SOCITS: A SOCial sITuational Systems approach to measuring and modelling influences on adolescent mental health

This project will create a new method for researchers, counsellors, teachers, and young people to do research about adolescent mental health. It will also study how the method works, what training you need to use it, and how easy it is for researchers to learn the method.
Most mental health survey research asks questions about how individual young people feel in general, asking people if they feel stressed or lonely 'all of the time', 'most of the time' or 'none of the time', but without asking what the different times are like, or what other people are doing at the times where they feel stressed or lonely.
We think that research spends too much time looking at individual young people, and too much time asking general questions about mental health. Instead, we should look at the important situations in young people's lives, we should look at different social interactions that take place in those situations, and we should think about the connections between people. Looking at connections between people is thinking about a system of people, so we call our approach the SOCial SITuational Systems or SOCITS approach.
SOCITS will help to understand the reasons for things like loneliness, stress and mental health. And change how we improve mental health. Instead of only looking at what goes on inside people's heads, SOCITS will looking at the social situations and places around individuals that affect mental health.
In the project, we will train young people to be researchers, so they can interview secondary school students to find out about the situations in their school and how they might affect stress, loneliness, mental health, and holding negative attitudes about other people with mental illness.
We will take what we find out from these interviews, and have a group discussion with young people, teachers, and mental health researchers to find out what the group thinks are the reasons for poor mental health. We will use the final decisions of the group do two things: design a survey to find out what actually happens in schools, and build a computer program to create an artificial school that we can use to study what would happen if we changed some of the situations in school.
After this, we will test out the survey we designed to see what young people think about filling out the survey, and we will come up with plans on how to analyse the surveys. We will also do studies with the computer programme artificial school, and compare the artificial school to what we know about the real school from the survey information.
After we do the study, we will write instructions on how other research teams can use the SOCITS approach to do a study of their own looking at different topics. For example, instead of stress and loneliness, other researchers might look at social media use, self-harm or substance use. We will also study how easy our instructions are to understand, and if there are difficulties, this will help us improve our guidance documents.
From day 1, we will make information about the project plans freely available for everyone to read. We will also organise six online meetings for people to find out more about the ideas behind SOCITS and decide how they could be used for their own work.
By the end of the study, we hope that we will have added some new ways to do mental health research that can help improve how adolescents feel, help prevent poor mental health, and improve the quality of life for people with mental illness.

This project will establish SOCITS as a readily available framework to allow any research team to adopt a situated systems approach to adolescent mental health, whether from a qualitative, quantitative, simulation or practice background.
Through a series of reflective and comparative studies, we will determine the optimal approach for data collection and analysis to support a system-level understanding of how psychosocial constructs operate within SOCially sITuated Systems, and how the experience of the constructs within complex environments influences mental health outcomes. The study will use focal constructs of stress, loneliness and mental health stigma.
The SOCITS study will develop a framework to identify the social-situational factors relevant to a specific adolescent environment or 'system of interest (SoI)' by developing methods toolkits for the following work packages. 1. Youth Advisor Investigator led walking interviews to obtain data about situations relevant to focal constructs. 2. Systems thinking workshops tailored to inform survey design and Agent Based Model specification for socially situated constructs. 3. Agent Based Models of socially situated interactions, calibrated to data, and used to explore situational-environmental interventions. 4. Development, testing and deployment of a longitudinal school survey containing socially situated assessment of constructs, and how they relate to mental health.
A final work package involves a webinar series throughout the life of the grant to discuss SOCITS concepts with the various research communities relevant to adolescent mental health and systems approaches, and at the end of the workshop, SOCITS useability testing workshops, using Normalisation Process Theory to assess how easily research teams can make use of SOCITS for their own projects.