Changing Lives | Magdalen College Oxford

Changing Lives: childhood experience, cumulative risk, and supportive environments across the life course

Lucy Bowes and Siân Pooley

‘Changing Lives’ is an interdisciplinary project, led by Dr Lucy Bowes and Dr Siân Pooley, that brings together the complementary strengths of research from medical sciences and humanities to ask new questions about how experience affects the unfolding of lives.

Childhood experiences shape our lives in many ways. Adverse childhood experiences can lead to outcomes that have enduring and damaging effects, not only for the individual, but also for those who are close to them and for society as a whole. Existing psychological and epidemiological research has focused on the short-term outcomes of early life stress, such as violence, neglect, or abuse. By contrast, historical research has tended to rely on retrospective evidence from adults’ memories of childhood experiences. This project seeks to develop an innovative methodology to understand the life-long impact of early life experiences prospectively and to help identify what best supports people across the course of their lives.

Project members

Lucy Bowes (experimental psychology)

Aoife O’Higgins (experimental psychology)

Selected recent publications

Events

Workshop on ‘Children’s experiences of welfare in modern Britain’: call for papers.