The 2020 Work Experience Team whose work focused on, among other things, the ethics of assistive plush toys

 

Last week we welcomed four enthusiastic young people from Year 12 and 13 to participate in a packed week of ‘virtual’ research work experience (and some on-line socialising) at the end of their long ‘unusual’ summer. The focus was to provide a flavour of day-to-day working within a research team, expand their knowledge of mental health research, develop new skills and confidence and apply these to provide meaningful outputs supporting the aims of the research group. They also experienced many interactions with external guest researchers and the National Children’s Bureau and planned and ran our full NeurOX YPAG meeting. 

 

The team’s overall objective for the week was to consolidate input provided by the broader Neurosec YPAG over the past 4 months on the role of digital approaches to include and amplify young people’ voices from diverse backgrounds and with diverse experiences in mental health research in a meaningful way. A key focus was on connecting young people and improving accessibility using digital approaches. They also started applying these learnings to future research projects exploring approaches and evaluation of on-line peer support for young people.

 

As researchers, over the past 4-5 months we have listened, learned and started to adapt our approaches and practice in a journey of discovery around how best to interact and conduct research with young people using digital methods. The feedback from our young researchers over this week has been invaluable and will guide our future work across many aspects of our research and involvement with young people. We would love to share this with others interested too, and encourage wider involvement of young people – the resources we have developed to support this process will be available here soon.

 

In the mean time, if you would like further information please contact: vanessa.bennett@psych.ox.ac.uk