Seminar 25 March 2011

Gwyther is Research Director for The Children's Society, a national children's charity in England. He has had a lead role in developing The Children's Society programme of research on children's subjective well-being, which is being undertaken jointly with the University of York. The presentation will provide an overview of findings from the research programme to date, and will also look specifically at new findings (to be published in March 2011) on the links between inequalities and subjective well-being.

The seminar took place in Seminar Room 2, First Floor, Institut of Governance, University Road, Belfast on 25 March 2011 from 12.00pm to 2.00pm.

To view the original please click here.

Update April 2010

Seminar 22 April 2010 **THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED**

Gwyther Rees, Research Director, The Children’s Society, will be presenting a Child Forum seminar ‘Understanding children’s wellbeing: Findings from a national survey of young people’s well-being’.

To view the original flyer, please click here.

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Update November 2009

The first meeting in this new semester of the SIG on Children’s well-being and quality of life took place on 27^th October in the School of Education.

We welcomed two new members - Diana Gossrau-Breen from the Public Health Agency and Bronagh Byrne who is a Research Fellow in the School of Education at Queen’s. Diana has provided conference posters presenting findings from her work using the KIDSCREEN with school children in Northern Ireland and these have been sent to Forum members. Copies can be requested by email to Katrina Lloyd at k.lloyd@qub.ac.uk.

SIG members attending the meeting agreed that we should invite Michael Erhart from the KIDSCREEN team to come to Queen’s next year – a suggestion that was made in June by Professor Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer who leads the project at the University of Hamburg. The invitation to Michael was issued on 27^th October and we are waiting to hear if he is available to come to Queen’s to work with us on exploring the psychometric properties of the KIDSCREEN measure within the Northern Ireland context and perhaps present some of the work his team has done on KIDSCREEN to interested groups of researchers here. If Michael is available to come to Belfast, details will be made available on the Forum’s website. If you have any seminars or events that Michael could get involved in during his stay, please contact Katrina Lloyd at k.lloyd@qub.ac.uk.

The next meeting of the SIG will be held in January 2010 and details will be posted on the Forum’s website.

Update September 2009

The members of the Research Forum for the Child Special Interest Group (SIG) on Children’s well-being and quality of life met on 22^nd May in the Radisson Hotel to discuss the possibility of writing a joint interdisciplinary journal article centred on the use of the Kidscreen measure of health-related quality of life among children in Northern Ireland (NI).   The paper will focus on the unique value the work that is being carried out in NI contributes to the literature on Kidscreen.  There were several suggestions including looking at the psychometric properties of the Kidscreen-10 which has not been done before, a comparison of NI scores with other countries, the mode of data collection and the use of the Kidscreen among special populations of children including disabled, disadvantaged and minority ethnic groups.  The outline for a potential paper was produced and the group will take this forward in the next academic year.

To facilitate this work, a literature review has been carried out to identify research which has used the Kidscreen.  This has resulted in the production of a document with abstracts of 52 research papers, from a variety of countries and disciplines, all of which have used the Kidscreen-52, Kidscreen-27 or the Kidscreen-10.  If you are using (or are thinking about using) the Kidscreen for your own work, and would like a copy of the abstracts, contact Dr Katrina Lloyd - k.lloyd@qub.ac.uk.

Researchers from the SIG presented papers at the Forum’s annual seminar on Children's Quality of Life which was held in Queen’s University Belfast on the 25^th and 26^th June 2009.  The researchers had all used one of the three versions of the Kidscreen to measure health-related quality of life in a variety of populations of children within Northern Ireland, including children from disadvantaged backgrounds (Dr Sarah Miller and Dr Lisa Maguire), children from minority ethnic groups (Dr Liam O’Hare) and children with Cerebral Palsy (Dr Nichola McCullough).

The next meeting of the SIG will be held at the start of the next academic year (2009/2010) and details will be posted on the Forum’s website.

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Update March 2009

The Forum is establishing a new Special Interest Group (SIG) which will focus on health-related quality of life (QOL) among children and young people. One of the most recently-developed measures of QOL, used by researchers from a variety of disciplines at Queen’s, is the Kidscreen. In October 2008, these researchers met to discuss their work and share ideas with each other. At Queen’s, the Kidscreen has been used to examine the health-related QOL of children in Northern Ireland including children with disabilities as well as those from minority ethnic communities and from disadvantaged backgrounds. The discussion within the group centred on the key themes of the psychometric properties of the Kidscreen and what the questionnaire is actually measuring.

At its second meeting, in February 2009, the group noted the paucity of journal articles relating to the Kldscreen.  Most common were articles relating to the development of the Kidscreen and its psychometric properties which were produced by the team that designed the measure. To address this deficit, the group is aiming to produce a publication focusing on the use of the Kidscreen in Northern Ireland.

Professor Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer, one of the team that designed the Kidscreen, has been invited to present a paper at the Forum’s seminar in June 2009. She will also be asked to write a foreword for the Queen’s Kidscreen publication.

If you have used the Kidscreen and would like to contribute to the publication, or you are interested in health-related quality of life among children and young people, please contact k.lloyd@qub.ac.uk

The next meeting of the group will be held on Friday 20^th March 2009 in Room G6 in the School of Education at 12.00pm.

For further information on this Special Interest Group please click here to view the SIG webpage.

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