Health Promotion and Education Research

This 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.

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.