The UTS Human Technology Institute (HTI) will partner with Tresillian, Australia’s largest early parenting service, to evaluate their innovative program supporting vulnerable parents and their children aged 0 – 3 years impacted by cumulative traumatic stress.
The funding was awarded through Paul Ramsay Foundation’s Experimental Evaluation Open Grant Round, which funds for purpose organisations to evaluate their initiatives to build evidence on achieving better outcomes for children, young people, families and people experiencing disadvantage.
HTI will use Bayesian Adaptive Trials (BATs) to measure improvements in parental disturbances of self-organisation and parent-child relationships, and test what may help break intergenerational cycles of psychosocial disadvantage.
BATs are a rigorous and efficient framework for social policy impact evaluation, which uses AI algorithms to synthesise and learn from a range of different data sources, allowing researchers to gain insights in real time and adapt or change as needed.
Alice Dwyer, Tresillian Medical Director Perinatal Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, said, “Data indicates that almost 40,000 children per year have substantiated child protection notifications made, with 59 per cent involving emotional abuse. Research indicates that the parents involved were often also subject to adversity. The impact of childhood adversity has profound, long-lasting impacts on later mental health, physical health and educational and economic participation.
Unfortunately there is a lack of rigorous evidence of what interventions could support addressing repeated patterns of intergenerational trauma for parents affected by their own childhood adversity. - Alice Dwyer, Medical Director Perinatal Infant and Early Childhood Mental Health, Tresillian
Anna Lopatnikova, HTI Head of Cross-Functional programs, said, “Intergenerational trauma is an issue with multiple complex and interacting factors and causes, and traditionally it has been very hard to measure what works to stop this cycle.
Our evaluation methods, powered by AI algorithms, have the capacity to synthesise several data sources and adapt as we gain new insights, allowing us to rigorously assess what works so Tresillian can focus its efforts on interventions that have the most impact.- Anna Lopatnikova, Head of Cross-Functional Programs, Human Technology Institute