The impact of socioeconomic factors on psychological development and their combined influences on child mental health

My proposed research is embedded in Applied Health and tackles issues related to Child Mental Health from a social and economic perspective. It has been shown that the extent to which inequalities in child mental health exist between different children are in large part determined by socioeconomic factors that affect their environmental circumstances. The specific mechanisms by which such factors influence a child's development are not well understood - illustrated by the fact that we lack an understanding of why children from different social and cultural backgrounds show marked differences in their resilience to growing up in equally economically disadvantaged surroundings. Effective interventions to reduce the inequalities experienced by children from particularly disadvantaged backgrounds require a clearer understanding of how social circumstance shapes the individual environments that surround children as they develop and how this 'scaffolding' directly encourages or impedes personal opportunities to learn the specific psychological skills that are important for later life success. In other words, how do relatively impersonal 'structural' factors (e.g. family income) in children's lives influence the opportunities afforded to them to acquire the personal abilities and coping strategies they need to develop as they grow? This research seeks to answer such questions by applying a rigorous longitudinal and inter-disciplinary methodological approach, which utilises techniques from psychology and applied health research to give us unprecedented insight into: 1.The extent to which different aspects of cognitive and motor development interact to determine child mental health outcomes. 2.How cognitive and motor development are influenced by social circumstance and cultural factors. 3.How these factors combine to influence mental wellbeing in children. The research will be
conducted with the support of a large UK-based multi-ethnic family cohort study (Born in Bradford) and will involve accessing existing data and collecting new data to enable longitudinal analysis of the relationships between children's socioeconomic circumstances, their family and cultural backgrounds and Psychological Wellbeing, from birth to 9 years old. This analysis will also incorporate assessments of motor skills and cognitive development at ages 4 and 9 years (important aspects of psychological development). Central to these investigations will be study of the specific roles that motor and cognitive development play as intermediary links in the pathway between (i) economic, social and cultural factors; (ii) resultant inequalities in wellbeing and attainment. Movement underpins the learning of many more abstract skills and thus is a plausible 'bridge' through which factors in our learning environment (e.g. materials, time, and instruction) may have knock-on impacts on the effectiveness of developing new skills. Recent research points to motor abilities in children being strongly associated with measures of their wellbeing and mental health. Moreover, motor and cognitive skills change in subtle ways depending on cultural biases in how they are taught and are strongly predicted by underlying socioeconomic status. This research draws upon these insights and will further them using robust
longitudinal methods in a uniquely rich dataset - transforming our knowledge and understanding of the developmental pathways that likely play a significant contributory role in determining later life inequalities in social mobility and wellbeing. Finally, these findings will be used to guide more evidence-based approaches within intervention initiatives presently being set up, with the intention of increasing children's resilience to socioeconomic disadvantage. The Better Start Bradford community-partnership (£49 million of Big Lottery Funds) over 10 years to support early years child development in one of the most deprived areas in the UK