Parenting for Lifelong Health SUPER Study
(Scale-Up of Parenting Evaluation Research)
Parenting for Lifelong Health
WHO’s INSPIRE: Seven Strategies for Ending Violence Against Children, which forms part of the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children, recommends parenting programmes as a core component of preventing abuse. Parenting for Lifelong Health (PLH) is an initiative of researchers from the Global South and North, the WHO, UNICEF, and NGO implementing partners who are focused on improving parenting. Over the past decade, it has carefully developed and tested in randomised controlled trials a suite of freely available parenting programmes for low-resource settings. Two of these programmes are PLH for Young Children for children aged 2- to 9-years-old and PLH for Teens for children aged 10- to 17-years-old. These programmes aim to prevent violence against and by children, to improve child wellbeing, and to improve positive parenting capacity.
The PLH-SUPER Study
Positive results from the studies of PLH sparked major interest from international agencies and governments to plan scale-up. An unprecedented scale-up of these programmes is currently taking place throughout Africa as well as in East Asia, Eastern Europe and the Caribbean, with major partners including national governments, UNICEF, Catholic Relief Services/4Children, World Education’s Bantwana Initiative and Pact. However, we currently only have a tiny number of studies on the effectiveness of any parenting programmes outside the high-income world. The evidence-base is currently only from South Africa, with studies forthcoming in the Philippines, Thailand, Moldova, North Macedonia and Romania. Evidence from randomised trials is of great value for testing causal pathways of effectiveness, but we also need more programmatic evidence in order to understand questions such as the most effective implementation approaches, impacts of combined programmes, and add-on modules.
Over 20 low- and middle-income countries have now scaled up PLH for Young Children and PLH for Teens. This is an unprecedented opportunity to collect and combine monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data that can bring forward the evidence-base for prevention of violence against children.
The SUPER study will be conducted from 2019 to 2024. It is a unique study examining the scale-up of parenting programmes across multiple contexts. It will allow testing of whether families with key vulnerabilities (such as affected by HIV/AIDS, poverty, or political violence) benefit more, less or differently to other families. It also provides the opportunity to examine issues related to programme implementation and scale-up, such as barriers/facilitators of attendance and quality of delivery, and how they might differ across contexts. As a result, the implications of this research for policy and practice are likely to be incredibly powerful and useful.
Main research questions:
1. What is the process and extent of dissemination of PLH programmes?
2. How are the PLH programmes adapted and implemented in various contexts? What are the factors associated to implementation outcomes?
3. What is the impact of PLH at scale on family-level outcomes?
4. What are the barriers and facilitators to sustainment of PLH programmes?
5. What are the costs and resources needed for PLH delivery in different contexts?
Map of countries implementing the PLH for Young Children and PLH for Teens programmes
Principal Investigators
• Professor Lucie Cluver – Professor of Child and Family Social Work at the University of Oxford & Honorary Professor for the Department of Psychiatry & Mental Health at the University of Cape Town.
• Professor Catherine Ward – Professor of Psychology at the University of Cape Town
• Dr Jamie Lachman – Research Officer at the Universities of Oxford and Glasgow
Funders
The PLH SUPER study is supported by the ERC under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 737476 and No. 771468), Research England, UKRI GCRF Accelerating Achievement for Africa’s Adolescents Hub (Grant Ref: ES/S008101/1), and the National Research Foundation of South Africa (Grant Ref: 118571).
