{"id":4474,"date":"2015-09-07T10:40:38","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T09:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/tizard-news-events\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2015-09-07T10:40:38","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T09:40:38","slug":"50th-anniversary-celebrations-at-uok","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/2015\/09\/07\/50th-anniversary-celebrations-at-uok\/","title":{"rendered":"50th Anniversary Celebrations at UoK"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Tizard Centre hosted a very successful event as part of the University of Kent&#8217;s 50th Anniversary celebration weekend. \u00a0We were delighted to have Dr Janet Carr, OBE, as our Guest Speaker. \u00a0Dr Carr gave a very informative lecture based on her 50 year research project into children with down&#8217;s syndrome that has been\u00a0a lifelong commitment to changing attitudes. \u00a0After half a century this is the world\u2019s longest-running research project into people with Down\u2019s syndrome.<\/p>\n<p>The longitudinal study began with 54 babies born in the year to November 1964 and living with their families in a part of south-east England. Driven by an interest in people and behaviours and a sharply inquisitive mind, Carr\u2019s aim was to establish the children\u2019s educational needs using intelligence tests such as pattern-matching. The research, which began when the babies were six weeks old, was conceived by the Medical Research Council psychiatric genetics research unit at London\u2019s Maudsley Hospital. It was initially intended to last just 10 months but the young researcher wanted to look longer term and explore family interactions.<\/p>\n<p><em>\u201cI thought, as well as looking at how the little people are, I\u2019d like to look at how it affected their families. It was widely accepted that having a baby with a disability meant that it would be a disaster, that families would break up. That\u2019s what I expected to find,<\/em>\u201d she recalls. In fact Carr discovered that, while the babies\u2019 development was slower than their non-disabled peers, families coped well as the children grew, with youngsters bonding and developing good relationships with their\u00a0brothers and sisters.<\/p>\n<p>This was at a time when the \u201cintellectually handicapped\u201d, as people with Down\u2019s syndrome were then known, were regarded as non-persons to be consigned to institutions. Carr wrote up the research as her doctoral thesis in 1970-71. Although she assumed the project was over, she began sending birthday cards \u2013 something she continues to this day. \u201c<em>I wonder what I had in mind writing on birthdays \u2026 maybe subliminally [I knew I\u2019d continue]<\/em>\u201d.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/tizard-news-events\/files\/2015\/09\/50ann_jc.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1046 aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/tizard-news-events\/files\/2015\/09\/50ann_jc-300x201.jpg\" alt=\"50ann_jc\" width=\"300\" height=\"201\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Tizard Centre hosted a very successful event as part of the University of Kent&#8217;s 50th Anniversary celebration weekend. \u00a0We were delighted to have Dr &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/2015\/09\/07\/50th-anniversary-celebrations-at-uok\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2312,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[43796,1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2312"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4474"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4474\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sspssr-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}