The William T. Grant Foundation recently awarded six grants to research teams who share our interest in understanding and improving youth settings. Five of these grantees will be exploring how different settings influence youth outcomes, specifically families and neighborhood, peer groups, and after-school programs. The sixth grantee is focusing on our other current research interest, understanding how policymakers and practitioners acquire, use, and interpret research evidence.

“The awards reflect several features of our grantmaking. These include our interest in a range of youth settings, our interest in improving policy and practice, and a belief that researchers can address practical questions in a way that advances fundamental knowledge about critical family and organization practices. In a time of tight budgets, several of them also use our support to creatively enhance publicly funded, large-scale efforts,” said Foundation President Robert C. Granger.

Information about each of these grants follows. Those seeking further information are invited to contact the principal investigators.

Early Social Settings and Pathways to Economic Opportunity in Uncertain Times
Robert L. Crosnoe, Ph.D.
University of Texas at Austin
Margaret Burchinal, Ph.D.
University of California-Irvine
Tama Leventhal, Ph.D.
Tufts University
Kathleen McCartney, Ph.D.
Harvard University
$286,737
2010–2013

What influences youth decisions about entering the labor market or pursuing higher education? Crosnoe and his team will explore which childhood and adolescent family, school, and activity settings influence entry into post-secondary education or the workforce and on which of these settings policymakers should focus their intervention efforts. The researchers are currently analyzing data from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, which tracked 1,364 youth and their families, schools, and activity settings from birth through 9th grade. This grant will allow them to conduct additional surveys of youth in 12th grade and two years after their expected high school graduation, as well as collect data about their high school settings, such as course catalogue information, student transcript data, interviews with school administrators, and census data. They will also add data from two National Center for Educational Statistics databases.

Low-Income Youth, Neighborhoods, and Housing Mobility in Baltimore
Kathy Edin, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania
Susan Clampet-Lundquist, Ph.D.
Saint Joseph’s University
Stefanie DeLuca, Ph.D.
Johns Hopkins University
$460,938
2010–2011

The Moving to Opportunity housing mobility experiment (MTO) was a 10-year research demonstration sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), implemented in Baltimore and 4 other cities. The results of the MTO program, which helped a group of families living in low-income, high-poverty areas move to less-impoverished neighborhoods, show that adults in this group experienced less distress, depression, and obesity after their moves. However, MTO did not impact the economic self-sufficiency or educational outcomes of the adults or their children. Where there was improvement, girls benefited more than boys. Edin and her team plan to use this grant to add on a youth component to their MTO analysis to determine what setting changes and social processes might account for the youth outcomes, particularly for the discrepancy between boys and girls. Their sample will include 200 young people, ages 15–24 and primarily low-income African-Americans, currently living in Baltimore. Participants will be selected randomly from the Baltimore MTO voucher and control condition families. During the summer of 2010, each youth will be interviewed about a wide range of topics, including educational careers, employment transitions, romantic/partner/parenting roles, sexuality, risk behaviors (incarceration; violence), and mental health and well-being.

How Do Peers Influence Each Other’s Mental Health and Help-seeking in College?
Daniel Eisenberg, Ph.D.
University of Michigan
Janis L. Whitlock, PH.D.
Cornell University
Ezra Golberstein, Ph.D.
Harvard Medical School
$422,482
2009–2011

Mental health problems are as prevalent among college students as they are among their non-college attending peers. Most mental health disorders begin before this age, and social, economic, and academic pressures combined with the transition to college may exacerbate these problems, making college a potentially important site for preventive intervention. One significant point of intervention is through peers and social networks in the college setting. To understand the influence of peers on mental health, the researchers will conduct a natural experiment based on random assignment of first-year students to residences and roommates. They will use a sample of 9,500 first-year students at 3 large universities and will focus on measures of mental health, help-seeking behaviors, and related attitudes and knowledge. Data will be collected from administrative records of the colleges and student surveys. This will be one of the first studies to estimate the “contagion” of mental health variables in a randomized design.

The Effects of a Workplace Intervention on the Family Settings and Health of Employees’ Children
Susan McHale, Ph.D.
David Almeida, Ph.D.
Anne Crouter, Ph.D.
Laura Cousino Klein, Ph.D.
Robert Stawski, Ph.D.
Pennsylvania State University
$499,079
2009–2013

The investigators are part of a collaborative team—the Work, Family, and Health Network (WFHN)—that is engaged in a large workplace intervention study designed to promote employees’ experiences of control over work time in the context of supervisor support. This grant supports an in-depth add-on study of how the workplace intervention affects family processes and resources (e.g., parent well-being, parent-child relationships, children’s daily routines) and in turn, the physical and psychological health of youth. The larger intervention study will take place in 60 workplaces of 2 companies, a high-tech firm and a long-term care company. Workers at these two companies are of varying ethnicities and social backgrounds. The add-on study targets a sub-sample of 1,200 families that have children between 10 and 17 years of age. Parents and youth will be interviewed and surveyed, biomarkers of physical health will be collected, and an 8-day diary study will be conducted on a subset of the sample.

Innovation and the Use of Research Evidence in Public Youth-Serving Agencies: Phase 1
Lawrence Palinkas, Ph.D.
University of Southern California
Patricia Chamberlain, Ph.D.
Center for Research to Practice
$180,179
2009–2009

California and several counties in Ohio are currently undergoing a large, federally funded trial investigating an attempt to implement an evidence-based, statewide foster care program (Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care, or MTFC) with the help of Community Development Teams (CDT). CDTs are run by an intermediary organization and consist of multi-agency meetings and technical assistance to support adoption and implementation of MTFC. This grant will allow the investigator to capitalize on the opportunity presented by this trial; he will have access to agency leaders who are in the midst of making decisions about adopting and implementing the program, and he will study how they acquire research evidence on the program and other relevant topics, how they interpret the evidence, and how the evidence influences their decisions. He will examine the roles that external conditions, agency culture and climate, agency leaders’ social networks, and the Community Development Team intervention play in the decision-making process. Palinkas will conduct interviews, focus groups, and surveys with leaders of mental health and child welfare agencies and probation departments in all 58 California counties and 12 Ohio counties and will use this data to develop measures of individuals’ evidence use; consensus about evidence use among decision-makers; and negotiation, compromise, and agreement about evidence use.

Strengthening After-School Programs
Emilie Smith, Ph.D.
Daniel Perkins, Ph.D.
Linda Caldwell, Ph.D.
Pennsylvania State University
$1,499,920
2009–2012

After-school programs are designed to provide safe venues for academic enhancement, recreation, and positive youth development. They can be a place in children’s communities that can foster supportive relationships with adults and positive interactions with their peers. However, the degree to which after-school programs actually accomplish these important goals can be enhanced when the programs have clear guidelines for behavior that also involve the youth in setting and encouraging these guidelines. One successful approach that has been used in schools to combat disruptive behavior and decrease youth aggression and substance abuse is the Good Behavior Game (GBG), a cooperative game that allows youth to establish collective, positive behaviors for their classroom or program. With this grant, the LEGACY Together Project will adapt GBG for after-school programs serving elementary children of diverse racial-ethnic, socio-economic, and geographic backgrounds to assess whether the game improves the staff practices, youth engagement, and the climate of the program. The randomized trial will take place in 72 elementary school-based after-school programs in urban and rural Pennsylvania; 36 programs will receive the GBG intervention while the other 36 will continue to operate as usual. Observational data and survey data from directors, staff, and children will be collected before and after the intervention to examine the effects of the program as well as the ways in which the program impacts both adult staff and participating youth.