From mechanism to impact: advancing youth mental health research
We are a team of researchers and clinicians based at the University of Oxford. We provide resources and measures to help clinicians and researchers better develop targeted, effective, and meaningful treatments.
Our work is part of the Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre - Mental Health in Development project, which is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).
We believe in the importance of conducting high-quality research to develop effective psychological interventions and a step-by-step approach to building new treatments.
We have created a detailed user-friendly guide, taking you through the process of developing, researching, and evaluating developmentally-informed treatments that target psychological mechanisms. The guide is aimed at a wide audience, whether you are just beginning to consider undertaking work in this area or you already have experience.
One of the first steps to understanding a problem is to be able to accurately measure it. This includes measuring the mechanisms that cause the problem. To be confident in your findings you need measures that are reliable, accurate, and sensitive to change. They also need to work for young people with different characteristics and at different ages.
We have built an open-access library of measures of psychological mechanisms, particularly those that can be used for children and young people. We provide information about each measure’s quality, scoring, and access.
You can also sign up and add a measure to our ever-growing library. This could be new measure developed by you or others, or an existing measure you think others would find useful.
We have pulled together definitions of the key terms which we feel may be of use when reading the website content and linked resources.
You can access the glossary from the sidebar of any page (from the footer if you are on a phone).
Or you can view it on its own website, linked below.