Exploring Links Between Parental Narrative Coherence and Child Wellbeing in the First Year of School

This study involves analysis of secondary data collected as part of the Ready or Not Study that aimed to investigate the relations between children’s wellbeing and ‘school readiness’ (Hughes et al., 2025). Children and their caregivers in England were recruited to participate in a longitudinal study, and data was collected at two timepoints, when the children had completed at least one term of Reception (T1), and then a year later when the children had completed at least one term of Year One (T2). At both timepoints, data was collected from parents and teachers via online questionnaire packs, and caregivers and their children participated in a 20 minute remote interviews. The aim of this study is to use the Five Minute Speech Samples (FMSS) collected in the caregiver interviews at T1, and code them for parental narrative coherence using the procedure developed by Sher-Censor (Sher-Censor, 2019). These coherence scores will then be used together with results from the ‘How I Feel About My School’ (HIFAMS) questionnaires collected from children and their caregivers which sought to measure child wellbeing to explore parental narrative coherence in relation to child wellbeing in the first year of school. The second aim of this study is to compare the child-reported child wellbeing scores of children with the acceptance subscore of narrative coherence to explore the strength of the association relative to ther other coherence subscales.