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Adolescent girls appear more vulnerable to experiencing mental health difficulties from social media use than boys. The presence of sexualized images online is thought to contribute, through increasing body dissatisfaction among adolescent girls.
Residents of rural areas internationally typically experience chronic disease risk profiles worse than city dwellers. Poor diet, a key driver of chronic disease, has been associated with unhealthy food environments, and rural areas often experience limited access to healthy, fresh and affordable food.
There is a large volume of research on the persistence of advantage and disadvantage across generations. Intergenerational studies typically address family resources as independent factors, which ignores how risks cluster together and accumulate over time.
In this paper, we aim to contribute to the understanding of the multidimensional nature of school readiness. In a sample of over 4,000 Australian children in their first year of school, we used latent class analysis to examine patterns of school readiness based on child, family, school and community characteristics, and examine the relationship between these patterns of school readiness and subsequent outcomes (reading comprehension, school absence and emotional and behavioural difficulties).
In Australia, the health and education sectors provide universal early childhood services for the same population of children. Therefore, there is a strong imperative to view service use and outcomes through a cross-sectoral lens to better understand and address the service needs of young children and their families.
School readiness is a construct used by educators and policy makers to describe a range of abilities that are beneficial for children transitioning to school. The association of socioeconomic disadvantage with developmental vulnerability when children start school is well established. Parents play a crucial role in supporting children’s transition to school and are acknowledged as their child’s first and foremost teacher.
Children with neurodevelopmental disorders often experience difficulties in acquiring and executing movement skills. Although the motor profiles of neurodivergent children frequently overlap, rigid conceptual distinctions between diagnostic labels have been imposed by traditional categorical approaches to taxonomy. An alternative transdiagnostic approach is proposed to better represent the similarities between presentations.
Honorary Emeritus Research Fellow
To estimate the prevalence, distribution, and co-occurrence of mental ill-health and substance use among gender and sexuality diverse young people relative to their cisgender and heterosexual peers in Australia using population-level, nationally representative data.
This project investigates the prevalence, risk factors, and causal impact of COVID-19 lockdowns on mental health disorders, self-harm, and suicide among Australian children.