News
20/08/18: Skeptics in the Pub: Sheffield
Dr. Juliet Wakefield talked about "The Social Cure: How Groups Can Keep Us Healthy" at the Farm Road Sports & Social Club in Sheffield. You can find out more about the talk here.
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01/05/18: Skeptics In The Pub: Nottingham
Dr. Juliet Wakefield talked about "The Social Cure: How Groups Can Keep Us Healthy" at the Canalhouse Pub in Nottingham. You can find out more about the talk here.
10/04/18: New Paper
Dr. Juliet Wakefield and Professor Fabio Sani's new paper has been published in Applied Psychology: Health and Well-Being, entitled "Greater University Identification—But not Greater Contact—Leads to More Life Satisfaction: Evidence from a Spanish Longitudinal Study". It can be viewed here.
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05/03/18: Psychology Live!
Dr. Juliet Wakefield talked about Health in Groups to 250 A-Level students at Disneyland Paris as part of a Psychology Live! Event
13/12/17: New Paper
Dr. Juliet Wakefield and Prof. Sabio Sani have published a paper with colleagues at The University of Queensland. Study 1 in the paper reports Health in Groups data. The paper explored the relationship between social isolation and frequent GP appointments. The paper is open access.
16/11/17: Talk at University of Sussex
Dr. Juliet Wakefield spoke about the Health in Groups project at the School of Psychology Colloquium series at The University of Sussex.
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28/09/17: Turning Point Scotland Connects
Dr. Juliet Wakefield spoke about the importance of groups for health at the Turning Point Scotland Connects conference in Glasgow. Turning Point Scotland Connects is a charity which allows Turning Point Scotland service users to become more involved in the running of the organisation, and enables them to meet up with other service users.
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08/06/17: New Paper
Health in Groups researchers Dr. Kirsty Miller, Dr. Juliet Wakefield, and Prof. Fabio Sani have just published a new paper in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology entitled "On the reciprocal effects between multiple group identifications and mental health: A longitudinal study of Scottish adolescents". The paper is based on research that Dr. Miller conducted for her PhD., and it can be found here.
25/05/17: New Paper
Health in Groups researchers Prof. Fabio Sani and Dr. Juliet Wakefield collaborated with colleagues on a paper entitled 'On the Association between Greater Family Identification and Lower Paranoid Ideation among Non-Clinical Individuals: Evidence From Cypriot and Spanish Students', which has recently been published online in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. You can find the article here.
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03/04/17: BBC Radio Scotland
Today Dr. Wakefield spoke about Health in Groups on the BBC Radio Scotland programme 'Personal Best'. You can listen to it here.
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25/03/17: Article in The Scotsman
The Scotsman has published an article on Prof. Sani's research exploring group membership and stress in psychiatric nurses. You can view it here.
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20/09/16: Article in ESRC's Society Now
Health in Group's research has been discussed in an article in the Economic and Social Research Council's Society Now magazine (see page 5 of the magazine, or our Media Appearances page).
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15/07/16: New paper
Health in Groups researchers Prof. Fabio Sani and Dr. Juliet Wakefield collaborated with Italian colleagues on a paper entitled 'Post-traumatic growth enhances social identification in liver transplant patients: A longitudinal study', which has recently been published online in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research. You can find the article here.
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05/07/16: Dr. Juliet Wakefield presents at the Trent Insititute for Learning and Teaching Annual Learning and Teaching Conference
Dr. Juliet Wakefield Presented a paper entitled "The Relationship Between Group Identification and Wellbeing In Students" at the TILT ALTC at Nottingham Trent Univesity. The paper concerned some data she has collected over the last year regarding the relationships between group identification and wellbeing in new undergraduate students. You can learn more about the conference here or by looking at #TILTALTC2016 on Twitter.
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19/05/16: Read about Health in Group's Research in The Media
The recent Health in Groups paper published in The Journal of Happiness Studies has been reported in various publications, including The Daily Mail, The Independent, and The Telegraph. Dr. Juliet Wakefield was also interviewed on today's BBC Radio Nottingham's Drive Time Show. You can hear the interview and see all the news stories here.
28/03/16: First cross-national Health in Groups paper published
The first cross-national paper based on Wave 1 of the Health in Groups project has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Happiness Studies! The paper is entitled "The relationship between group identification and satisfaction with life in a cross-cultural community sample", and you can find a summary of its contents on our Research Summaries page.
07/03/16: Paper published the the British Journal of Developmental Psychology
Kirsty Miller had published a second paper based on data from her PhD.research (entitled“Greater number of group identifications is associated with healthier behaviour in adolescents" and published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology). The paper investigated Scottish adolescents’ identification (i.e., subjective sense of belonging) with their family group, friendship group, and school group, and also assessed whether they engage in a number of unhealthy behaviours (smoking, binge drinking, and cannabis use). The findings indicated that identification with the family and school groups predicted reduced the odds of engaging in these behaviours, whereas identification with the friendship group predicted increased the odds of engaging in these behaviours. Moreover, the greater the number of social groups with which the participant strongly identified, the lower the odds that he/she participated in these behaviours. This suggests that identifying with multiple social groups can have a protective effect on one’s health, a finding which supports and extends Sani, Madhok, Norbury, Dugard, & Wakefield's 2015 paper in the British Journal of Health Psychology.
14/12/15: Paper published in European Journal of Social Psychology
Members of the Health in Groups team have just had a paper published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, entitled 'Greater family identification—but not greater contact with family members—leads to better health: Evidence from a Spanish longitudinal study'. The paper investigated the relationship between Valencian students’ identification with their family (i.e., subjective feelings of belonging to the family group) and their self-rated physical health over time. Findings revealed that family identification had a positive impact on participants’ health over eight months, even after accounting for the amount of contact that participants had with members of their family. For more details of the paper, please see our Bibliography page.
13/07/15: Project Nearing an End
There is just over a month of the Health in Groups project left-our funding ends on 31st August 2015. All of the data have now been collected, and we are finishing entering the data so that we can analyse it. Our original website (www.healthingroups.org) involves a monthly fee, so it will end when the project ends, but all of the website content will be available on this site.
23/06/15: Open Access Paper
The third publication from the Health in Groups Project ("Greater number of group identifications is associated with lower odds of being depressed: evidence from a Scottish community sample") is now Open Access, meaning that anybody in the world can access the publication. Please click here to read the paper.
10/06/2015: Cafe Science Talk
After the success of her TEDx talk, PhD. student Kirsty Miller gave a Cafe Science talk at the Dundee Science Centre entitled "Understanding Teenage Mental Health". The talk presented key findings from her PhD. research, which examines the impact of group identification on adolecents' physical and mental health. Cafe Science talks allow the general public to hear about cutting-edge research on a large range of topics in a welcoming and informal atmosphere.
26/05/2015: Two Papers In Press
Members of the Health in Groups research team have just had two papers accepted for publication.
The first reports data from the Health in Groups project, and will be published in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology. The paper shows that participants with larger numbers of group identifications are less likely to be depressed and less likely to have been prescribed antidepressants in the last six months.
The second paper reports data from Kirsty Miller's PhD. research, and will be published in Psychiatry Research. The paper shows that adolescents with larger numbers of group identifications are less likely to experience symptoms of psychiatric ill-health.
For more information about both of these publications, please see our Bibliographypage and our Research Summaries page.
23/05/15: Health in Groups at TEDx Dundee
The Health in Groups project featured prominently in Dundee's first TEDx event, which was entitled 'Making a Difference'. For more information about Dundee TEDx and how we contrbuted to it, please visit our TEDx page.
06/05/15: Our Research On The Cover of Psychologie Heute
Findings from the Health in Groups study are discussed in the June 2015 cover-story of popular German magazine Psychologie Heute (Psychology Today). Please visit our Media Appearances page to see the magazine cover.
30/05/15: Talk by Dr. Tegan Cruwys
Visiting researcher Dr. Tegan Cruwys (University of Queensland) gave a talk in theSchool of Psychology today, which included some Health In Groups-related research. The talk was entited Delivering the Social Cure: New Evidence for the Role of Social Identity in Preventing and Treating Depression.
"There is a growing evidence base indicating that social connectedness, and social identification in particular, underpins the psychopathology of depression. Candidate mechanisms, including maladaptive schema and attribution styles, will be discussed. In this talk, Dr Cruwys will introduce the relevant literature and present data from a pilot study of a social identity group intervention for people with depression."
20/04/2015: Our Research Discussed in Good Housekeeping Magazine
The Health in Groups study is mentioned in May's edition of Good Housekeeping Magazine. Please visit our Media Appearances page to see the article.
13/04/2015: Final Wave 2 Questionnaires Being Returned
The final Wave 2 questionnaires (from participants in the Montrose GP practices) are now being returned, and data-entry is continuing. We hope that the final Wave 2 questionnaires will have been returend by the beginning of May. The final part of the data-collection for the project (the collection of the Montrose participants' medical data) will then take place in late May/early June.
02/03/2015: Study newsletters
Health in Groups newsletters are being delivered to the final group of Scottish participants (in Montrose) this week. The newsletter will remind participants about the project, and highlight the need for them to complete the final (Wave 2) questionnaire, which they will receive a week or two later.
13/02/2015: Our Research Discussed in Men's Health Online Magazine
The key results from Professor Fabio Sani's presentation at the British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology Conference in Glasgow discussing the Health in Groups data (particularly the relationship between group identification and depression) has appeared in the American version of Men's Health Online Magazine. It is available to view here. Please also see our Media Appearances page for a screenshot of the article.
09/02/2015: 100 Twitter followers
Last week @healthingroups achieved 100 followers on Twitter! Follow is on Twitterand Facebook to keep up-to-date with the project.
06/02/2015: Dates for Wave 2 medical data collection decided
The collection of Craigmillar and St. Serf's participants' Wave 2 medical data will take place in late February and late March respectively. This is exactly two years after the Wave 1 medical data were collected. The Wave 2 questionnaire data for participants from both of these practices has already been collected and entered.
20/01/2015: Visiting PhD. student
Tamara Butler, a PhD. student from the University of Queensland, is visiting theUniversity of Dundee School of Psychology for four months in order to collaborate with Health in Groups researchers and to carry out research. Tamara's research focuses on intergroup help-seeking, with a particular focus on the reasons that people might be unwilling to seek help.
15/01/2015: Second Paper In Press
The second paper based on Health in Groups data is now in press in Psychology, Health & Medicine.
The paper is called "The pain of low status: The relationship between subjective socioeconomic status and analgesic prescriptions in a Scottish community sample", and is written by Juliet R. H. Wakefield, Fabio Sani, Vishnu Madhok, Michael Norbury, and Pat Dugard. You can learn more about the paper by visiting our Bibliography and Research Summaries pages.
08/12/2014: Conferences
December has been a busy month for Health in Groups. On December 3rd, Dr. Juliet Wakefield presented at the UK Society for Behaviour Medicine Conference in Nottingham. She discussed Health in Groups-related research investigating the relationship between group identification and mental health in multiple sclerosis support group attendees.
On 5th December, Professor Fabio Sani presented at the British Psychological Society Division of Clinical Psychology Conference in Glasgow. He discussed results from the Health in Groups study relating to the relationship between group identification and depression. He also reported on some of the results from theAdolescent Health In Groups Project, which is being carried out by PhD. student Kirsty Miller at the University of Dundee, and focusses on the relationship between group identification and adolescents' mental and physical wellbeing. The key results from Professor Sani's presentation were discussed on BBC Breakfast News on the morning of his talk: see the press release, as well as the video clip on our Media Appearances page.
29/09/2014: St. Serf's Wave 2 questionnaires set out
Patients from St. Serf's GP surgery will start receiving their Wave 2 questionnaires over the next few days. Patients from Craigmillar GP surgery received their Wave 2 questionnaires earlier in September, and many patients have already returned them. We hope for as high a response rate as possible from this crucial second wave of the project.
20/09/2014: First paper in press
The first paper based on Health in Groups data is now in press in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
The paper is called "Greater number of group identification is associated with healthier behaviour: Evidence from a Scottish community sample", and is written by Fabio Sani, Vishnu Madhok, Michael Norbury, Pat Dugard, and Juliet R. H. Wakefield. You can learn more about the paper by visiting our Bibliography andResearch Summaries pages.
17/09/2014: Wave 2 data collection has begun
Wave 2 questionnaire data has started to be collected from patients of Craigmillar GP surgery, with data from patients of St. Serf's GP surgery planning to be collected in October. Data from patients at the Montrose practices will be collected in 2015.
14/08/2014: Study newsletters
Study newsletters will start to be delivered to Health in Groups participants this month. The newsletter will remind participants about the project, and highlight the need for them to complete the final (Wave 2) questionnaire, which they will receive a week or two later.
14/07/2014: European Association of Social Psychology
On Wednesday 9th July, Professor Fabio Sani presented a paper based on data from studies related to the Health In Groups project at the 2014 European Association of Social Psychology in Amsterdam. The paper was included in a two-part symposium on social identity and health. The paper was entitled "Group identification and mental health among multiple sclerosis patients, school pupils and pregnant women".
05/06/2014: A summer of writing
We are spending the summer writing up some of the main findings from the Wave 1 Health In Groups data for publication. At present, we hope to produce around 3 journal articles from the Scottish Wave 1 data. You can see our publications so far by viewing our Bibliography page.
18/03/14: Talk by Dr. Juliet Wakefield
Dr. Juliet Wakefield gave a talk on the Health In Groups project at the School of Psychology in the University of Dundee today. She discussed the background to the project and some of the results we have found so far.
07/03/14: Talk by Professor Sani
Professor Fabio Sani gave a talk on the Health In Groups project at St. Andrew's University today. He discussed the background to the project and some of the results we have found so far.
15/11/13: Wave 1 of Scottish Data Collection Complete!
Wave 1 of Scottish data collection for Health In Groups is complete! We have collected questionnaire data and medical data from 1824 Scottish people from a huge range of backgrounds, and whose ages range from 18 to 97.
26/07/13: Award for Dr. Michael Norbury
Academics (including Health In Group's Dr. Michael Norbury) from the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) have received an award for the best research paper of 2012, published in The Lancet in May.
The research paper, entitled 'Epidemiology of multimorbidity and implications for health care, research and medical education: a cross-sectional study' mapped out how many people have two or more medical conditions in Scotland, based on a large, nationally representative sample of 1.75 million patients in general practice.
The study led by Professor Bruce Guthrie from University of Dundee, is part of an ongoing national programme of research established by the Scottish School of Primary Care and led by Professor Stewart Mercer at the University of Glasgow.
The study authors were Bruce Guthrie, Karen Barnett and Michael Norbury from University of Dundee and Stewart Mercer, Sally Wyke and Graham Watt from Univeristy of Glasgow.
The full research paper, 'Epidemiology of multimorbidity and implications for health care, research, and medical education: a cross-sectional study', Guthrie et al., The Lancet, can be found here:http://press.thelancet.com/morbidity.pdf
21/06/13: Montrose Patients Contacted
Participant Information Sheets have now been posted out to patients from the final three Scottish GP practices who will participate in Health In Groups: Annat Bank, Castlegait and Townhead Practices in Montrose. As with the Craigmillar and St. Serf's practices, patients interested in participating will be asked to complete and return the reply slip at the bottom of the Participant Information Sheet, and we will them post them out a questionnaire to complete. Please see our Participants and Recruitment page for more information.
27/05/13: Statistics Course
Juliet Wakefield (the post-doctoral researcher on the project) is just back from a three-day statistics course at Southampton University which covered Structural Equation Modelling, one of the techniques used for data analysis in our project. Southamption University offers a wide range of such courses.
07/03/13: Paper In Press
The paper 'The Effects of Identification With A Support Group on the Mental Health of People With Multiple Sclerosis" (Wakefield, Bickley, & Sani) is now in press at the Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine. While not based on data from the Health in Groups Project, the findings are entirely consistent with the study, and the paper was written by two members of the Health in Groups research team (Dr. Juliet Wakefield and Prof. Fabio Sani). You can view a poster summarising the paper on our Research Summaries page, and get the full reference for the paper from ourBibliography page.
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11/02/13: Follow us on Facebook!
You can now keep up to date with Health In Groups developements by following us on Facebook. You can also follow us on Twitter.
06/02/13: Multiple Sclerosis Paper Accepted
We had our paper "The Effects of Identification with a Support Group on the Mental Health of People with Multiple Sclerosis" accepted for publication in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research on February 6th 2013. Although not based on Health In Groups project data, the paper has been written by the Health In Groups team, and features data collected by one of Prof. Sani's undergraduate dissertation students. Moreover, the findings are entirely consistent with the hypotheses outlined in the Health In Groups project. The paper will not be published for some time, but you can get a sneak preview of the results on our research summaries page. 
13/09/12: First Scottish questionnaires posted
The first questionnaires were posted to potential Scottish participants on 13th September 2012. These potential participants have already received a Participant Information Sheet through the post, which explained the nature of the study. They returned a reply slip to show they were interested in participating, and have then been sent a consent form and a questionnaire to complete and return. 
25/08/12: Launch of Twitter page
You can now follow the project on Twitter (username: @healthingroups) in order to keep up-to-date with developments. 
20/08/12: New website up and running!
Our project website is now online- feel free to explore the pages to learn more.
17/08/12: Ethical approval obtained!
We now have full ethical approval for our study. You can learn more about the ethcial approval process here.