Research: Developing an animation-based mental health measure for children and young people
This study, which was contributed to by many Anna Freud researchers, focuses on developing and testing a new way of measuring mental health in children and young people using animations instead of text-based questionnaires.
Traditional surveys often rely heavily on reading ability, which can make them hard for some young people to understand or engage with, particularly those with reading difficulties, special educational needs or limited proficiency in the survey language.
Researchers therefore want to design a more accessible and engaging mental-health assessment tool, and used a co-production approach involving young people, mental health professionals and researchers to help design it.
When young people tested the animation-based measure, they reported that:
- it was more engaging than standard questionnaires
- the animations were easier to understand
- it better represented emotions and experiences compared with written questions.
This suggests that animation-based tools may improve accessibility and inclusivity in mental health research.
Future work is needed to test psychometric reliability and validity; evaluate use in larger and more diverse samples and examine how well it performs in clinical settings.
We will update you more on this when we can.
You can view the research report here:
Developing an animation-based mental health measure
Meanwhile, we have created the following guidance for working with children and young people with specific differences, when using existing outcome measures, which you may find useful:
Using outcome measures with specific groups of children and young people