About

My PhD project involves the development of a prison-based animal assisted intervention programme; specifically, a dog training programme for young offenders serving custodial sentences. The aim of this intervention is to offer vocational, educational and therapeutic benefits to participants, improving their future outcomes. The programme will teach young inmate participants to improve rescue dogs’ behaviour by training basic obedience through positive reinforcement methods, and in doing so, provide the inmates with positive and rewarding interactions with the dogs, and the opportunity to gain valuable skills. Interacting with animals has been shown to be beneficial to humans, both physiologically and psychologically, and is particularly effective in enhancing interpersonal communication and reducing stress and anxiety. In addition to the benefits offered to the inmates, this is an opportunity for inmates to provide a positive service to the community, by helping dogs from rescue shelters overcome their behavioural issues and improving their chances of finding a new home.

The evaluation of the intervention programme is a substantial, four year doctoral project, which gained UK Government Research Council (Economic and Social Research Council, ESRC) funding in recognition of the quality of the proposal, supervisors and the student. In addition to on-going feedback from inmates and staff, the project will therefore be subject to rigorous academic analysis in order to evaluate its value and applicability for future use. Using a mixed design, in which the progress of programme participants is compared with those not taking part (other intervention and no intervention control groups) and changes within participants are examined following taking part in the programme (pre-test/post-test), this research will allow for clear and systematic comparisons. Both quantitative and qualitative methods will be used to evaluate the programme’s effects.