PhD Studentship in Parent-infant Relationships

Lead supervisor: Professor Sarah Blower

Co-supervisors: Dr. Kate Mooney, Professor Paul Tiffin

The University of York’s Department of Health Sciences is inviting applications for a PhD studentship. The student would be based on campus in the Family Wellbeing Team at the University of York (the PhD studentship is not suitable for distance learning). The Family Wellbeing Team is an interdisciplinary group nested within the Public Health and Society Research Group. Our focus is on developing and evaluating interventions to improve child and family outcomes, particularly in the early years.

This includes the development and testing of measures and tools that can be used in practice to identify needs and evaluate services.

The studentship is nested within the STRIVE programme (STRategies for the Identification, enrolment, attendance and retention of families into parenting interVentions in Early life) led by Prof Sarah Blower in the Department of Health Sciences in partnership with colleagues from Hull York Medical School, the Centre for Health Economics and Bradford Institute for Health Research. Funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), STRIVE aims to tackle child health inequalities by improving access to evidence-based parenting support for disadvantaged families.

This studentship will have a specific focus on understanding the parent‑infant relationship and/or related constructs in the early years. Strong parent‑infant relationships support a child’s long‑term socio‑emotional, behavioural, and biological development. A lack of support for early parent‑infant relationship difficulties can impact long‑term infant health, however, it can be challenging for parents to disclose difficulties, and challenging for practitioners working with parents to identify families that may need more support.

The candidate should develop their own research questions and apply either a quantitative or a mixed‑methods approach to their project. The main focus of proposed research should be on one of these topics:

• The quality and robustness of existing measurement tools used to assess the quality of parent‑infant relationships in diverse groups and populations.
• How existing tools could be made more effective in practice, for example, understanding how practitioners currently experience and use them.
• Evaluating novel approaches to rating parent‑infant relationships, including AI and machine learning, and their potential feasibility in everyday practice.
• Work understanding, and aimed at disentangling, measures of parent‑infant relationships and those evaluating parental mental health.

Candidates are welcome to develop alternative/additional questions related to parent‑infant relationships using quantitative and/or mixed methods approaches. Candidates with a relevant degree (see below), and an interest in building their quantitative and/or mixed methods research skills, are encouraged to apply.

The candidate will have the opportunity to access data resources to support their research (subject to relevant approvals). These include data from the Born in Bradford’s Better Start cohort study (includes measurements of parent‑infant relationships, mental health, and other constructs), the Enhancing Social Emotional health and wellbeing in the Early years (E-SEE) study (includes video observations and measurements of parenting, mental health, and other constructs), and data from clinical services administering the Me and My Baby (MaMB) questionnaire in practice.

Candidates are also welcome to develop their own proposals using other primary and secondary data sources, including collecting their own primary quantitative and/or qualitative data.

This PhD will suit candidates with an…