Parent- child communication plays a very pivotal role in shaping mental health outcomes, coping mechanisms, help-seeking and early identifications of difficulties. Despite this, many parents report hesitance and uncertainty about how to talk to their children about mental health. Existing support tools may be difficult to access and navigate or uneven in quality. By improving understanding around mental health discourse in families and mapping available resources, it can help identify gaps and inform future interventions.
This Project aims to investigate the communication between parents and children regarding mental health. This will be done by conducting a secondary analysis of existing qualitative data from Irish research repositories (e.g., Irish Qualitative Data Archive). This data will provide detailed insights into family experiences and perceived barriers of how mental health conversations are initiated and the contextual factors shaping these conversations. The project will conduct an environmental scan of available online resources (e.g., mental health organisations and electronic databases) to serve as a parallel in identifying existing tools that support such conversations.
Hypothesis: Parents and Children discuss mental health in a range of ways, these conversations reflect both supportive strategy and areas of difficulty that can be identified through qualitative analysis.
The 3 main objectives are as follows:
1. To analyse qualitative accounts of how parents and children discuss mental health, identifying common challenges and themes.
2. To systemically evaluate and map the range of publicly available resource that exist to support family mental health conversations.
3. To integrate findings from both components and to determine whether existing resources align with the needs and experiences described by families.