Teenpath Covid · Growing Up in a Pandemic: health behaviours and the impact of COVID-19 on health inequalities among young people in Ireland
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2021-07-01 → 2023-10-22
- EU contribution
- €184,591
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Growing Up in a Pandemic: health behaviours and the impact of COVID-19 on health inequalities among young people in Ireland
The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant impacts on the mental health and wellbeing of young people in Ireland and worldwide. Evidence suggests that existing inequalities have grown in the wake of the pandemic, harming the health, social and material well-being of children and young people, with the pandemic impacting on child poverty, healthcare access, mental health, and educational outcomes for young people. Research on the wellbeing and mental health of young people in Ireland has identified protective factors for mental health including physical activity, family support systems, supportive friendships and connectedness with teachers and schools. On the other hand, risk factors include difficulties within family structures, loss and bereavement, low socioeconomic status and financial stress. COVID-19 and the effects of lockdown may have worsened many if not all of these risk factors, while disrupting protective factors such as support networks and connectedness. The Teenpath COVID study has contributed important qualitative insights to these analyses in a project that expands our understandings of what it means to grow up during a pandemic, particularly regarding its implications on young people’s mental health. Specifically, the aims of the TeenPath COVID project are to: 1) Explore young people’s lived experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in their social and domestic worlds 2) Examine the role of social networks in young people’s mental health and resilience 3) Outline health inequalities worsened by the pandemic, and identify entry points for policies affecting differential exposures and vulnerabilities Teenpath COVID has documented significant disruptions to young people’s daily lives, primarily on their education and social networks, toward building a greater understanding of its impact on their mental health and long-term well-being. From here we sought to identify inequalities in some of the ways certain groups of young people may experience disproportionate exposures and vulnerabilities to these impacts, with a view to finding solutions to mitigate these effects. From a public health perspective, this is important for understanding the long-term consequences of COVID-19’s impacts on the mental health of young people today and their health and wellbeing in the future.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has brought health inequalities into sharp focus and exposed the structural disadvantage experienced by people facing the greatest deprivation. Research studies such as Growing Up in Ireland (GUI) and TeenPath at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Royal College of Surgeons Ireland (RCSI) are specifically documenting these inequalities in the lives of children and young people in Ireland pre-COVID-19. This proposal will integrate with the TeenPath study and its aims to centre young people in the development of public health policy targeting adolescent health, with a view to addressing longer term health inequalities revealed and potentially exacerbated by the pandemic. Despite their behaviours being subject to high levels of public scrutiny and social policing throughout the pandemic, young people have limited power to influence society’s response to it. Rapid studies have generated snapshots of the experiences of people living through the COVID-19 outbreak in Ireland, but largely overlook how young people’s routines and emotional wellbeing have adapted. This project will take participatory and social network approaches to investigate how adolescents in Ireland have experienced COVID-19, and will address intersectional dimensions including gender and ethnicity to examine disproportionate impacts of the pandemic on health inequalities. Working with the TeenPath project at RCSI in partnership with TCD, this interdisciplinary project will bring together Public Health, Anthropology and Sociology to deploy innovative approaches such as Photovoice and Social Network Analysis to centre young people in the co-development of public health policy. This co-designed, inter-sectoral and participatory project will contribute to understanding of the impacts of COVID-19 on young people and health inequalities in Europe through policy-focused research, while developing my interdisciplinary skills as an independent public health researcher.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- ROYAL COLLEGE OF SURGEONS IN IRELAND · DUBLIN 2CoordinatorIreland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union