Biography

Dr. Giovanna Esposito is a PhD in "Psychological Science and Pedagogy" (address "Health Psychology and Psycho-Social Risk Prevention) and she has awarded PhD at the Department of Relational Sciences, University Federico II of Naples with a thesis entitled "Evaluating and promoting the competence of use in the training context: a research-intervention with social workers." She earned a degree in Psychology in 2002 at the Second University of Naples and she became Systemic-Relational Psychotherapist in 2008. She has been working for three years (from 2008 to 2011) as a supplementary professor within formative reflexive programs addressed to psychology university students. Starting from 2007/2008, she is Teaching Fellow in Clinical Psychology. Since 2012, she is a Post Doc researcher for the University Centre SInAPSi (University Federico II of Naples) within the research project "Learning to Learn at the University”. She collaborates with other European Universities in research-intervention activities for the European project INSTALL (Innovative Solutions to Acquire Learning to Learn) funded in 2011 under the Lifelong Learning Programme (Erasmus Multilateral Project measure). For the above project she has assumed the function of trainer (Narrative Group Trainer – NGT) of some reflexive training courses addressed to underachieving students lagging behind with their studies; she has also performed the functions of coordination and supervision of the other trainers involved in the project. She has collaborated with various institutions (Italian and European universities, Italian Order of Psychologists, vocational training institutions, socio-cultural associations, schools) within research and action-research projects aimed at the evaluation and monitoring of educational projects addressed to high school students, college students and professionals of the psycho-social field. In particular, she has worked on the design, the planning and the coordination of research projects aimed at monitoring and evaluation of effectiveness of some training programs for social workers and students at risk of dropping out of school. Her research, which is testified by some publications in national and international journals and participation in numerous conferences, is bound by a common thread: the interest in the promotion and evaluation of cross-cutting and reflexive competences. These competences allow different types of trainees to place productively within educational setting and promote their inclusion in the context in order to achieve educational and professional development purposes. This interest, over the years, has held various declinations in specific areas of research: the prevention of psycho-social risk in schools, with particular attention to the relationship between bullying at school and academic performance; the promotion of individual and group counselling interventions within schools; the development of reflexive competences within the university and vocational training setting; the relationship between narrative methods and promotion of mentalizing competences with students at risk of getting low academic performance. Her research has made use of both methods of quantitative analysis, with particular attention to the processes of validation of questionnaires, and qualitative methodologies, with specific reference to narrative analysis and the use of computerized procedures for textual analysis.


Research Interest