About Us
Our partnership traces back to 2017, when the Executive Director at Crossroads Children's Mental Health Centre contacted researchers at the University of Ottawa, proposing a mutually beneficial research collaboration. The partnership was originally intended to benefit knowledge users in the child/youth and family health sector. These agencies often have reams of data generated through clinical activities but usually limited capacity to leverage them for knowledge generation that could advance their clinical mission.
Over the past six years, our partnership has grown to encompass researchers and community mental health service providers throughout the Ottawa region. This expansion has led us to shift our general research focus on child and youth mental health towards a more specific emphasis on school attendance issues. This change in focus towards attendance issues serves as an entry for us to better comprehend and address the social, psychological, and health challenges that hinder the development and progress of children and youth.
Our Mission
Across much of the world, children and youth spend a large portion of their waking hours in schools. The variety and depth of social experiences they have with peers and adults in school settings make the school an influential context for psychosocial development. To benefit from what this rich social context has to offer, children and youth must attend school. Even before the severe disruptions to schooling caused by COVID-19 restrictions, school absenteeism had been emerging as a complex problem in multiple research fields given empirical findings pointing to numerous adverse consequences of chronic school absenteeism. School attendance problems (SAPs) differ in etiology and presentation, and they have been studied across many academic disciplines, including education, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, social work, occupational therapy, criminal justice, and medicine. While this diversity of perspectives offers significant advantages, to date there has been very limited integration of knowledge about SAPs in these disparate literatures. Additionally, there is a gap of knowledge and research devoted to understanding these issues within a Canadian context.
A central organizing goal of the research partnership we are building is to bring together diverse stakeholders to work on pressing issues related to school attendance. We hope that the research resulting from this partnership will foster new shared understandings of SAPs that are relevant within our Canadian context and moving forward, make international, multi-sectoral research collaborations possible.