/prod01/channel_3/media/tcd/global-health/staff-images/img-5807.jpeg)
Biography
Dr. Kristin Hadfield is an Assistant Professor in the School of Psychology and the Trinity Centre for Global Health. Dr Hadfield completed her PhD in psychology at Trinity College Dublin in 2015. Following this, she worked as a visiting research specialist in the Department of Health Systems Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago (2014-2015), a postdoctoral research fellow at the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University (2015-2017), and as an assistant professor of positive psychology at Queen Mary University of London (2017-2020). Dr Hadfield's research focuses on how the resilience, wellbeing, and mental health of young people can best be promoted. She is interested in what makes children and adolescents thrive when faced with adverse or challenging contexts. To this end, she has been involved with and led longitudinal studies and with projects conducting evaluations of educational, psychosocial, and positive psychology-based interventions in multiple countries. Her projects use a multi-method approach to examine changes at multiple levels (psychological, physiological, cognitive, etc). She is interested in proximal influences on development (family, school, etc) but also in more distal factors, such as how community cohesion, healthcare provision, pollution exposure, access to green space, and experiences of climate changes influence young people's mental health and wellbeing. To examine the above, she focuses on effective measurement and in methodological innovations. This has included the adaptation and validation of a number of questionnaires, the use of cognitive and behavioural tasks, a focus on adolescent participation in health research and how this can best be promoted, and participatory engagement with youth co-researchers.
Publications and Further Research Outputs
- Hadfield K., Amos M., Ungar M., Gosselin J., Ganong L., Do Changes to Family Structure Affect Child and Family Outcomes? A Systematic Review of the Instability Hypothesis, Journal of Family Theory and Review, 10, (1), 2018, p87 - 110Journal Article, 2018, DOI
- Khraisha, Q., Sawalha, L., Hadfield, K., Al-Soleiti, M., Dajani, R., & Panter-Brick, C., Coparenting, mental health, and the pursuit of dignity: A systems-level analysis of refugee father-mother narratives., Social science & medicine, 340, 2024, p116452Journal Article, 2024, DOI , URL
- Panter-Brick C., Eggerman M., Ager A., Hadfield K., Dajani R., Measuring the psychosocial, biological, and cognitive signatures of profound stress in humanitarian settings: impacts, challenges, and strategies in the field, Conflict and Health, 14, (1), 2020, p1-7Journal Article, 2020, DOI
Research Expertise
-
TitlePatterns of resilience among youth in contexts of petrochemical production and consumption in the Global North and Global SouthSummaryFunding AgencyCanadian Institutes of Health ResearchDate FromDecember 2016Date ToJanuary 2021
-
TitleEffects of early childhood trauma on the development of healthy interpersonal skillsSummaryThis aim of this project is to measure the psychological impact of forced migration on children's interpersonal skills, which are a strong predictor of their future mental health. Specifically, we ask whether the foundation of communication, emotion recognition, is impaired in these vulnerable children. Facial emotions convey critical information about state of mind and the inability to interpret emotional expressions is associated with clinical disorders. Sensitivity to facial emotions is impaired in children that have suffered abuse and it is therefore likely that refugee children who have endured or witnessed trauma may also have impaired emotion recognition, disrupting healthy social communication and increasing vulnerability to mental health issues. We will test this hypothesis and will evaluate the potential benefits of a low-cost, scalable intervention. To achieve this ambitious goal we have built a multidisciplinary team that joins world leading scientists and the multiple-award winning NGO "We Love Reading" (WLR), who bring story-telling to young refugee children in Jordan. Hearing and reading stories is a major source for learning social rules that can help children understand another person's emotional state. The collaboration therefore provides a unique opportunity to assess whether an affordable and easily implemented intervention can mitigate the effects of early adverse experiences on emotion recognition in children. Our proposal offers significant potential for academic and non-academic impact including for policy development in response to the growing refugee crisis.Funding AgencyThe Waterloo FoundationDate FromNovember 2018Date ToNovember 2019
-
TitleFamily Intervention for Empowerment through Reading and Education (FIERCE)SummaryCommunity-led, shared book-reading interventions can improve early childhood development and reduce inequity. One such program, We Love Reading (WLR), was implemented in Jordan in response to the Syrian refugee crisis and involves mothers reading stories to children. We will examine the potentially transformative nature of WLR, by (a) evaluating WLR qualitatively and quantitatively and (b) interviewing the people who developed and implemented WLR (WLR Ambassadors, women trained in WLR, children who took part) to create a toolkit for effectively developing and implementing non-formal education resources elsewhere. To address the first aim, we will conduct a grounded theory analysis of interviews with stakeholders (i.e. parents, children) and will conduct a quantitative randomized controlled trial with Syrian refugee women and children. This will allow us to understand how an education intervention may impact children's educational trajectories during war and displacement, and how we can effectively intervene in other humanitarian crisis contexts. For more information on the project, see: https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/projects/education-learning-in-crises-developing-implementing-transformational-intervention/Funding AgencyBritish Academy, Provost's PhD Project AwardDate FromMarch 2020
Recognition
- IRC Research Ally 2023 December 2023