Dr Madeleine  Stevens

Dr Madeleine Stevens

Assistant Professorial Research Fellow

Care Policy and Evaluation Centre (CPEC)

Room No
PAN 8.01E
Connect with me

Languages
English
Key Expertise
Social Care and Mental Health, Service Evaluation, Young People's Services

About me

Madeleine is a mixed-methods researcher in the fields of social care and mental health. Her research interests are in services for adults, children, and young people; community and family support; unpaid care; children’s behaviour problems; parenting; youth mental health; social exclusion; and the social determinants of health and wellbeing.

Madeleine’s current research relates to the following topics: strengths-based approaches in adult social care; improving support for young carers; relationships between cognition and place; and evaluating web and app-based support for young people with mental health difficulties.

 Madeleine's doctoral research, completed in 2017 and funded by an NIHR fellowship, was about families with children at high risk of later antisocial and criminal behaviour. The study combined an in-depth qualitative study of a small group of families over five years with analysis of larger longitudinal data sets, investigating why and how families benefit, or fail to benefit, from support and intervention from services and other sources. Madeleine’s work has underlined the importance of providing support in a strengths-based, positive, and non-blaming way that acknowledges the role of societal factors in recreating disadvantage. She is interested in exploring barriers to the provision of this kind of support and in involving citizens affected by policy and practice in research.

Madeleine joined CPEC in 2009 to work on evaluations of the cost-effectiveness of parenting interventions. She joined LSE from the Institute of Education where she researched effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of a variety of interventions for children and young people. Previously Madeleine was based at City University where she completed a Masters in research methods in 2000. She then worked in the Family and Child Psychology Research Centre analysing child development data from ALSPAC and later in the Child Health Research and Policy Unit where she worked for several years on the What Works for Children project which aimed to encourage the use of research evidence in children's social care.

As a way of presenting messages from research, Madeleine has collaborated with the artist Tamsin Arai in the comic book Tales from Social Care, featuring the story of one family involved in her research.

Expertise Details

Evaluation in Social Care and Mental Health Services; Children and Young People's Services; Children's Behaviour Problems; Family Support; Social Exclusion