Our Health, Our Community, Our Voice

This project will seek to understand the Social Determinants of Health (SDH) (Health Care Access, Social Community, Neighbourhood and Environment, Education and Economic Stability) of Military Connected Children and Young People (MCCYP). Moreover, this project will identify how service providers could support MCCYP’s SDH through the project's outputs. 

The primary aim is to co-produce a MCCYP specific SDH screening tool within the context of military life, to identify and reduce inequalities within the military connected children and young people’s population. The second aim of the project is to develop an age appropriate self-reporting MCCYP-SDH (8-11, 12-15, 16-18 years) screening tool through the ‘lived’ experience of the social determinants of health which surround military connected children and young people, from the perspectives of the young people.

Rather than asking adults to speak on behalf of young people, the study was built around the idea that MCCYP themselves are best placed to describe their own lives, and that research tools should be shaped with them, not just for them.

This co-production study adopted an exploratory sequential mixed-methods design across three phases. 

Phase 1: Scoping review and focus groups with MCCYP. 

Phase 2: Five co-production events across the four devolved nations with MCCYP aged 8 - 18 years old. The events will give young people the opportunity to share their experiences and directly shape the developmnent of the survey instruments.

Phase 3: Using what learnt in phase 1 and 2, develop age appropriate surveys and distribute to MCCYP to assess the feasibility and acceptability of the survey and gather initial information about how MCCYP report their experiences across the SDH. 

Phase 4: Wider distribution of the survey to MCCYP across the devolved nations to gather data on how they report their experiences of the SDH. 

The objectives of the study are to:

• Objective 1: With MCCYP, co-design and iteratively develop a mixed-methods survey instrument producing three age-appropriate versions for participants aged 8–11, 12–15, and 16–18 Years and test the feasibility of the co-design partnership.
• Objective 2: Involve MCCYP as active research partners across all phases of survey development and refinement, and to assess acceptability by documenting participant feedback on survey content, language, and format at each design iteration.
• Objective 3: Pilot the co-designed surveys with MCCYP and evaluate feasibility of deploying this methodology to capture lived experiences of MCCYP by measuring recruitment rates, survey completion rates and data completeness within a defined pilot timeframe.
• Objective 4: Assess the clarity of survey items across age groups by analysing response patterns to closed-ended items and thematic coherence in open-ended responses, and by identifying items requiring revision prior to wider deployment.
• Objective 5: Determine the feasibility of generating robust and policy-relevant evidence by examining whether survey findings capture meaningful insights across key social determinants of health domains and can inform recommendations for future service provision for MCCYP in the UK and research.

Armed Forces children and young people.