The Child Development Research Group conducts research on the effects of early life experiences, including nutrition, health and psychosocial factors, on children’s development and behaviour. The work addresses issues of importance to health in the Caribbean region and other developing countries, is internationally recognized and widely published in high impact journals.
The group was originally part of the Tropical Metabolism Research Unit but became part of the Epidemiology Research Unit when the Tropical Medicine Research Institute was formed in 1999. The group’s initial focus was on childhood undernutrition but this has expanded over the years to in response to the identified research gaps and the needs of the region to include the impact of health and nutrition in school aged children and adolescents, the effects of intra-uterine growth retardation and the determinants of aggressive behaviour.
A central theme of the group’s work is the design and evaluation of interventions to improve children’s cognitive and behavioural outcomes. The interventions have been low cost, sustainable and appropriate for public health programmes.
In 1991 we published the results of a trial of supplementation and stimulation given to stunted children. This work has been used by several International Agencies including UNICEF, WHO and the World Bank to demonstrate the importance of early childhood stimulation in developing countries and the need to integrate child development services into nutrition and health programmes. We have now followed the children from that study to age 17-18 years and demonstrated sustained benefits from stimulation to children’s cognitive and psychosocial functioning. These findings make the case much more persuasive and we are confident they will be used even more extensively to promote services.
We have also conducted studies investigating the effects of term low birth weight and evaluations of approaches to integrating early childhood stimulation into the care provided for young children.
We plan to continue work in these programme areas. In addition we intend to develop our work on prevention of aggressive behaviour with the implementation and evaluation of interventions to promote social and emotional competence in basic school age children – probably the most effective way of preventing later aggressive behaviour. We also plan a new collaborative programme with the Sickle Cell Unit to investigate cognition and behaviour in children with Sickle Cell Disease.
The group currently has three academic members of staff: Susan Walker (Professor), Christine Powell (Senior Lecturer) and Susan Chang-Lopez (Lecturer).
