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Exploring how caregiving promotes mental health for care-experienced young people
Developing logic models through an intersectional approach.
6 January 2025
The project proposes an interdisciplinary approach with diverse groups of minoritised ethnic and migrant care experienced young people using participatory methods to address the research aim: Identify and explore diverse pathways and mechanisms by which caregiving relationships influence care experienced young people's mental health outcomes.
The project will draw on an intersectional approach to inform understanding participants’ positions to explore how different social divisions interrelate to produce social relations. Acknowledging the marginalisation of some caregiving styles in White majority societies, the project will adopt a decolonising lens to incorporate cultural differences in understandings and conceptualisations of caregiving relationships and promoting care experienced young people's mental health outcomes. Through four participatory workshops with diverse groups, facilitated through organisations working with care experienced young people, workshops will aim to elicit views on a) how caregiving relationships are conceptualised; b) the different mechanisms via which these relationships may influence mental health outcomes. Workshops will facilitate a challenging of assumptions of how caregiving may support care experienced young people's mental health, and ultimately, develop logic models for the mechanisms via which caregiving relationships may improve mental health.
Working inclusively is central to this project, with funds to improve accessibility for diverse participants. Identifying putative social processes by which caregiving relationships promote mental health and will lay the groundwork for larger-scale empirical studies and accelerate evidence-based intervention development for supporting care experienced young people's mental health. This will contribute to addressing health inequalities faced by care experienced young people and driving positive change through addressing the social processes linked to caregiving.
