Provide a clear and indicative title for your proposed research: it is essential that your title is concise and contains some key words that indicate

A growing body of research suggests that pets have beneficial effects on children's socioemotional health, including quality of life and self-esteem (Purewal et al., 2017). However, in relation to anxiety/depression symptomatology, literature is surprisingly sparse and reveals conflicting findings.



Importantly, the relationship with a pet appears more influential than ownership alone for psychological health. Most adolescents self-report strong attachments to pets (Hawkins et al., 2017); indeed, when understood within attachment theory, there can be features of secure attachment in child-pet relationships that have similarities to human-human attachments (Carr & Rockett, 2017). Pets may also directly confer benefits through provision of companionship or emotional reciprocity (Muldoon et al., 2019) or via physiological mechanisms (Beetz et al., 2012); indirectly, pets might act as 'social lubricants' (Wood et al., 2015). Despite this, the impact of pet attachment on mental health has hardly been explored in the literature. In particular, there is no published literature using qualitative methodology to explore adolescents' experiences in this area. Further research is required to understand how multispecies attachment relationships within the family system together influence adolescents' mental health.



This unique project will therefore address this gap, targeting early adolescence (11-14 years). The project aims to investigate the role that pets play in adolescents' experiences of anxiety/depression, using quantitative and qualitative methods. The following research questions will be addressed:

What associations are there between pet ownership, pet attachment and self-reported anxiety/depression symptomatology in early adolescence, and what underlying mechanisms explain these associations?

What are early adolescents' lived experiences of the role that pets play in day-to-day lives with anxiety/depression symptomatology?



The design will involve two phases and the sample will consist of 1st/2nd year secondary school pupils. Participants will provide demographic information and complete two questionnaires on each of: anxiety/depression symptomatology, pet attachment and social support. Quantitative analysis will investigate relationships between pet attachment and anxiety/depression symptomatology while controlling for potentially confounding demographic/social variables. Mediation/moderation analyses will investigate indirect mechanisms and potential moderating variables. The purpose of this phase is two-fold; to provide data to answer research question one, and to facilitate selection of phase two participants.



Phase two will have two parts and will be conducted with a subsample of participants. Participants will be selected from those who self-report current pet ownership, clinically significant depression/anxiety symptomatology and above-average pet attachment during phase one. First, semi-structured interviews will be conducted using a framework of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to allow exploration of lived experiences. Interviews will explore: participants' relationships with pets; day-to-day anxiety/depression experiences and the role/meaning of pets within this, including during COVID-19 and within the family system; and coping/support. Subsequently, interview participants will be invited to document everyday interactions with their pets in the family environment using multimedia digital diaries (narratives, films and/or photos) as an innovative means of implementing photovoice (Volpe, 2018). These representations of participants' relationships with pets will facilitate understanding of patterns within multispecies attachments in the family system that have a role in anxiety/depression symptomatology. The purpose of phase two is therefore to utilise mixed qualitative methods to explore research question two