Eric Dubow - US grants

This Children's Research Initiative Center will bring together investigators from 20 multi-disciplinary national and international longitudinal projects to work collaboratively on analyses aimed at resolving some of the key issues about how children's environment affects their development during middle childhood. Specifically, the Center will focus on disentangling the complexity of influences on children as they develop through adolescence, into adulthood, and even into rearing their own children. The investigators will address common issues of importance with their data using state-of-the-art analysis techniques. The Center will focus on four specific questions: 1) Is middle childhood a particularly sensitive time during which attitudes, beliefs, and views of the self crystallize and thus determine later life success (e.g., occupational, educational, relationship success) or difficulty (e.g., aggressive behavior, depression)? 2) Which childhood influences (e.g., family, school, peer) matter the most for positive and negative adolescent and adult outcomes, and at what points in time do they have the most influence? 3) Do personal characteristics of the child (e.g., temperament, intelligence, gender of the child) influence the impact of family, school, and peer influences in predicting later life outcomes? 4) How similar are parents and their children in positive behaviors (e.g., social skills, intellectual achievement) and negative behaviors (e.g., aggression), and how do family, peer, and school influences affect these cross-generational similarities and differences?

Although the influences studied in any one project are limited, taken together the many projects participating in this Center can examine a wide range of influences during childhood. In addition, because of the breadth of these longitudinal projects, the Center's efforts will foster new methodological and statistical approaches. The Center will promote innovative, multi-disciplinary training of undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral students through courses, workshops, and collaborative research experiences. The findings are expected to lead to the creation of effective interventions for improving life outcomes by identifying specific factors that have powerful short- and long-term influences on development. Analyses will address the effects of family, peer, school, neighborhood, and media influences on socially and clinically important outcomes such as school success/failure, depression, aggression/delinquency, and relationship success. Finally, in partnership with school systems, community groups, and mental health agencies, the Center will move towards design and implementation of scientifically based interventions to reduce the incidence of these problems and to promote life success.

This collaboration aims to stimulate innovative, interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of existing longitudinal data sets bearing on pathways through human development. Tracing the interacting effects of family, peer, neighborhood, and school influences during childhood on life success and problem behaviors in adulthood is a challenging task that is critical to understanding human development and designing interventions to treat maladaptive behavior. Individual longitudinal research projects that follow children over time usually have focused on a limited number of childhood factors that might shape later behavior. At the heart of this Collaborative is the recognition that each of the disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences has made substantial contributions to our collective understanding of human behavior and development. The evolution of our science now requires a coordinated approach to further elucidate the complexities of experience and development; thus, the current Collaborative involves sociologists, economists, education specialists, and psychologists. This Collaborative is broader in scope than previous efforts in several ways: (1) it begins with a relatively large set of established, similar, and committed longitudinal projects involving scholars from a range of behavioral science disciplines; (2) it examines the full span of life-course development, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and across generations; (3) it examines human development in the many contexts in which it occurs, including families, the peer group, neighborhoods, schools, and communities; (4) it utilizes the most advanced statistical analysis techniques; (5) findings will have implications for understanding and creating effective interventions; and (6) there will be widespread dissemination of both the substantive and methodological knowledge. A sample of specific topics include: factors affecting children's school readiness; effects on children of parents obtaining additional educational experiences; the bidirectional effects of parenting strategies on children's behavior over time; and adulthood outcomes (e.g., educational and occupational success, substance use) of childhood and adolescent aggression. In sum, after several decades of productive yet fragmented longitudinal research in the field, this Collaborative intends to integrate and replicate findings from existing longitudinal (community-level, national, and international) studies and take many steps forward in our knowledge of developmental science.

The Collaborative fosters new methodological and statistical approaches, particularly models that examine simultaneous, multiple interacting ecological contexts, which will be disseminated through conferences, published papers, and invited talks. The Collaborative involves experts from a variety of disciplines in its meetings and activities, and encourages the participation of underrepresented undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and faculty both from the University of Michigan and from the project sites. Results will inform psychosocial interventions and social policy. To the extent that researchers can more fully understand the influences and mechanisms that contribute to success and lack of success in life, the more likely it is that interventions can be created that will make a difference to individuals, families, schools, and neighborhoods. It is a specific focus of this Collaborative to examine social policies in different countries to understand how the well-being of children and families may differ due to the policy conditions in each country. Efforts will be made to disseminate the research findings of the Collaborative beyond academic circles to policymakers, researchers, and other important stakeholders in intervention and policy development.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Gun violence in the United States is a serious public health concern. The nation's firearm death rate is the highest among industrialized nations, with an alarmingly high rate among African-American youth. We will examine childhood and adolescent contextual and individual predictors of late adolescent and early adulthood gun attitudes and gun violence among a sample of urban, mostly African-American youth, as well as factors that protect these youth from the effects of exposure to violence. First, we plan to follow up a sample of youth in Flint, Michigan, who were in grades 2, 4, and 9 when first interviewed in 2006-07. We have extensive 3-year prospective data on their media exposure, exposure to violence in the neighborhood and family, parenting, social cognitions related to aggression, and academic and behavioral outcomes (including self, parent, and teacher reports). We will collect geocoded crime data on their neighborhoods while growing up (e.g., exposure to gun violence and related gun crimes, independent of other forms of violence exposure, using geospatial analytic methods), and re-interview the participants again (ages 18, 20, and 25 years of age) on their attitudes toward and use of firearms (and collect criminal data on them). Second, we will conduct a new 3-wave prospective study of high school 10th graders at two sites (Flint, MI and Jersey City, NJ) to expand our knowledge of the risk factors that promote youth's and young adults' violent behaviors with firearms and other weapons; most important, we will collect self-report data on specific social cognitions related to weapon carrying and weapon use, as these weapon-related social cognitions were not available in our earlier study. In both studies, we also will examine potential protective factors (e.g., parenting, constructive social activities, civic engagement) that moderate the effects of exposure to violence on subsequent violent behavior. Our specific aims are to: 1) evaluate the impact of exposure to people's use of weapons (guns, etc.) on risk for violent behavior, including weapon-carrying, weapon use, threatening others with a weapon, and committing crimes with a weapon; 2) examine the role of social cognitions and emotional reactions concerning general aggression and aggression with weapons in mediating the longitudinal effect of exposure to weapon violence on violent behavior; 3) examine the role of individual and contextual factors in moderating the impact of violence exposure on violent behavior; and 4) assess the impact of exposure to weapon violence and general violence at different ages on risk for subsequent weapon carrying and weapon use at later ages. This will allow us to test key theoretical propositions concerning mediating cognitive and emotional processes that might account for the long-term effects of general and weapon-specific violence exposure, as well as protective factors that can inform the development of multi-layered community intervention efforts to reduce gun violence among urban youth.