Buket Kara

Buket is a full-time Research Fellow at the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice, School of Health Sciences, University of Brighton. Her current work focuses on evaluating the HeadStart programme in Blackpool. HeadStart is a multi-agency programme, funded by the National Lottery Fund, aiming to increase resilience in young people and improve mental well-being by building a resilience revolution across the whole of Blackpool.

Buket completed her PhD in Developmental Psychology at Koç University (Turkey) in 2020. Her PhD research focused on the well-being and development of youth living in the armed conflict zone in Turkey. In her dissertation, Buket examined factors that posed risk (e.g., armed conflict experiences, poverty, family violence) or protection (e.g., social competence, support in the family) for the psychological well-being and development of youth as well as the mechanisms underlying the psychological problems that youth were manifesting. While working on her PhD, Buket also worked as a research and teaching assistant at Koç University. Prior to this, Buket was a research and teaching assistant at the Psychology Department of Izmir University of Economics (Turkey), where she received an MSc degree in Experimental Psychology in 2013. 

Buket's research interests include investigating individual, familial and contextual risk and promotive/protective factors associating with children’s well-being and development and informing policy decision-making about the need and strategies to develop effective early-stage interventions and policies to promote resilience in youth.