Health Promotion and Education Research

This Health Promotion and Education team focusses on applied research investigating ways to support children and adolescents with behavioural, social development, physical and mental health needs; including children with chronic disease and disability, Aboriginal young people, and those who have social development difficulties and mental health problems in both online and offline environments.

Some of this team’s research objectives include:

• Working collaboratively with policymakers and practitioners from health, education, and other sectors as co-researchers to improve development and learning outcomes from service delivery that effectively meets the needs of young children and their families experiencing adversity.
• Developing and testing interventions to help children and young people with social and emotional difficulties, especially those with chronic conditions such as cystic fibrosis to enable and support positive behavioural outcomes.
• Continuing to enhance our Friendly Schools Plus whole-school social and emotional intervention especially for higher risk groups of children and adolescents.
• Understanding children’s and adolescents’ evolving experiences in today’s digital environments and co-design and test policies and practices to reduce risk and promote digital literacy and other positive cyber behaviours.
• Empirically testing guidelines to support evidence-based decision making that promotes and enables optimal social-emotional health for children and adolescents.
• Improving children’s health and wellbeing by creating healthy food and physical activity environments’

All of these objectives are most successfully achieved with active community engagement as well as collaboration between industry, professions, government agencies and the community.

We are working hard to ensure these relationships are nurtured to enable and strengthen the capacity of young people, families, teachers and service providers to co-develop and implement effective evidence-based policy and practice.

The team is also a strong advocate for children’s and adolescents' health, wellbeing and learning, based on quality evidence of what works, for whom and under what conditions.

Team Highlights

• Mr David Ansell was appointed CoLab Co-Director, Policy
• Dr Gina Trapp was the recipient of 5 research awards in 2017. These included the  ‘2017 Early Career Research Excellence Award’ from the Faculty of Health and Medical Science at The University of Western Australia ($1,500), the ‘Early-Mid Career Research Contribution Award’ from the Telethon Kids Institute ($5,000), for contributions to the wider community and research field, the ‘Emerging Leader Award’ from the Telethon Kids Institute (one of 12 people chosen to participate in the 2018 Telethon Kids Institute’s ‘Emerging Leaders Program‘) and the ‘International award for Urban Design Excellence’ (a team award) from the Centre for Active Design in New York for the RESIDE Project: a ground-breaking longitudinal study on the health impacts of the government’s Liveable Neighbourhood’s urban design policy.
• Dr Chris Brennan-Jones was awarded a NHMRC Early Career Fellowship
• The Supre Foundation Bullying Education and Prevention Resource Kit developed by the HPER team was distributed to 340,000 families through headspace and the Supre stores, plus 2000 digital downloads.
• Prof Donna Cross was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to the USA for 6 weeks to promote the HPER research team’s digital research and to investigate the effects of technology on children’s development and learning. She was also a Finalist, in the Western Australian Scientist of the Year