The Children and Families Mental Health and Psychosocial Support Resource Collection

Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Psychosocial Wellbeing Across the Life Course. Towards an Integrated Conceptual Framework for Research and Evidence Generation

The paper on Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Psychosocial Wellbeing Across the Life Course aims to inform research on child and adolescent mental health. It incorporates children’s developmental stages and the dynamic environment in which they live and grow. Informed by a review of existing theoretical frameworks on mental health and child development, it presents a framework that integrates elements of the socio-ecological model; the life course approach; the social determinants of health approach; and Innocenti Report Card’s Worlds of Influence Framework. Overall, this framework can be applied to support research and efforts to generate evidence, as well as to test and improve measures and methods for child and adolescent mental health.

Ethical Research Involving Children

This Ethical Research Involving Children (ERIC project) is an international project motivated by a shared international concern that the human dignity of children is honoured, and that their rights and well-being are respected in all research, regardless of context. To help meet this aim, the compendium acts as a tool to generate critical thinking, reflective dialogue and ethical decision-making, and to contribute to improved research practice with children across different disciplines, theoretical and methodological standpoints, and international contexts. Emphasis is placed on the need for a reflexive approach to research ethics that fosters dynamic, respectful relationships between researchers, children, families, communities, research organizations, and other stakeholders. Hence, the content of this ERIC compendium moves beyond prescriptive approaches to encourage a more critical engagement with ethical issues and contemporary research practices across the multiple sectors and national/international contexts in which these take place. ERIC has been developed to support all researchers, individuals and organizations who are involved in research that is undertaken with, or potentially impacts on, children. This includes researchers, all members of any research team, research organizations, other stakeholders and research ethics review committees.

The Right of Children to Participate in Public Decision-Making Processes

The Right of Children to Participate in Public Decision-Making Processes is a report commissioned by the Child Rights Governance team at Save the Children and was undertaken by the Centre for Children’s Rights and Family Law at University College Cork and the Centre for Children’s Rights at Queen’s University Belfast. It brings together the research literature and the experience of civil society organisations working around the world to promote effective engagement with and participation by children and young people in decisions by national and local governments. Drawing on examples from a variety of countries representing diverse economic, social, political and cultural circumstances, it identifies the building blocks that are conducive to the effective participation of children in public decision-making.