Pets and youth mental health research

Initial questions for this Team asked about how we can understand the impact of pets, for example how this would be measured, how animal companions could help, for example what settings they would be in, like in schools or hospitals, but also thinking about the effects of just owning a pet. The questions considered both impacts of pets on people, and the other way around, asking how animals were affected by their owner’s mental health.

These were themed into “human focused”, “animal focused”, “applications” and “research methods”.

The Team talked about needing to differentiate between short term contact with an animal (which might happen with an animal support intervention in a hospital for example) and the longer term relationship we have with pets. 

The co-developed evidence mapping question asked:

What evidence exists on the impact of pet ownership and pet therapy on the mental health of young people and their pets

This topic was challenging to perform Evidence Mapping on because of what is called “noise” in the data. This means a search is returning lots of things that aren’t relevant. In this case, the search was getting muddied with findings about CAT and PET scans (a type of medical equipment), studies using animals (such as psychology studies using rats) and even studies that were given animal names as abbreviations!

The Evidence Map found a few studies, but David cautioned they were low quality - this refers to studies not being very well designed or reported and so we’re not very confident about what they show. The map also showed most research was on dogs (with a few studies on horses and just one on cats). None of the studies looked at outcomes for the animal themselves, and the majority looked at short term assisted therapy rather than relationships over time. 

The Team decided that future research should conduct surveys and interviews with young people to understand how their pets affect their mental health, and do a full review to try to find any evidence about how impacts on the pets themselves can be understood (consulting specialists like vets to explore how to do this.). They’d then bring these findings together to suggest how young people and their animals are impacting each other and understand why this happens.

The purpose of this proposal is to share the priorities and ideas of young people with the research community, with a hope that these ideas are taken forward and youth voices embedded in future mental health research. Please feel free to use the ideas presented here to support future research bids, we would just ask that you let the Youth LIVES team know, and acknowledge the Youth LIVES project in any bids and papers published. Additionally, we would strongly recommend the use of participatory approaches with young people in future research inspired by these proposals, and can share details of your project with the young people involved in Youth LIVES if you are interested in working with them.