200212 SE Theorie und Empirie wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens (Geist und Gehirn) 1 (2023W)

Background
The world’s population is increasingly living in urban settings detached from the natural environment. There is growing evidence that this negatively affects the mental and physical health of millions of people globally. Re-connecting with nature can promote positive mental health (Hartig et al., 2014; White et al., 2020; Yang et al., 2023) but there are significant inequalities, with women, older adults, and those with long-term health conditions less likely to visit nature and thus missing out on potential benefits (Boyd et al., 2018). One way to support these groups access nature is through ‘social prescribing’ programmes. Social prescribing is an approach to health care which recognises that many mental and chronic health issues, including loneliness and social isolation, cannot be “treated” using traditional drug and other treatments. Social prescribing provides such patients with a link worker who listens carefully and works with them to establish their needs and wants and supports them find complimentary programmes to help manage their wider needs. Suggested programmes may include cooking clubs, walking groups, or art/music therapies (Husk et al., 2020; Morse et al, 2022; Rojatz et al., 2021). This course will focus on social prescribing approaches that support access to nature for promoting mental health and well-being, sometimes referred to as Green (or Blue) Care (Nguyen et al., 2023; van den Berg, 2017).

Course overview
The initial sessions will introduce students to the basics of nature and mental health, social prescribing, and nature-based social prescribing. Then guest speakers from social prescribing programmes in Austria will introduce their work to provide students with practical insights into how these initiatives operate. Students will be divided into sub-groups in order to develop research proposals to evaluate the effectiveness of these types of interventions. The aim is to build on research skills and knowledge to investigate a) whether or not nature-based social prescribing can benefit people’s mental health, b) how equitable these benefits are, and c) what psychological mechanisms and processes may explain them. Research designs will be written in the form of a pre-registration. If possible, pilot or feasibliity data will be collected and analysed, or existing (secondary) data will be used (which is common in this field). Students will present their research plans, progress and results collectively in class and individually in a pre-registration document and final report submitted in the style of a published paper.

Objectives and Transferable skills
A core aim of the course is to introduce students to “research in the wild”. Stepping outside of the lab, where one can “play God” and control a lot of factors, is scary because many things are outside of your control. It can be “messy” and frustrating (e.g. it is impossible to “blind people to condition”). But if we are to use psychological science for public good, sooner or later we need to see if our theories and experiments work in the real-world. Although the content on the course is nature-based social prescribing most of the learning objectives are about the kind of real-world team-based monitoring and evaluation of programmes that many graduates will face in non-academic careers. The trick is to use your research training to make them as technically robust as possible within the practical constraints you will be faced with. Academic rigour, creativity, open-mindedness, problem solving skills, and the ability to work as a team will all be critical.