Understanding children's interpersonal conflict: effects on mental health and interventions to reduce it

This project will use advanced quantitative methods to conduct secondary data analysis of large-scale datasets, to understand the effects of children's interpersonal conflict within the family context (with their siblings) and outside the home (with their peers) on children's later mental health and wellbeing. It will also explore whether parenting and school-based interventions can reduce levels of children's interpersonal conflict. Specifically, this project will:

1. Elucidate the cognitive mechanisms which might be responsible for the relationship between being the victim of conflict with peers and/or siblings and later mental health difficulties, using data from a UK based longitudinal birth cohort study, the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC).

2. Explore the effects of the Incredible Years parenting intervention on children's levels of interpersonal conflict. Specifically, it will examine whether Incredible Years influences levels of children's conflict with their parents, siblings, and same age peers, relative to a control. Data is from a pooled data from randomised controlled trials evaluating the Incredible Years parenting intervention in seven countries across Europe.

3. Examine whether school-based anti-bullying interventions, designed to reduce conflict amongst peers, also improve sibling relationships, using data from the KiVa anti-bullying intervention