About

Documenting how community spaces promote or hinder youth’s mental health.

The proposed project aims to understand how local community centre spaces and youth hubs can (or cannot) support the mental health needs of young people from marginalised communities.

Today, young people aged 10-25 years living in poverty will die younger and live 18 more years in ill-health than those living in wealthier parts of the UK (The Health Foundation, 2022). Despite landmark reviews (Marmot 2010; 2020), the call for policy action continues to be ignored, and our understanding of this group remains poor. Research into the social determinants of health inequalities and interventions for continued poor health outcomes in our youth is key to a fairer society.

A key challenge of non-clinical research is public involvement in research – where ‘hard-to-reach’ young people are not involved. This high need disenfranchised vulnerable group is ‘invisible’ in our current healthcare and education systems, living with existing inequalities and are often implicated with the criminal justice system. This group’s invisibleness in research is not by choice, but by circumstance. Non-involvement from invisible youths perpetuates a cycle of social injustice because no health data means they are poorly understood by the research community and in turn risk receiving inadequate healthcare and educational support .

The current aims of the project are three-folds:

1. Using a co-designed battery of health questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups and ‘objective’ and quantitative/qualitative measures of health based on past study methodology, we will work with participants (young people, social workers) to assess the ‘subjective’ built environment features of local community centres/youth hubs and identify what the hindering/promoting factors are for invisible youths’ health (i.e., mental, physical, social health).

2. Through Aim 1, we will also coproduce a document of best practices with and for invisible youths and third-sector organizations, clinicians, local authorities, and youth workers, to provide a clear guidance / ‘end-of-project report’ for researchers and policymakers on how best to intervene on the growing health disparity in our society.

3. We will disseminate findings in an accessible manner (e.g., multimedia outputs) to maximize youths’ life outcomes and inform current priorities across research disciplines and spaces (e.g., policy, council, and practice) with key stakeholders.\