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Professor awarded grant to study at-risk youth

March 22, 2006

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has awarded Associate Professor of Psychology Audrey Zakriski a $184,900 grant to continue and expand her research on behavior change in children.

The three-year grant will support data collection on at-risk children before, during and after the Wediko Summer Program in New Hampshire, an intensive 45-day residential treatment program designed to promote social, emotional and academic mastery in at-risk youth. The project, which continues Zakriski's research collaboration with Drs. Jack Wright of Brown University and Harry Parad, executive director of Wediko, will develop a contextual model of behavior change that focuses on the immediate social ecologies that surround children's problem behaviors.

Unlike widely used "syndromal checklists" that emphasize the overall frequency of problem behaviors, contextual assessment examines how often children encounter triggering social events in their interactions with adults and peers, how they react when they encounter these events and how adults and peers respond in turn.

"By focusing on the social context in which children's behavior problems are embedded, rather than overall behavior rates, the meaning of a child's behavior can be better understood, and interventions can be designed that are more likely to be successful," Zakriski said.

In past research at Wediko, Zakriski and Wright have developed methods for studying children's behavior problems in context, including detailed behavioral observations and a corresponding standardized questionnaire suitable for use by parents, teachers and counselors.

"Further development of these instruments through this NIMH grant will help researchers, clinicians and educators better detect treatment effects that are context-specific yet potentially important, better evaluate why interventions impact children differently and better predict the transfer or non-transfer of treatment gains to other settings," Zakriski said.

This grant is 100 percent financed with federal funds.

Zakriski holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University and has taught at Connecticut College since 1998. She is the director of the College's interdisciplinary Holleran Center for Community Action and Public Policy.

For more information contact: Amy Martin (860) 439-2526; a.martin@conncoll.edu