Speaker

Presentation in English

SIMON PETER NEUMER

UIT THE ARCTIC UNIVERSITY. NORWAY

Senior Researcher at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, South and East Norway, Oslo and Associate Professor at RKBU – North, Health Sciences Faculty, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø.

He is a specialist in clinical psychology and supervisor in the Norwegian Psychological Association (NPA). During the last years, Dr. Neumer has been PI and Chief Investigator (CI) in several research projects in Norway, the “ECHO study” (https://echo.r-bup.no/en): a cluster randomized controlled study with a factorial study design. Before that, he has been CI in “Coping Kids: a randomized controlled study of a new indicated preventive intervention for children with symptoms of anxiety and depression”, a cluster randomized multi-center study. He is member of the Editorial board in the Scientific Journal PsykTestBarn.no.

Prevention of school attendance problems. Optimizing a cognitive-behavioural intervention for Norwegian municipalities: A collaborative approach

School attendance problems are often connected to anxiety problems but can seldom be explained only as a consequence of internalizing problems. Since school attendance is crucial for the academic, social, and emotional development of children and adolescents, recurrent school absenteeism is a serious and complex problem, usually with numerous possible causes.

Surprisingly, valid registration systems for school attendance are rare. In Norway, records from public authorities have estimated that aprox.15% of Norwegian 10th graders had more than 10% absence during the last schoolyear. An absence higher than 10% is defined as problematic according to an internationally used definition by Kearney (2008).

To prevent prolonged school absenteeism for this risk group of youth, we are recently working on the optimization, evaluation and implementation of a new and promising intervention.

The symposium will present:

A new transdiagnostic Danish intervention recently developed by M. Thastum and colleaques (2019), adapted for use in Norwegian municipalities.

Quantitative results of a pilot study conducted in 8 municipalities in Norway (Sørheim Nilsen et al., in prep). 

Experiences from the pilot study – lessons learned from qualitative interviews with parents, teachers and counsellors.

A planned Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) with waitlist control, investigating the effectiveness of the optimized intervention on school attendance.

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