Validating Social determinants of mental health questionnaire
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Validating a questionnaire to assess Social Determinants of Mental Health in clinical practice: administering the questionnaire to current users of secondary mental health care services and healthy control individuals
IRAS ID
357775
Contact name
Fritz Handerer
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Oxford / Research Governance, Ethics and Assurance
Duration of Study in the UK
1 years, 5 months, 28 days
Research summary
The most helpful mental health care must be informed by a full understanding of the needs of mental health care service users. Current mental health care services have been criticised for focusing too much on medical and psychological symptoms while ignoring social contextual information. We therefore developed a questionnaire to assess the Social Determinants of Mental Health (SDMH) in clinical practice. The current study will ensure that this questionnaire is assessing all the most important social factors in an objective and reliable way. For this purpose, we will ask approximately 100 current mental health care service users and 100 people who do not suffer with poor mental health to complete the questionnaire. This will be a sufficient sample size to answer our main research questions. We will compare if those with poor mental health differ in how they answer the questionnaire compared to the control group. The eventual goal of this research is to contribute to a mental health care that takes all relevant aspects of a person into account.
REC name
Wales REC 3
REC reference
25/WA/0368
Date of REC Opinion
16 Dec 2025
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion