Child Wellbeing and Education Research

We conduct applied research on factors that are linked to outcomes around the academic, social, behavioral, and psychological wellbeing of children and youth. We primarily draw on theory and methods from the fields of psychology, education, and interdisciplinary areas such as human development, implementation science, translational science, and program evaluation. What we mean by applied is that our work focuses on addressing practical problems by putting existing evidence and theory into practice. We aim to understand how these applications improve conditions and outcomes for children and families. This kind of applied research differs from basic research, which focuses more on advancing scientific knowledge in areas that researchers and the public are curious about. While in theory, these types of research are distinct, in practice, they often overlap, which is the case with our work. While we have a strong leaning towards the applied end of research, we believe that basic research is also essential for addressing gaps in our knowledge and building a larger base for applied research to draw upon. In short, we aim to produce work that bridges the goals of applied and basic research that produces useable and actionable evidence.

Our team's guiding principles involve conducting research that is honest, rigorous, and useful.

Honest. Doing honest research means engaging in a search for answers to questions and allowing for our conclusions to be driven by evidence rather than our individual opinions, desires, and ideologies. This does not mean that we approach the work free of personal values. On the contrary, we have strong opinions and deeply care about solving social problems. However, to solve such problems, we believe that an accurate understanding of their nature and effective means of addressing them is essential, and achieving this means removing as many of our biases as possible. Sometimes we will encounter research findings that run counter to what we hypothesize or contradict our held views. We must be open to revising our thinking in light of such findings rather than seeking ways to fit the findings into our preexisting beliefs. In other words, we believe we should never set out to “prove” anything. Rather, we should aim to produce the best evidence possible for answering our questions and see where the evidence takes us.

Rigorous. What we mean by being rigorous is using the best practices in research methodology to address questions given the project's feasibility constraints. These approaches can range from descriptive research to randomized controlled trials and may involve quantitative, qualitative, and/or mixed-methods techniques. Doing this requires staying on top of rapidly developing methodological and statistical techniques and consulting with others with more expertise in these areas than us.

Useful. Given the applied nature of our work, we aim to make it useful and actionable for those who are most likely to benefit from it, namely practitioners, policymakers, and laypeople. To achieve this goal, research collaboration is regularly an important aspect of how we go about our work. Practitioner and policymaker partners often bring critical insights and expertise regarding the contextual factors associated with the phenomena under study and valuable information about constraints of the research setting that may limit the type of research and/or interventions that can be implemented. Because of these insights, in addition to helping make research more useable, collaboration adds to our scientific knowledge. Making research useful also means considering how it is disseminated. To make research useful, our dissemination approach involves a range of products, including peer-reviewed research, research reports, and public-facing pieces such as media editorials.