Pablo Cheyre & Eleanor Craig

Faculty of Social Science

INC360: understanding the prevalence of loneliness amongst children and young people

PGR Placement

INC360 is a Community Interest Company in the early stages of developing a service for children and young people experiencing loneliness. Many children and young people find themselves isolated due to situations out of their control and miss out on opportunities their peers are enjoying. Whether this is due to having a long term illness, being a young carer or suffering from social anxiety, we want to enable them to participate in community-based activities and events by bringing the outside world in using 360-degree video watched on VR headsets. INC360’s saying is that ‘Everyone has the right to feel included’.

They are currently developing group workshops which will use storytelling and drama to create a journey to an event or location which will be the video. Throughout the workshop, the participants will come up against real-life scenarios where they’ll need to use life skills like creative thinking and empathy to reach their final decision. To develop the content for these sessions, they need to collect data from various user groups to understand the scope of the service as well as specific areas of interest for age groups. Through the research, they would like to understand the effects of loneliness on children and young people, how the skills they learn in the workshops can impact their mental health and the overall user journey.