Background Improving outcomes for children known to social services (including those in care and those receiving in-home support or child protection measures) is a key policy priority. Prior research suggests care experienced children have worse adult outcomes compared to peers across numerous domains including health, education, and employment. However, the majority of research is based outside the UK, uses small samples, and excludes children known to social services but never in care. Improved understanding of...

The unique circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic poses formidable health, economic and social challenges for governments around the world. The impact of the coronavirus varies both between and within countries due to unique coronavirus risk factor profiles, transmission patterns within populations and different approaches used by governments to combat the spread of the virus. In the early stages of the pandemic, despite having the lowest Covid-19 age-standardised mortality rate (ASMR) in the UK (March and...

Neighbours and work colleagues can all potentially have an influence on our behaviour. For instance, poor health behaviours amongst neighbours and colleagues may normalise and reinforce our own poor health behaviours. This is one example of a peer effect. Imitative behaviour can cause small initial changes in individual behaviour to spread amongst their social networks and result in a ’social multiplier’ effect. Understanding the size and mechanisms behind the ’social multiplier’ effect allows for more...

Social determinants of health are defined by the World Health Organization as the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age (US Department of Health and Human Services, 2020). Living in an area of deprivation is a key field of study. Recent research suggests that while area-level deprivation may persist, there is movement of people in and out of these areas (the churn) (Jiang, Pacheco & Dasgupta, 2019).  Within NI we can...

Language loss, retention, and gain amongst smaller languages has attracted much attention.  Most of this work has concentrated on communities or individual life courses although census data have been used to map spatial concentrations of language users, and patterns of advance and retreat through time.  However, there have been few quantitative population-level analyses which combine the general insights of the census with those from individual-level and community studies. Although the health benefits of learning and...

Self-Harm (SH) and suicide ideation (SI) (i.e. thoughts about dying by suicide) are two of the most important known risk factors for death by suicide. Increasing suicide rates are a major public health concern and Northern Ireland (NI) consistently has the highest rate of suicide in the UK and Ireland. Recent nationwide policies to reduce suicide are now including a focus on reducing SH and SI as these are precursors to suicide. However, little is...

Previous research has identified how the household environment, work and family composition can determine a person’s well-being, physical and mental health. One strand of such research has focused on household characteristics, although this has mostly been applied within the continental European context and only rarely within the context of the UK, especially Northern Ireland. Understanding the household structure based on its social, work and family composition and its impact on mental health/health would provide valuable...

This research idea was submitted to Queen’s University Science shop by the North Down Community Network (NDCN).

Socioeconomic status (SES) is often seen to relate to health inequalities. Wilkinson (1997) found that mortality in developed countries is affected significantly by relative living standards within the population. Social position and material circumstances are said to influence both physiological effects of a lower standard of living and also the psychosocial condition of individuals.

The aim of the project is to shed light on how frequently people move home, and especially about the types of people who change address the most and also the least. This question is prompted by our recent research on England and Wales using the ONS Longitudinal Study to examine change of address between one census and the next, 1971-2011, which itself was prompted by observations of sharp declines in migration intensity in the USA...