Title: Applying relationships science to contemporary interventions
Funder: Economic and Social Research Council

Abstract: One of the biggest challenges for society today is how to maintain and enhance people's mental and physical health, in a time of increasing demand for services and significant budget shortfalls. Traditional interventions for monitoring and/or treatment typically involve some degree of face-to-face time with a practitioner (e.g. health care assistant, nurse, GP, or counsellor), and are therefore resource intensive. Over the last decade, technology has become increasingly used to bridge the shortfall in resources, providing wider access to less resource-intensive solutions (for example, the use of computerized therapeutic programmes for depression in NHS services). Such solutions have multiple benefits including empowering clients through self-help, and more discrete access to support. Technology has also become increasingly interactive, and as such the therapeutic relationships formed with practitioners in face-to-face interventions may now be formed with the technology directly, for example with avatars or socially assistive robots. Research into human relationships highlights the fundamental role played by relationship quality in our overall wellbeing, but also in our motivations and expectations regarding different or new behaviours. The proposed seminar series invites experts in relevant fields to consider how we relate to the content and increasingly interactive modes of delivery of contemporary interventions for health and wellbeing. These events will enable knowledge exchange between relationships scientists, service users, and contemporary intervention developers in order to utilize theoretical and empirical models of human relationships in the development of new interventions. Over a series of 9 events (3 per year for 3 years), seminar series participants will meet for networking, knowledge exchange activities, and collaboration instigation. Each event will feature a keynote speaker from the UK or Europe, several short talks from participants, roundtable discussions and break out groups. The seminar series will comprise a core group of participants drawn from relevant private and third sector organization as well as academic experts who will attend all seminar events, but events will also be advertised individually to relevant audiences and open to interested parties outside of the core group. As such, each seminar day will function as a standalone event as well as part of the series as a whole. The seminar series will facilitate co-production of future interdisciplinary and cross-sector projects, including research, intervention design, and theoretical advancement. The specific results of this stream of work will include funding bids for future projects, featuring both research and development work but also evaluation of new developments, and publications disseminating the theoretical progression made in areas such as human-robot bonding. An important feature of the seminar series will be an informational website which will serve both as an ongoing tool for the series participants but also contain pages designed for wider public consumption explaining the activities of the series. The more general results of this scheme of work will be better informed, more effective interventions for wellbeing, that fully utilize important relationship factors, and the establishment of an applied, research active network for continued advancement in this field.


Research activity codes: 7.1 INDIVIDUAL CARE NEEDS
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE