Skip to content
Show Menu

Dr Beth Barker

Beth is a Research Associate at PEDAL. She's interested in supporting babies, toddlers, and families in the first years of life, translating research to real-world impacts, and promoting children's own voices in research.

I’m a Research Associate working on a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship led by Dr Christine O’Farrelly. As part of this work, we’re hoping to build a pathway of mental health support for families and children in the first few years of life. Before this, I spent six years working on the Healthy Start, Happy Start study, across my roles as a research assistant, PhD student, and post-doctoral researcher.

I completed my PhD in the Centre for Psychiatry at Imperial College London. My PhD focused on integrating young children’s own perspectives into our understanding of very early behaviour problems. I want to do more to involve children themselves in all stages of research and focus on translating our work to real-world impacts.

You can find out more about some of my work below.

Paper: Promoting children's behaviour through a video-feedback parenting programme

The Healthy Start, Happy Start study tested whether a video-led programme for families (called VIPP-SD) could help reduce children’s challenging behaviour. All together, 300 families with one- and two-year-olds took part and we found that children whose families received the programme had less challenging behaviour compared to those who did not. We published our open-access findings in JAMA Pediatrics.

Blog: Using play in COVID testing

Read my blog about using play to help children in completing a COVID-19 test.