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Providing resources for young people seeking help online

Research team and collaborators

  • Dr David Coyle - Associate Professor;
  • Dr Claudette Pretorius - Assistant Professor. This work formed a core part of Claudette’s PhD and postdoc at UCD. David supervised Claudette’s PhD. They worked together on each study. More recently. Claudette wrote the Navigator guidelines document. This document translated the research into an accessible and actionable format that directly informed the Navigator project. David is a member of the HSE Advisory Board for the Navigator project.
  • Derek Chambers CEO, ReachOut Ireland (2009 - 2017). Derek was closely involved in the initial project development and co-supervised the first year of Claudette’s PhD. He co-authored the systematic literature review and online survey and helped to establish collaborations with Jigsaw and spunout.
  • Naoise Kavanagh, eMental Health Programme Manager, Jigsaw (2018 - 2022). Naoise facilitated the recruitment for the co-design workshops with the Jigsaw youth advisory panel, helped facilitate the sessions and co-authored the resulting paper.

Funding

  • This research was initially funded by the TEAM ITN project. TEAM was a 4 year Innovation Training Network (ITN), which was funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie actions (grant agreement no. 722561) and provided doctoral training for 15 early career researchers. TEAM provided the funding for Claudette Pretorius’ PhD at UCD.
  • Following this, the SFI Insight Centre for Data Analysis provided additional funding for an 18 month post-doctoral fellowship for Claudette.

Selected articles

  • Pretorius, C., Chambers, D. and Coyle, D. (2019). Young people’s online help-seeking and mental health difficulties: Systematic narrative review. Journal of medical Internet research, 21(11), p.e13873. https://doi.org/10.2196/13873
  • Pretorius, C., Chambers, D., Cowan, B. and Coyle, D. (2019) Young people seeking help online for mental health: cross-sectional survey study. JMIR mental health, 6(8), p.e13524. https://doi.org/10.2196/13524
  • Pretorius, C., McCashin, D., Kavanagh, N. and Coyle, D. (2020) Searching for mental health: a mixed-methods study of young people’s online help-seeking. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13). https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376328
  • Pretorius, C., McCashin, D., & Coyle, D. (2022). Supporting personal preferences and different levels of need in online help-seeking: a comparative study of help-seeking technologies for mental health. Human–Computer Interaction, 1-22. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07370024.2022.2077733
  • Pretorius, C., McCashin, D. and Coyle, D., 2022. Mental health professionals as influencers on TikTok and Instagram: What role do they play in mental health literacy and help-seeking?. Internet interventions, 30, p.100591 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.invent.2022.100591
  • Pretorius C, Coyle D (2021) Young People’s Use of Digital Tools to Support Their Mental Health During Covid-19 Restrictions. Front. Digit. Health 3:763876. DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fdgth.2021.763876

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