We spoke to Eva Sprecher – an Early Career Research working on the ReThink Programme at UCL – about her background, her project, and how she is disseminating her findings in an engaging and informative way.
Tell us about yourself and your journey as an Early Career Researcher – how did you end up working on this project?
Eva: “I’m a Research Fellow at UCL working on the AMHDM ReThink Programme. I studied Psychology for my undergraduate degree before training and then working as a secondary school teacher, teaching Physics. As any teacher will tell you, I spent a lot of my time supporting children and young people with their mental health and wellbeing.
"I also worked with a lot of care-experienced young people, and my feeling was that there was a gap in the school’s provision for them. I therefore decided to do an MSc degree at UCL focusing on Developmental Psychology and Clinical Practice in an effort to learn more about this gap, and at the same time was involved in setting up the not-for-profit residential children’s home provider, Lighthouse Pedagogy Trust. I realised I loved doing research so decided to do a part-time PhD, also at UCL, whilst working as a Research Officer on Reflective Fostering, a study exploring how a group-based programme helping foster carers supported young people’s mental health. ReThink felt like the natural next step to understanding more about how to support the mental health of young people living in care.”
What was the background to the project, and what is the challenge that you and your team are trying to address?
Eva: “We know that children living in care are much more likely – up to five times in fact – to have mental health challenges than children who are not care-experienced. A lot of research has described this problem, but falls short of identifying the key things which make the biggest difference to care-experienced young people’s outcomes. This is what the ReThink programme is seeking to address by investigating care-experienced young people’s experiences of two major transition points in any young person’s life: moving from primary to secondary school, and turning 18.”
How did you approach this element of the project, and what did you find?
Eva: “One thing we noticed early on in this project, relates to a questionnaire known as the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ). The SDQ is generally the only questionnaire local authorities use when looking at the mental health of young people living in care as a statutory requirement. The SDQ is one of our core mental health measures on ReThink, and when we looked at the SDQ alone, you’d often think the young person in question was completely fine, whereas actually the SDQ was failing to capture some symptoms of anxiety, depression, and PTSD. We investigated this further and found this to be a common and concerning pattern. While the SDQ remains a very useful tool for detecting more general difficulties, our findings suggest nearly half of children with possible clinical anxiety, depression or PTSD symptoms are missed by using the SDQ alone.”
If you are being led by the priorities of the people your research impacts the most, you'll have a much easier time in landing your message.
Eva Sprecher
ReThink Programme at UCL
Thinking about how to present these findings, how did you approach producing your poster?
Eva: “We were privileged to have a group of young, care-experienced advisors on this project. We ran one session where our advisors wrote postcards to key stakeholders, such as all their foster carers, focusing on the learnings from the research and what they wanted the actions to be. This informed the production of our poster as there was a lot of overlap between our research and what the young people were saying.”
Was there one key message that you wanted people to remember after looking at your poster?
Eva: “The current statutory approaches used in the UK for screening care-experienced young people’s mental health are likely not good enough, and these young people deserve a robust, evidence-based approach.”
Do you have any final tips for colleagues wanting to share messages from their adolescent mental health research in an engaging and memorable way?
Eva: “If you are being led by the priorities of the people your research impacts the most, you’ll have a much easier time in landing your message. This was also very much a team effort, from undergraduate students working on the data to Principle Investigators investing their time and energy into the project – research is not a solo activity.”