The Role of Network Effects In Pupils' Wellbeing Interventions - Irsa Ajmal, Professor Domenico Giacco, Colin Palmer

This project is based on improving mental wellbeing of pupils through school interventions. Professor Giacco and his research collaborators have been working on assessing wellbeing of a large number of pupils in secondary schools in the West Midlands. This project goes one step further and aims to redesign data collection methods to allow network-based analyses using the existing wellbeing census system.

We had a detailed consultation with the software developer for designing the required user interface (UI) that is user-friendly for pupils, teachers and helps us collect the desired data whilst complying with GDPR restrictions. Following the initial meeting with the software developer, we had a series of meetings with a multi-disciplinary group of academics with expertise in social science (Griffith and Ajmal), mental health research (Giacco), school-based research (Palmer) and Mathematics (Hill). We finalised our software requirements and the discussed with the developer to enable them to design the required UI. This was discussed in co-production and consultative workshops in schools including teachers, administrative staff, IT staff and pupils (years 8 and above). We obtained school pupils and staff feedback on the ease of usage, functionality and overall experience of the software UI for the survey as well as any potential concerns and/or suggestions to improve the platform.

The project achieved its primary aim of developing an implementable software to be added to a large scale wellbeing census (>15000 pupils) and allow research on how the effect of school based interventions propagate through school networks – the software will produce data which can be analysed through a complex contagion model.

The work and output generated by this project will enable multidisciplinary cutting edge science. This will involve mental health and public health researchers, mathematicians, social scientists to understand how networks facilitate the dissemination of positive and negative behaviours within schools. This understanding will enable the development and testing or more targeted and better evaluated public health and preventive interventions. It will also enable observational studies to understand the role of networks in social contagion in the spread of positive and negative behaviours within schools.

We plan to publicise this research on University platforms, such as under the “Social and Digital Psychiatry Projects”, Warwick Medical School and “Healthcare and Wellbeing” [research], Warwick Business School as well as on the webpages of Birmingham Women’s and Children NHS Foundation Trust. We are also planning to publish our initial findings through letters to the editor for relevant journals.