International Child Development Research Program

Our vision is to support families, communities, donors and governments to give children the best start in life, while also enhancing our international reputation through the conduct of policy relevant gold-standard research leading to high impact academic output and effective translation.

The scope of research is large, with studies being conducted locally in South Australia, across all jurisdictions in Australia, and multiple other countries (current active research in Laos, Tuvalu, Kiribati, China, Indonesia, Peru, India, Bulgaria and Tajikistan). Although expansive, the program of research is coherent and consistent with the vision; each research project aims to improve the health of children, with a particular focus on children in disadvantaged communities. The range of work covered within the program would include child health and nutrition, development, wellbeing, and education.

The overarching aim of all that we do is to reduce inequalities with a focus on emerging countries and vulnerable communities. The work takes a population health approach and focuses on a broad range of factors that impact on children’s health, nutrition, development, education and wellbeing across the ecological spectrum (i.e. from individual characteristics, family and home environment, community, service provision, and policy impact). Research activities include:

• Population wide monitoring of child health, stunting, and development in the early years and wellbeing in the middle years with a focus on enhancing and developing instruments as well as systems capacity to detect and respond to children’s poor development and social and emotional needs (international and national).
• Investigation of the mechanisms behind intergenerational poverty (for example, the contribution of home language exposure to intergenerational transmission of inequality).
• Further understanding the impact of early life experiences on trajectories of academic achievement and later cognitive and non-cognitive outcomes.
• Quantitatively evaluating the impact of interventions and programs on child health and development and developmental trajectories.
• Evaluating models of service delivery to inform system wide change, including economic estimations.