Sophia Backhaus

Sophia Backhaus is a DPhil student in Social Intervention, supervised by Prof. Frances Gardner and a recipient of Clarendon – ESRC Grand Union DTP Award. In her research, Sophia focuses on the effectiveness of parenting interventions that promote positive parenting practices and reduce violence against children. Specifically, her research aims to unpack the differences in the effectiveness of parenting interventions for specific sub-groups in order to identify which families benefit the most and which the least. Her research is co-supervised by Dr Patty Leijten.

Sophia holds an M.Sc. in Psychology with distinction from the University of Konstanz, Germany, and has visited the University of Haifa for an Erasmus-sponsored exchange semester. She completed her B.Sc. in Psychology at the University of Konstanz in 2016, focusing on prevalence and risk factors of child maltreatment in a parenting sample in Tanzania.

In her professional life, Sophia has worked as a consultant for the World Health Organization, led a cross-national research project on political violence at the University of Haifa and worked in her first profession as a pre-school teacher around the world. Sophia offered training on child abuse screening in German kindergartens, developed and implemented an intervention on dental hygiene in a preschool in Bolivia, developed and implemented an intervention addressing externalising behaviour for children living in a marginalized area in Hamburg, Germany and set up a project addressing the biological changes of adolescents, education for safe sex and strengthening self-esteem and self-efficacy in Tanzania.