Ann S. Masten - US grants

The goal of this research program is to identify individual and environmental qualities related to competence and resilience in children exposed to normative and nonnormative stressors. The proposed study aims to examine the continuity and correlates of adaptation in a community sample of children from middle childhood to late adolescence by integrating two comprehensive sets of data spanning 10 years. The study began with an urban sample of 205 school children in 3rd to 6th grade recruited in two waves in 1977/78 and 1978/79. Extensive data were collected about their competence, behavior problems, personal attributes, family resources, and stress exposure. In 1985, after 7 years, a two-stage follow-up study was initiated. In Stage 1, questionnaire data were collected by mail from mothers and adolescents, with 88% participating. With additional funding in 1987, a more intensive follow-up was undertaken, including semi-structured interviews of adolescents and mothers, laboratory assessments of adolescents' cognitive abilities as well as self-report measures of competence, mood, personality, life events, and symptoms, and ratings by mothers and peers of the adolescents' competence. On the basis of our recruiting success thus far, we expect to have nearly complete data sets across the 10-year span for at least 75% of the sample. The proposed study will focus on data reduction and integrative analyses to address major hypotheses about the relation of competence, psychopathology, risk stressors, and protective factors over a time period of great significance for the newly emerging science of developmental psychopathology. Children with many resources and/or who manifest competence in middle childhood are expected to be resilient in the face of the normative challenges and unexpected life stressors of adolescence. Children with few resources are expected to have difficulty, partly because they have fewer resources to meet the challenges of adolescence, but also due to their elevated risk for stressful life experiences, and the consequences of maladaptation in middle childhood. Results of this study may offer valuable clues to improved intervention strategies for preventing or ameliorating behavior orders in adolescence.

It is essential to societies that their children become competent adults. To facilitate the development of competence, it is important to understand the processes that drive successful development and transitions to adult life. This study has the goal of contributing to the fundamental knowledge needed for building theory, designing policies, and guiding programs focused on promoting successful pathways to competence, particularly for individuals who grow up with adversity. Understanding resilience, how children overcome risks and negative life experience to become competent, is particularly important in our time because many American children are growing up in hazardous situations. This project is a 20-year follow-up of a school sample of 205 urban children and their families who joined `Project Competence` in 1978 and 1979 when they were in elementary school. They were followed up 7 and 10 years later. Extensive data are available on the development and life histories of these children through adolescence. In this new follow-up, the cohort will be contacted again to assess their adult success in multiple domains of competence from multiple informants, including the young adults themselves, parents, peers, and employers. These data will make it possible to identify the predictors of adult success in life for children and adolescents who have faced great hardship and to test hypotheses that adult competence in work, family and community roles has roots earlier in development and that children with good social capital will weather adversity, become competent adults and providers of social capital for society and the next generation. This study will enhance our understanding of the risk and protective factors that jeopardize and promote the development of social competence from childhood to adulthood. Results could inform efforts to foster resilience in children and youth at risk due to psychosocial disadvantage or adversity.

The purpose of the proposed program is to train predoctoral and postdoctoral students in child development research. Students will concentrate their efforts on various topics, each dealing with behavioral adaptation in childhood and related developmental processes. Research in child development is essential to a better understanding of child mental health and those disorders of adulthood having developmental antecedents. Current societal conditions have an increasingly negative impact on children's development, thus creating an urgent need for research information dealing with both normative and pathologic aspects of behavioral development. The proposed program is an outgrowth of training efforts in the Institute of Child Development supported by NIMH for more than 30 years and includes a variety of didactic components as well as a research apprenticeship at the predoctoral level. Postdoctoral training encompasses a series of coordinated program activities as well as bench work in social and emotional processes, language development, cognitive development and neuroscience, psychobiological processes, and perceptual development. Predoctoral trainees (8) entering the program will have completed baccalaureate studies in psychology or a related area and occasionally will have had graduate work. Trainees are recruited from a substantial applicant pool and represent the most outstanding students in a competitive program. Postdoctoral trainees (2) will enter the program having had training in specialties other than child development or developmental psychology. The main training facility is the Institute of Child Development, a regular academic department of the University of Minnesota. The faculty consists of 16 professors in this department, whose work ranges across the entire discipline. Physical facilities are mostly housed in the Institute building on the main campus of the University which includes about 50.000 sq. ft. of space. Ongoing collaborative research is also conducted in laboratories in the Departments of Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Educational Psychology, and Kinesiology.

Faced with persisting disparities in educational achievement, there is a pressing need to understand processes that promote early school success in children at risk for academic problems. Promising evidence indicates that executive function (EF) skills play a central role in successful transitions to school among young children, especially disadvantaged children. EF skills are those involved in cognitive self-control of behavior, including directing and shifting attention, resisting distractions, and inhibiting impulses. Children with good EF skills fare better in the school context, both in terms of learning and social competence. There is also evidence that EF can be improved through strategic intervention. This project will examine the role of EF skills in the school success of young homeless/highly mobile students who represent a substantial proportion of the low-income children at highest risk for academic problems in urban school districts. Chronic adversities associated with poverty and mobility may alter physiological stress response systems and undermine the early development of neural systems associated with EF. As a result, children may face the challenges of school and life with poor EF skills, as well as difficulties regulating stress. Nonetheless, some children growing up in adversity succeed in school, and their resilience may be related to protections afforded by good parenting and the development of effective stress regulation and EF skills. To examine the role of EF in school success among homeless/highly mobile children, this study will assess children entering kindergarten from shelters for homeless families and follow their adjustment during this important school year. Through assessments of child, parent, and parent-child interactions, this study will test the connections of family adversity, risk, and parenting to EF skills, stress regulation, and success in school. Cortisol, a stress hormone, will be sampled from the children's saliva to assess stress reactivity. School outcomes will be assessed through teacher reports and school records of standardized tests and attendance. Better EF skills are expected in children with lower family risk, better parenting, and good stress regulation, who consequently will do well in school. EF skills are expected to show protective effects for learning and social adjustment in these high-risk children.

Results are expected to inform developmental theory on EF, risk and resilience, and the design of educational programs and interventions to address achievement disparities and promote early school success in disadvantaged children. The project will provide insights into processes that may enhance or inhibit learning and adaptation in a context of high adversity and change. Results will elucidate how EF skills may facilitate successful transitions to school in an under-studied population of low-income, highly mobile children whose success may prove crucial to closing achievement gaps in American education.

The RMC serves as a resource to the Principal Research Core by providing innovative methodological approaches to adapt EBP protocols for use in community setfings. Approaches include (a) identificafion of tailoring constructs and selection of reliable, valid, culturally sensitive and ecologically feasible measures that assess these tailoring constructs, (b) development of flexible experimental designs embedded in 'pragmatic'intervention trials to answer tactical questions regarding targeted decision-making (i.e., inform the construction of decision rules), (c) packaging of decision rules (for needs-based adaptive models) and decision supports (for preference- based adapfive models) for community consumption, (d) development of web-based technology to facilitate on- line monitoring of fidelity implementation of adaptive models by community implementers, and (5) application of statistical techniques to analyze qualitative and quantitative data generated by DC trials. Figure X illustrates the units and subunits of the RMC.