Human Capability

The Human Capability Team focuses on population mechanisms that underpin child health, social and emotional wellbeing, and child development more generally.

In this team we address fundamental mechanisms that contribute to social inequalities and social gradients across a range of outcomes across the life course. Families are the principal societal institution involved in the transmission of disadvantage between generations and over the life course: the challenges are to identify the mechanisms underlying these processes and to develop policies and practices to reduce disadvantage and minimise harms.

The team works across a range of projects. The ARC Centre of Excellence for Children and Families over the Life Course (Life Course Centre or LCC) is a major project within the team. The Life Course Centre is a national centre funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence Scheme and administered through the University of Queensland. The Human Capability Team is involved in the Life Course Centre via our association with The University of Western Australia, which is one of four collaborating Universities that comprise the centre. Human Capability Team members participate in a range of funded research projects within the Life Course Centre.

The Life Course Centre aims to address the points above to develop innovative solutions to reduce disadvantage. The Human Capability Team will advance basic, applied and translational research to reduce intergenerational and long-term disadvantage. Through the maturation of longitudinal datasets and advanced data integration, the team will follow the journeys of Australian families over generations and across the life course creating the opportunity to provide evidence for new policies to combat disadvantage and make a real difference to the lives of children and families.

The central strategies of the team include:

• Identifying the principal causes of deep disadvantage in Australian families and the key threat points in a person’s life course so that public resources can be directed appropriately towards pre-identified risks.
• Examining the impacts of remedial public policy and public/private program solutions to disadvantage.
• Implementing population-level social intervention to evaluate the effectiveness of targeted solutions to reduce disadvantage on multiple levels.

Team Highlights

The Human Capability Team conducts leading edge research in population child development, mental health and wellbeing and education. We work closely with policy makers, service organisations, service providers and the community to improve outcomes for children and young people, especially children who experience deep and persistent disadvantage. Our research informs action to address the social determinants of inequalities in child development. We address fundamental mechanisms that contribute to social inequalities and social gradients across a range of outcomes across the life course. Our team brings very specific and highly specialised collaborations, research networks and funding to key human development studies- most notably relevant to Australia. The work of the team is notable for its:

1. Explicit population focus;
2. Deployment of descriptive epidemiology, survey methodology, cross-sectional studies, and longitudinal studies coupled with longitudinal data linkage; and,
3. Involvement in and leadership of national efforts in establishing and maintaining data sources of high policy relevance.
4. Intense use of inter-disciplinary collaborations.

Key achievements over the past 5 years include:

Every Day Counts

Commissioned by the Australian Government Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations (DEEWR), this landmark study made novel use of population data collected as part of the routine administrative processes of the WA Department of Education and represents the first time these data have been used in a systematic study of these aims. The data and approach have enabled us to demonstrate the relationship between attendance and achievement and how this is affected by aspects of disadvantage.

Young Minds Matter – the Second National Survey of Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Wellbeing

More than 6000 Australian families were selected randomly and interviewed as part of the Young Minds Matter survey, which looked at the emotional and behavioural development of children and young people aged between 4 and 17 years. Funded by the Australian Government Department of Health and conducted by the University of Western Australia (UWA) through the Telethon Kids Institute, in collaboration with Roy Morgan Research, this $7m study was designed to produce national statistical estimates of mental health morbidity for children and adolescents. Extensive data integration augmented the face-to-face interviews producing a rich profile of information.

Evaluation of Headspace – the National Youth Mental Health Foundation

The Australian Government Department of Health funded a consortium of researchers to conduct the second evaluation of the headspace program, following a competitive tender process in 2012. The consortium was led by a team from the Social Policy Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, and included several researchers from the TKI Human Capability Team as well as researchers from the Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre at Curtin University. headspace was established by the Australian Government in 2006 with a primary focus on the mental health and wellbeing of young Australians aged 12–25 years, and funding at over $100m per annum by 2015. A large and complex project running over 3-years, the final evaluation report led to a significant restructure of this national service platform for youth mental health.

Kick the Habit: a smoking cessation pilot study for people with mental illness

There are over 1-million smokers in Australia with a mental illness. People with a mental illness smoke at much higher rates than the general population, spend more on tobacco products, have greater trouble quitting, and die earlier from smoking related illness. This project was conducted in partnership with Neami National, a community mental health service, to test a new consumer-focused method of smoking cessation in collaboration with Human Capability Team researchers. The results are soon to be published but show promising signs for intervention with this hard-to-assist group.