Stanley – understanding population data

I think the understanding of population data by people who are working out there with families and children actually is important for several reasons. Firstly, it justifies what they are doing. Because they may think they are just working with one family and focusing on the children of that family, to actually put that child on a trajectory to good health. But in fact what is now coming out is a very powerful reason for doing early child intervention and early child development intervention is the powerful impact this is having not just on this individual family but on whole communities. And if you think about that, when you get whole communities that are performing better because the kinds of things that are enhancing family functioning are enhancing community functioning. Then that’s a pathway to national development and prosperity. So it is actually very important that people who are working just one-on-one understand the power of this implementation for the effect on the population.  
 
The other thing that I think is exciting for people who are working at the practice level is that it’s from population data that we have actually worked out these pathways to resilience. It’s actually by grouping together these population factors, these risk factors, these protective factors, looking at how children and families interact in a population sense that we get enough numbers to say Yes, these are important trends, this isn’t just an isolated example of how this works in one family. We’ve actually got this from thousands and thousands of families and thousands and thousands of children. We’ve looked at how parenting practices, the kinds of parenting that you do, we’ve done that in thousands of families.  
 
We’ve looked at trajectories of thousands of children with mental health problems and we’ve been able to go forwards by looking at these big large population databases to look at these trajectories in longitudinal data to mental health outcomes. We’ve been able to take case control studies where you take cases of children with mental health problems and controls of children who don’t have those problems and work backwards through the population data to say What were the powerful influences and I think that’s very important for people who are working in practice to know that this is very, very rich data that’s informed what they’re doing. So it isn’t something that’s not backed up by the strongest of evidence.