Our research has added greatly to the understanding of attention and related disorders.

Key research

Salience, organisation and management of anxiety towards time in children with ADHD: A new model and intervention

This four-year project aims to build into our earlier time as invisible disability research study (Houghton, Cordin, West, Whiting and Chapman, 2004), which highlighted the potentially debilitating role that anxiety towards time plays in impairment of everyday functioning.

The current project aims to test more definitively the sense of time and time management hypothesis that children with ADHD have little or no sense of time and cannot sequence events across time. As such, they become highly anxious about meeting or dealing with time related events and experience significant impairments in everyday home and school functioning.

The present study also aims to explore other components of time-related behaviour, develop and validate an instrument to measure time management anxiety, and then evaluate time management strategies, including in combination with medication which assist home and classroom functioning.

• 2005-2008 Discovery grants scheme

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disordered children’s emotion regulation to emotionally provoking events in school classrooms

This study was a joint three-year ARC funded initiative between CARD and the University of Queensland, which aimed to identify school-based events that are emotionally provoking to children diagnosed with ADHD and to develop and evaluate an emotion self-regulation program to assist teachers and students best manage such disruptive events.

In this regard, the three separate phases of the study were conducted simultaneously in both states.

The first phase comprised a series of focus group interviews with primary and secondary students and teachers.

The second phase, involved the observation of 60 (40 ADHD and 20 non-ADHD) students in their school settings.

Finally, during the third phase 80 students (40 in each state) were involved in the evaluation of various emotion self-regulation programs.

• 2003-2005 Discovery grants scheme

Book

From Traditional to Ecological: Understanding Attention Deficit Disorders through Quantitative and Qualitative Research

The majority of research conducted in the field of ADHD has comprised laboratory-based psychological studies using highly repetitive and boring tasks. Hence, the generalisability of such work is somewhat limited.

This book describes, in three sections, a unique research program which successfully sought to achieve ecological validity in research. Specifically, the three sections describe:

1. the historical conceptualisation of ADHD and the emergence of models of ADHD;
2. the development of a unique quantitative research program incorporating studies using a traditional approach through to those conducted in naturalistic settings; and
3. the initiation of a related ‘grounded theory’ research approach to bringing about a fuller understanding of the everyday experiences of individuals with ADHD.

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