Dr Mathew Mathews is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. His research broadly addresses issues on social cohesion and inclusion. Mathew is also interested in how social programmes help in dealing with a range of social issues and has been involved in several major evaluation studies. He has examined how lay persons evaluate the usefulness of counselling and has investigated counselling provision in a number of contexts – marriages in distress, older persons with psycho-social needs and single mothers coping facing variety of stressors. He has also researched on the work of counselling professionals which resulted in an earlier monograph, State of counselling professionals in the Singaporean social service published by Counselling & Care and more recently a large scale survey of social service professionals on job satisfaction and burnout.
Mathew has published in a range of academic outlets including the International Journal of Social Psychiatry, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, Mental Health, Religion and Culture and International Gambling Studies. He is currently on various government and non-governmental panels including the VWOs-Charities Capability Fund Panel, Families for Life Council, Hua Mei Centre for Successful Ageing and Alive Community Network. He is also a Research Advisor to the Ministry of Social and Family Development.