis on Health and Social Care in real-life contexts, means that funding is difficult to secure from major funding bodies. The research often falls between the respective domains of 'academic' and applied, and between clinical and 'social', funding.
We intend to build upon recent success, in seeking to attract further non-commercial external funding for this Programme ( for example, we have recently submitted an application for substantial funding for the treatment of looked-after adolescents) .
