Community Leisure Activities as a Primary Prevention Tool for Youth Anxiety and Depression (CLASP)
Project overview
Mental health issues such as anxiety and depression are common among many young people. Ideally, we would be able to prevent people from developing these issues in the first place. But current approaches, like psychological therapy, do not work for everyone.
Community leisure activities (including music, arts, sports, volunteering and other groups) could provide an alternative way to promote young people’s mental health. These activities may provide more accessible and less stigmatising forms of support. The CLASP project therefore aims to explore whether involvement in community leisure activities can prevent young people from experiencing anxiety and depression.
The project will take place over 5 years and will use several types of existing data collected from young people across the UK. The team will mainly use data from ‘cohort studies’, a type of research that collects data from a large group of people and then follows up with those individuals to collect additional data, usually over a long period of time.
Data about local government funding for community activities and data from people’s medical records will also be included. Together, all these data sources will be used to explore how different activities could be used to prevent anxiety and depression among young people.
The project is being led by researchers at University College London (UCL) and the McPin Foundation. It is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).
Project details
Reducing rates of anxiety and depression could make a huge difference to many young people.
Although community activities have potential to do this, access to these activities is unfortunately unequal across society. There are inequalities according to people’s ethnicity, socioeconomic position, and where they live, among other factors.
This inequality makes it difficult to understand whether community leisure activities can prevent mental health problems in young people.
There have also been lots of cuts to funding for these activities in recent years, making it even more important for us to provide evidence on whether they can improve young people’s mental health.
The project will have a young people’s advisory group (YPAG) formed of ten 16–25-year-olds, recruited through McPin.
They will be involved in key decision making throughout the study, including deciding which community activities to focus on, thinking about factors that influence whether people can access these activities, co-designing how the data will be analysed, interpreting the findings, and they will be involved in the dissemination stage of the study.
This will include co-writing summaries, presentations and blog writing.
In years 3-5 there will be the opportunity for three 18–25-year-olds to take part in a paid eight-week summer placement. These research interns will lead on dissemination and gain experience in research methods and data analysis.
The interns will be employed via McPin and we will provide mentoring and training.
Please get in touch with [email protected] for more information on this project.
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