Our Research
This project, funded by the Integrated Education Fund, explores the role of integrated education in fostering social attitudes in relation to tolerance, support for peacebuilding, critical consciousness and respect, especially relating to different cultures and religious beliefs, socioeconomic differences and different abilities. If integrated schools aim to promote equality of opportunity through their values and practices, then it would be valuable to know how this is experienced and understood by those attending/attended the schools and whether this is significantly different from those attending/attended other school types.
This project is conducted in collaboration with Dr. Danielle Blaylock in the Centre for Identity and Intergroup Relations, and Dr. James Nelson, and Prof. Joanne Hughes in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work.
Stay tuned for our Final Report to the Integrated Education Fund, coming by February 2025!
Jocelyn Dautel leads one of 10 inaugural research teams making up the Developing Belief Network, an international, cross-cultural, collaborative research network exploring the development and diversity of cognition. This project is funded by the John Templeton Foundation. Our research team includes Hannah Kramer and Aidan Feeney at QUB, as well as Laura Taylor, University College Dublin, and John Coley, Northeastern University. See developingbelief.com for more information or follow @DevelopBelief on Twitter!
See our published Protocol for Wave 1 data collection with children and parents by the Developing Belief Network:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0292755
This mixed-method, interdisciplinary project funded by Templeton World Charity Foundation as part of the Grand Challenges for Human Flourishing Initiative explores the consumption and transmission of polarized narratives at different levels of society, with a focus on young people in Northern Ireland. See more about our project in our blog: Is ‘Truth’ as Objective as We Think? or public webinar: Community-Level Truth Seeking and Human Flourishing. Collaborators on this project include Bethany Corbett, Mariah Kornbluh, Jing Xu, Lara Wood, Christin Schulz, Jennifer Watling Neal, Kathleen Corriveau and Emma Flynn.
See our preprint on the Development of Polarization: An Ecological Systems Approach highlighting novel methods underlying our research programme: https://osf.io/preprints/osf/zj4wb
We want to find out more about children’s experiences and understanding of integration in Bolton, Blackburn with Darwen and Preston in England, and how schools and local services may play a pivotal role in community integration. This project is supported by the Understanding Communities Fund – a collaboration between The Nuffield Foundation and The British Academy. Visit our Nuffield webpage to learn more.
Download our Final Project Report (July 2024) with recommendations for policy makers, schools, and community groups here: https://beyondschoolgates.org/
The Helping Kids! Lab is an international project, collecting data in five different countries (Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Macedonio and Israel), exploring Children’s Empathy and Prosocial Behaviours within a Developmental Intergroup Framework; or for short, Helping Kids! View this short video summarizing our previous international research and collaboration! Meet the Helping Kids! team and hear some of our research backgrounds, questions, and findings.
See a selection of our publications with data from children across Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Croatia, Republic of North Macedonia, and Israel here:
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This project bridges research areas in developmental and social psychology to ask whether children are selective in their reasoning about the mental states of others, specifically in intergroup contexts. This project is in collaboration with Niamh McLoughlin, Crane Center for Early Childhood and Policy Research and Harriet Over, University of York, and funded by The British Academy.
See an example of our research on understanding others' minds and dehumanization here:
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Children’s play is often both acknowledged as important and taken for granted. Led by PhD researcher Risa Rylander, this project aims to investigate how different people perceive playfulness, how it’s measured, and what role playfulness plays in relation to children’s socio-cognitive development. This is a collaborative project with local Belfast childcare provider Venture Kids Belfast, and ESRC funded through the NINE DTP Studentship programme.
Dissertation forthcoming, stay tuned in 2025!