My current projects include (a) a multicomponent collaboration with three local place-based initiatives through which we are working to understand the facilitators and barriers of this work and laying groundwork for evaluating the initiatives’ impact on indicators of economic mobility; and (b) a study examining the posttraumatic growth and the effectiveness of peer support in grief centers serving caregivers and children who have lost a loved one. We also recently completed a multi-year partnership with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools’ (CMS) pre-kindergarten program and Office of Research, Analytics, and Evaluation. Through this federally-funded project, co-directed with Jim Cook in Psychological Science and Lindsay Messinger from CMS, we are working to increase the pre-kindergarten program’s capacity to collect, manage, and use data to better support teacher coaching, teacher differentiated instruction, teacher curricula implementation, and research.
Some other selected recent research topics include applied research on and evaluation of:
- A publicly-funded pre-kindergarten program;
- MeckCARES, a system of care for children with severe emotional disturbance and their families;
- A school–multi-agency partnership to address the needs of children and families in an impoverished neighborhood;
- The impact of “family partners” who provide support for families involved with child protective services;
- Supportive “wraparound” processes for families living in public housing developments;
- A family advocacy organization that serves families engaged with the mental health system.