A London Met Intern is providing invaluable expertise to help improve a local charity service.
Date: 10 August 2015
London Met has been working with local charity Khulisa, helping young people at risk of crime, violence or victimisation by providing powerful and creative intervention programmes in schools and prisons to offenders and those at-risk of crime.
Wendy Morgan, principal lecturer in Psychology has been developing staff and facilitator training programmes for Khulisa for the last five years. In November 2014 she broadened the scope of work with the charity by deploying the School of Psychology’s talented intern Mahdieh Alladad to assist with the analysis and evaluation of Khulisa’s research data.
Mahdieh completed her BSc in Psychology at London Met last year and after graduating won a place on the University’s Graduate Internship Scheme placed in the Faculty of Life Sciences and Computing. Over the course of the internship Mahdieh has been involved in organising many projects and events. The consultation with Khulisa has been her largest and most independent project.
Khulisa are experts in their field, delivering unique hands on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) based programmes in schools and prisons. Mahdieh has been brought on board by the charity to analyse the qualitative and quantitative data collected through these programmes in order to assess their effectiveness.
Mahdieh has been working with Khulisa for the last 10 months looking at data collected from a programme working with children who were displaying violent tendencies and at risk of expulsion. She will be creating a report which examines the effectiveness of the programmes in reducing violent behaviour in youths within school settings.
The report will include an in-depth assessment of the programme structure and its impact helping the charity to determine the success of their programme as well as areas for improvement. The report aims help to improve how data is collected and analysed in future.
Already there has been a high degree of change between the pre and post programme questionnaires indicating that the programmes have been successful in achieving behaviour change.
The programmes aim to break the cycle of violence, attempting to stop violent tendencies to prevent a violent or criminal lifestyle or to stop the development of repeat offenders.
Alongside her report, Mahdieh has created a coding manual to pass on to her successor, the next School of Psychology intern who will continue the work that she has started with Khulisa.
