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Parenting programmes are increasingly a feature of services and policies aimed at improving outcomes for children and families and tackling inequality, yet they remain underused. This study aims to assess parent engagement and retention in the parent and infant (PIN) programme – a universal, multi-component intervention designed to support parents from birth to when their children reach two years of age. The programme can be tailored to parent/community needs but also includes standardised core elements including two Incredible Years parenting programmes. Programme provider perspectives on recruiting and supporting participation were also explored.

A mixed methods study was conducted involving parents (n = 106) and programme providers involved in the PIN programme. Logistic regression analyses were used to assess the impact of participant demographic characteristics on the likelihood of programme engagement and attendance. Semi-structured interviews explored facilitators’ experiences of parent recruitment and engagement, as well as barriers and facilitators of parental attendance.

First-time mothers were more likely to initially enrol in the PIN programme than younger or lone parents. However, older age and married/cohabiting status were the strongest predictors of attending at least one-third of programme sessions. Qualitative findings highlighted the importance of relationship building and connection in supporting participant recruitment and engagement. Practical and psychological barriers to programme participation are also described.

The findings shed light on factors that influence engagement and attendance in universal, early parent support programmes. Barriers to parent engagement are multi-layered and tailored strategies to promote uptake of parenting programmes are needed.

Half of adulthood mental health challenges begin by the age of 14-years-old, making the need for early-intervention clear. This study aims to evaluate a new service model that promotes early-intervention through a community based low-intensity Hub.

Clinical data from 2,384 young people were analysed through within-group, pre- and post-comparisons and qualitative survey, and interview data was analysed through content analysis.

Overall, participants reported that they were highly satisfied with the Hub and the low-intensity brief interventions met their needs. Participants reported that learning new skills, having a place to talk and positive therapeutic relationships were beneficial. The Hub appeared to be less successful for young people with complex mental health difficulties. As a service, the adoption of the Hub model reduced waiting list times by more than half.

The quantitative data demonstrated that engaging with the Hub reduced symptoms of psychological distress. Qualitative analyses suggest that access to local, community, welcoming and “less clinical” support was beneficial, and the type of brief interventions offered was less important than therapeutic relationships.

This is the first study of a novel “Hub” model for low-intensity brief interventions in a socio-economically deprived area of England. Local knowledge, community integrated support, therapeutic relationships and a welcoming environment were viewed as more beneficial than the type of brief interventions offered. Consequently, community spaces can be created to be therapeutic and beneficial for mental health outside of a traditional conceptualisation of clinical support.

Identifying autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in children’s early years significantly impacts their academic performance and future life. It allows them to receive special support services and the required early intervention. Preschool teachers spend considerable time with their students, which allows them to observe their behaviors in different settings like classrooms and playgrounds. However, teachers need to be knowledgeable of ASD early assessment to detect them. Whereas, all well-known ASD assessment tools are designed for populations from different cultures than the Gulf Cooperation Councils' (GCC) culture. This study emphasizes the importance of preschool age, from 3 to 5, in indicating children's early signs of ASD. This paper aims to indicate the early signs of ASD in preschool children in the UAE as a model for other GCC countries.

A qualitative method consisting of interviews with preschool teachers and the ASD children’s parents was conducted to investigate the ASD early symptoms in children.

The findings of the study show that there is a direct connection between the opinions expressed by preschool teachers and the parents of children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder). These results also highlight the presence of early indications of ASD among preschool-aged children in the United Arab Emirates, such as difficulties in communication, repetitive actions, delayed speech, excessive focus on tablets, trouble paying attention, hyperactivity, sleep problems, and aggressive behavior.

The outcomes suggest a strong connection between the feedback from preschool teachers and the parents of children with ASD. The study uncovers initial indications of ASD in preschool-aged children from the United Arab Emirates, such as difficulties in communication, repetitive actions, delayed speech, excessive fascination with tablets, problems with attention, hyperactivity, sleep disturbances, and aggressive behavior.

In lieu of a cure, the idea that dementia might be preventable through risk-factor moderation has latterly gained popularity. Prevention research is an evolving field that will likely undergo significant shifts in the near future. This paper aims to engage with that future as it is imagined in the present.

This study explores the futures envisaged by dementia prevention researchers in the UK, based on interviews with six practitioners at the forefront of the field.

Participants foresaw a pivot away from “dementia prevention” toward “brain health”, and advocated for blended policy, community and lifestyle interventions. They were excited by the prospects for a lifecourse dementia hypothesis to inform new interventions but uncomfortable with the ethics of early intervention.

These findings complicate simplistic depictions of prevention researchers as pursuing responsibilised lifestyle approaches.

Stalking is considered a public health priority with a range of adverse outcomes. This paper aims to explore existing literature on children and adolescents as perpetrators of stalking, with a focus on rates of stalking and victim and perpetrator characteristics associated with stalking.

A review of research where stalking was engaged in by those 18 years old and younger was conducted, where 17 manuscripts met criteria for review.

This review found a prevalence of young people engaging in stalking of between 5.3% and 36%. Considerations including demographics, typologies, prior relationship characteristics, stalking and pursuit tactics, cyberstalking and a brief consideration of the impact are given.

Literature considering perpetration remains thin, and future research should seek to move towards a widely acceptable definition of stalking, as well as considering effective interventions for early intervention, and to consider the role of mental health services in supporting perpetrators and victims, who may not always be mutually exclusive groups.

This paper extends previous literature reviews; the authors understand this to be original work that contributes to a gap in the literature.

Purchase conversion prediction aims to improve user experience and convert visitors into real buyers to drive sales of firms; however, the total conversion rate is low, especially for e-retailers. To date, little is known about how e-retailers can scientifically detect users' intents within a purchase conversion funnel during their ongoing sessions and strategically optimize real-time marketing tactics corresponding to dynamic intent states. This study mainly aims to detect a real-time state of the conversion funnel based on graph theory, which refers to a five-class classification problem in the overt real-time choice decisions (RTCDs)—click, tag-to-wishlist, add-to-cart, remove-from-cart and purchase—during an ongoing session.

The authors propose a novel graph-theoretic framework to detect different states of the conversion funnel by identifying a user's unobserved mindset revealed from their navigation process graph, namely clickstream graph. First, the raw clickstream data are identified into individual sessions based on a 30-min time-out heuristic approach. Then, the authors convert each session into a sequence of temporal item-level clickstream graphs and conduct a temporal graph feature engineering according to the basic, single-, dyadic- and triadic-node and global characteristics. Furthermore, the synthetic minority oversampling technique is adopted to address with the problem of classifying imbalanced data. Finally, the authors train and test the proposed approach with several popular artificial intelligence algorithms.

The graph-theoretic approach validates that users' latent intent states within the conversion funnel can be interpreted as time-varying natures of their online graph footprints. In particular, the experimental results indicate that the graph-theoretic feature-oriented models achieve a substantial improvement of over 27% in line with the macro-average and micro-average area under the precision-recall curve, as compared to the conventional ones. In addition, the top five informative graph features for RTCDs are found to be Transitivity, Edge, Node, Degree and Reciprocity. In view of interpretability, the basic, single-, dyadic- and triadic-node and global characteristics of clickstream graphs have their specific advantages.

The findings suggest that the temporal graph-theoretic approach can form an efficient and powerful AI-based real-time intent detecting decision-support system. Different levels of graph features have their specific interpretability on RTCDs from the perspectives of consumer behavior and psychology, which provides a theoretical basis for the design of computer information systems and the optimization of the ongoing session intervention or recommendation in e-commerce.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to apply clickstream graphs and real-time decision choices in conversion prediction and detection. Most studies have only meditated on a binary classification problem, while this study applies a graph-theoretic approach in a five-class classification problem. In addition, this study constructs temporal item-level graphs to represent the original structure of clickstream session data based on graph theory. The time-varying characteristics of the proposed approach enhance the performance of purchase conversion detection during an ongoing session.

This study aims to explore how young people in child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in the UK, Ireland, The Netherlands and Croatia, experienced leaving CAMHS and identified a range of factors impeding optimal discharge or transition to adult mental health services (AMHS).

Interviews about discharge or transition planning, including what information was provided about their ongoing mental health needs, undertaken with 34 young people aged 17–24, all previous or current attendees of CAMHS. Some interviews included accounts by parents or carers. Data were thematically analysed.

A number of previously well-documented barriers to a well-delivered discharge or transition were noted. Two issues less frequently reported on were identified and further discussed; they are the provision of an adequately explained, timely and appropriately used diagnosis and post-CAMHS medication management. Overall, planning processes for discharging or transitioning young people from CAMHS are often sub-optimal. Practice with regard to how and when young people are given a diagnosis and arrangements for the continuation of prescribed medication appear to be areas requiring improvement.

Study participants came from a large cohort involving a wide range of different services and health systems in the first pan-European study exploring the CAMHS to adult service interface. Two novel and infrequently discussed issues in the literature about young people’s mental health transitions, diagnosis and medication management were identified in this cohort and worthy of further study.

Mental well-being is associated with positive outcomes throughout the life course. This study aims to examine interventions delivered by allied health professionals (AHPs) to alleviate community stressors adversely impacting public mental health and well-being.

Review inclusion criteria comprised experimental and qualitative process evaluations of public mental health interventions delivered by AHPs. Electronic searches in Cinahl, Embase, Medline, PsycINFO and the Cochrane Library, were combined with grey literature searches of National Institute for Health and Care Excellence public health guidance. A narrative synthesis and the Effective Public Health Practice Project appraisal tool were used to evaluate the evidence.

A total of 45-articles were included in the review describing AHP-delivered interventions addressing social disadvantage, trauma, bullying, loneliness, work-related stress, transitional stress, intersectionality, pain and bereavement. No articles were identified evaluating interventions delivered by operating department practitioners or orthoptists. A conceptual map was developed summarising the stressors, and a typology of public mental health interventions defined including: place-based interventions, discrete/one-off interventions, multi-component lifestyle and social connector interventions and interventions targeting groups at risk of mental health conditions.

Many mental health conditions begin in childhood, and a strength of the review is the life course perspective. A further strength is compiling a compendium of public mental health outcome measures used by AHPs to inform future research. The authors excluded many articles focussed on clinical interventions/populations, which did not meet review inclusion criteria. While playing a key role in delivering public mental health interventions, clinical psychologists are not defined as AHPs and were excluded from the review, and this may be construed a limitation. Given heterogeneity of study designs and interventions evaluated numerical analyses of pooled findings was not appropriate.

The review highlights the breadth of community stressors on which AHPs can intervene and contribute in public mental health contexts, stressors which correspond to those identified in UK Government guidance as currently important and relevant to address. The findings can inform developing community public mental health pathways that align with the UK National Health Service (NHS) Long Term Plan, on prevention and early intervention to protect community mental health and well-being. Further can inform the NHS strategic direction for AHPs including informing ways of increasing utilisation of core AHP skills to optimise contributions in public mental health agendas.

It is surprising there were not more AHP delivered evaluations of interventions for other stressors important to address in public mental health settings, for example gambling, domestic violence or that used digital technology, and these are areas for future research. Future research should identify the most active/effective dimensions of multi-component interventions which could be informed by frameworks to guide complex intervention development. The relative paucity of research identified, highlights the predominant focus of research to date on interventions for clinical mental health conditions and populations. The lack of preventative approaches is evident, and an important area for future research to align with UK health and social care priorities.

The review highlights AHP-delivered interventions impacting diverse community stressors across the life course. The findings can inform developing public mental health pathways aligned with government health service priorities to protect mental health and well-being, prioritise prevention and early intervention and increase utilisation of AHP skills across public mental health settings.

Adolescent mental health is a global concern. There is an urgent need for creative, multimedia interventions reflecting adolescent culture to promote mental health literacy and well-being. This study aims to assess the impact of a film-based intervention on adolescent mental health literacy, well-being and resilience.

A pretest-posttest intervention with a multi-methods evaluation was used. A convenience sample of ten schools facilitated students aged 15–17 years to engage in an online intervention (film, post-film discussion, well-being Webinar). Participants completed surveys on well-being, resilience, stigma, mental health knowledge and help-seeking. Five teachers who facilitated the intervention participated in post-implementation interviews or provided a written submission. Analysis included paired-t-test and effect size calculation and thematic analysis.

Matched pretest-posttest data were available on 101 participants. There were significant increases in well-being, personal resilience and help-seeking attitudes for personal/emotional problems, and suicidal ideation. Participants’ free-text comments suggested the intervention was well-received, encouraging them to speak more openly about mental health. Teachers similarly endorsed the intervention, especially the focus on resilience.

Intinn shows promise in improving adolescents’ mental health literacy and well-being. Film-based interventions may encourage adolescents to seek professional help for their mental health, thus facilitating early intervention.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an early assessment of India’s South-South cooperation for trade and technology (SSTT) with East Africa, focusing on Ethiopia, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. It aims to analyse the role of SSTT in providing support to targeted sectors.

The paper examines SSTT, focusing on India and East Africa over a specific period (2000–2016) of its emergence, and extends the public sponsorship literature in international business (IB) to better understand the relationship between SSTT and value addition – applying to a particular case study of SSTT interventions in spices.

The paper highlights SSTT as a pathway to support value addition in global value chains (GVCs). Trade between India and East African countries has grown, with three developments over the period of analysis in particular: shifting trade patterns, growing share of intermediate goods trade and differences in GVC insertion. However, East African exports are largely of lower value. Capacity building to support processing capability and thriving markets can encourage greater value addition. Preliminary findings suggest early gains at the margins, as SSTT interventions have been focusing on capacity boosting with buffering and bridging mechanisms for increased volume of trade. Moving up the value chain however requires that specific value-enhancing activities continue to be targeted, building on regional capacities. Our high-level case study for spices suggests that activities are starting to have a positive effect; however, more focus is needed to specifically target value creation before export and in particular higher levels of processing.

While findings are preliminary, policy implications emerge to guide SSTT interventions. There is capacity for building higher value-added supply chains as is evident among East African countries that trade with each other – future SSTT programmes could tap into this and help build capacity in these higher-value value chains. Future SSTT programmes can take a comprehensive approach by aiming at interventions at key points of the value chain, and especially at points that facilitate higher value addition than initial processing. An example is that Ethiopia and Rwanda are likely to benefit from an expanded spice industry, but the next phase should be towards building processing for value-addition components of the value chain, such as through trade policies, incentivising exporters to add value to items before export. From a development perspective, more analysis needs to be done on the value chain itself – for instance, trade facilitation measures to help processers engage in value chains and to access investments for increasing value add activities. (iv), Future research should examine more closely the development impacts of SSTT, namely, the connection between increased trade, local job creation and sustained innovation, as it is these tangible benefits that will help countries in the Global South realise the benefits of increased trade.

The paper underlines how the SSTT approach can contribute to the critical IB and GVCs literature using a theoretical grounded approach from public sponsorship theory, and with a unique lens of development cooperation between countries in the global south and its emerging impact on development outcomes in these countries.