1988 |
Turkheimer, Eric N |
R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Commitment and Recommitment--a Longitudinal Study @ University of Virginia Charlottesville
Policy makers, empirical researchers and theoreticians have struggled with the problem of civil commitment for decades. Legislators and scientists alike have focused on one aspect of civil commitment: initial commitments, which begin a patient's involuntary episode in the mental health system. Many patients, however, remain in the hospital after their initial commitment expires, and so must be recommitted if they are to remain in involuntary treatment. Patients in recommitment hearings are those to whom mental health policy is most difficult to apply: the chronically ill, the elderly, and those for whom no placements are available in the community. Likewise, the issues in contention at recommitment hearings may be different from those at initial commitments. For the recommitment patient, availability of continuing care may be as important as imminent danger to others; ability to care for self may be as important as danger to self. Nevertheless, legislative and scientific paradigms designed for initial commitments have been applied to recommitments as well. This is a proposal for a study of recommitment at Western State Hospital in Virginia. During a three month period, every commitment hearing--initials and recommitments--will be observed, and demographic and psychiatric data recorded on the patients involved. Six months later, the patients will be followed up. Some will have remained in the hospital, and will require a second hearing: these will be observed as well. Others will have been released as a result of the first hearing, or have been committed at the first hearing but discharged during the next six months: these patients will be followed up via the community service agencies responsible for their continuing care. Analyses will compare initial and recommitment hearings in terms of patient and process variables, examine longitudinal predictors of hearing outcome and community treatment at six months, and assess the impact of community mental health agencies on patients' careers in the state hospital. Multivariate logistic modeling and regression procedures will supplement the bivariate descriptive statistics commonly reported in this research area.
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0.958 |
2007 — 2010 |
Turkheimer, Eric Nathan |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Combinations of Genetic and Environmental Risk For Externalization in Adolescence @ University of Virginia Charlottesville
[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Although reliable associations have been established among a wide variety of social and biological precursors and risky, illegal, or psychopathological behavior in adolescence, the epidemiological and etiological details of how these factors combine remain to be understood in detail. Several extraordinarily detailed datasets are currently available, encompassing multiple cohorts, cultures and ethnicities. We propose to make use of unique and untapped potential in four existing datasets: The Australian Twin Registry, The Virginia 30,000, Add Health, and the Nonshared Environment and Adolescent Development project. Although the datasets all contain variables relevant to the explanation of disrupted development in adolescence, they have been collected with different emphases, ranging from the social and psychological to biological and genetic. The central theme of the current application is that family data, encompassing biological and social relations among parents and children, siblings, and twins, provides a unique window on the complex interplay of biological and social factors that combine in adolescent development. The application describes an integrated program of research combining the methodological and substantive expertise of a core group of investigators in behavioral genetics, developmental psychopathology, and social development in families. Throughout, our goal is to extend the limits of developmental social science in adolescence by employing genetically informative family data, while extending the scope of developmental behavioral genetics by getting beyond traditional variance partitioning approaches, applying genetically informative methods to the testing of specific questions about causal relations in complex developmental systems. Public Health Relevance: It is well-known that many aspects of family functioning and social environments like neighborhoods are associated with disrupted behavior in adolescence. In addition, there is a clear body of evidence demonstrating associations between biological characteristics of children and disrupted behavior. Both social and biological associations with problem behaviors in adolescence, however, can occur for at least two kinds of reasons, and it is crucial to be able to tell them apart. On the one hand it may be that the social or biological predictors actually cause the disrupted behavior; on the other hand, it could also turn out that the predictors are associated with the outcomes because of other factors. For example, if impoverished families provide less supervision to their children, and poverty also causes the children to be more likely to act out, lower supervision will be associated with acting out even though it does not cause it directly. [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable] [unreadable]
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0.958 |
2014 — 2015 |
Turkheimer, Eric Nathan |
R03Activity Code Description: To provide research support specifically limited in time and amount for studies in categorical program areas. Small grants provide flexibility for initiating studies which are generally for preliminary short-term projects and are non-renewable. |
Gene-Environment Interaction and Correlation in the Louisville Twin Study
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Louisville Twin Study (LTS) was established in 1959, and continuously funded for forty years; data collection was terminated in 2003. The LTS includes data on over 1500 twins born in the Louisville area. Data were collected on physical and medical parameters, health, families, school performance and cognitive ability at 16 different measurement occasions between three months and fifteen years of age. Repeated measurements of cognitive ability will be used to answer important questions about the causes of differences in ability through development. Data will be fit to an integrative model that will provide explanations of some of the most important observations regarding intellectual development during childhood: the importance of genetic factors increases throughout childhood, the role of genetics is diminished among children raised in impoverished environments, and the temporal stability of individual twins and siblings relative their family members increases with age. The hypothesis is that all three phenomena occur as a result of a process of ongoing matching of children to environments, through which children with the greatest observed cognitive abilities are exposed to the most enriching environments. In addition, funds are requested to support the ongoing recovery and archiving of the data from the LTS, so they can eventually be made available to the scientific community at large.
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0.958 |