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The University of Illinois (UIC) Prevention Research Training Program in Urban Children's Mental Health and AIDS Prevention is funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Irving B. Harris Charity Trust. The mission of the program is to educate predoctoral and postdoctoral prevention scientists to conduct innovative, preventive-intervention research to enhance social competence and prevent mental health problems in urban, economically disadvantaged children and adolescents. The Prevention Research Training Program is a multidisciplinary and collaborative effort among UIC faculty and students within in the program's primary training units including: the Department of Psychology, the Institute for Juvenile Research in the Department of Psychiatry, the Center for Urban Educational Research and Development in the College of Education, and the Health Research and Policy Centers in the School of Public Health. During their tenure in the training program, predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows receive didactic and hands-on multidisciplinary training regarding four inter-related phases of preventive intervention research, including problem analysis, innovation design, field trials, and innovation diffusion. Specifically, trainees learn about:
Predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees develop collaborative research relationships with one or more core or affiliated program training faculty and experience different phases of the prevention research cycle. Most trainees engage in extensive field work involving children's mental health and AIDS prevention within the varied contexts of families, schools, and communities.
Fall 1996 The mission of the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) Predoctoral and Postdoctoral Prevention Research Training Program is to educate prevention scientists who will conduct cutting edge preventive-intervention research to enhance social competence and prevent mental health problems in at-risk, economically disadvantaged urban children and adolescents. The multi-disciplinary Training Program, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), represents a collaborative effort of faculty members from four primary UIC training units: (1) the Department of Psychology, (2) the Prevention Research Center (PRC) in the School of Public Health, (3) the Institute for Juvenile Research (IJR) in the Department of Psychiatry, and (4) the Center for Urban Educational Research and Development (CUERD) in the College of Education. The training grant supports five predoctoral and six postdoctoral candidates per year. Trainees participate in prevention-related course work, supervised research practica, and professional development experiences over a 3-year period. The predoctoral fellows are highly qualified graduate students enrolled in UIC's Predoctoral training programs (e.g, Psychology, Education, Public Health, Nursing, Social Work). Postdoctoral fellows are recruited widely to establish an interdisciplinary group of promising scholars and researchers who have received advanced degrees in Psychology, Education, Public Health, Psychiatry, or other social and behavioral sciences. In addition to the NIMH stipend, postdoctoral fellows receive a $10,000 supplement via grant support through their individual mentors or through funding from the Irving B. Harris Trust. Predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows receive funding for travel to present at one conference per year, as well as to attend the NIMH Prevention Conference. Additional funding is available for supplies and research support. The faculty provide multi-disciplinary training to students regarding four inter-related phases of preventive intervention research: problem analysis, innovation design, field trials, and innovation diffusion. More specifically, trainees learn about (1) designing and implementing multi-component prevention programs in natural settings--particularly with families, schools, and communities; (2) culturally sensitive and valid assessment and intervention approaches with at-risk, urban, economically disadvantaged, minority child and adolescent samples; (3) a life-span developmental and ecological theoretical orientation with sensitivity to human diversity; (4) research designs and data-analytic techniques for longitudinal preventive interventions; (5) dimensional and categorical assessment approaches for emotional and behavioral problems and diagnosable mental disorders; (6) social, cognitive, and biological influences on development as well as risk and protective factors for emotional and behavioral disfunction; (7) developmental epidemiology in the community as an opportunity for scientific integration; (8) cost-benefit analyses of preventive interventions; (9) strategies to disseminate effective prevention practices; and (10) principles of scientific integrity and ethics in conducting prevention research. During their tenure in the training program, participants become involved in a wide variety of activities, including a weekly prevention seminar, additional coursework, and research with core and affiliated faculty. Each trainee develops a specialized program of training through discussions with the director of the program and individual mentors. The cornerstone of the training is the prevention seminar Prevention Interventions for Urban Children, Families, and Communities. This course is designed to provide an historical and theoretical overview of the field of prevention, with an in-depth look at methodological issues in design, implementation, assessment, and evaluation of interventions. Furthermore, critical areas in need of intervention among urban youth, such as prevention of violence, delinquency, and HIV; promotion of resiliency, social competency, and literacy; and the value of school-family partnerships and multi-component prevention programs, are systematically examined in the course. Career development is facilitated through doctoral level trainees presenting dissertation research ideas and preparing proposals, and postdoctoral trainees presenting research ideas in preparation for grant writing. Trainees have the opportunity to learn prevention related skills from disciplines outside of their traditional area of training through courses in Psychology, Community Health Services, Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Health Research Management, Sociology, Anthropology, African-American Studies, Latin-American Studies, Education, Psychiatry, and Public Health. Among the many relevant courses available for trainees to participate in are Developmental Psychopathology; Stress, Coping, Social Support, and Health; Juvenile Delinquency; Educational Psychology; Improving the Learning Environment; Adolescents and the Schools; Education and Social Development; Community Health; Public Health Aspects of Mental Health; Health Education and Health Promotion; Psychosocial Epidemiology; Mental Health in Urban Areas; Epidemiology of AIDS; Advanced Regression and Experimental Design; Applied Multivariate Analysis; Advanced Quantitative Methods in Epidemiology; Biostatistics; Community Research; Program Evaluation; Cultural Pluralism and Education Policy; Topics in Race, Ethnic, and Minority History; Urban Cultural Problems; Health Evaluation; and Ethnographic and Qualitative Fieldwork Techniques. Each trainee develops collaborative research relationships with one or more core or affiliated faculty. These projects allow trainees to experience different phases of the prevention research cycle from design and basic research to implementation and evaluation. For most trainees this includes extensive field work involving urban children's mental health issues and AIDS prevention within the contexts of schools, families, and communities. Trainees are involved in many projects throughout the university and community. Among them are the Chicago African American Health Behavior Project (Aban Aya), the Beethoven Elementary School Health Enhancement Project, Project FLAME, and the Chicago HIV-Prevention Adolescent Mental Health Project (CHAMP). The Chicago African American Health Behavior Project (PI: Brian Flay, Ph.D.) tests the efficacy of interventions to prevent anti-social behavior (i.e., violent and aggressive behavior, unsafe sexual behaviors, and substance use/abuse), plus associated mediating variables among 10-13 year old African American adolescents in poorer Chicago area neighborhoods. The Beethoven Elementary School Health Enhancement Project (PI: Roger Weissberg, Ph.D.) is a collaborative effort between the University of Illinois, the Ounce of Prevention, and the Beethoven Elementary School. The project is centered in the school's health clinic and its aim is to develop school/community-based initiatives to enhance children's social, academic, and physical development. Project FLAME (PIs: Flora Rodriguez-Brown, Ph.D. and Timothy Shanahan, Ph.D.) is a program to help immigrant parents enhance their children's education. Several trainees are collaborating with Project FLAME to assess the relationships among parental self-efficacy, social support, parent-child interactions, and child well-being within a group of Mexican immigrant mothers who are participating in Project FLAME. The Chicago HIV-Prevention Adolescent Mental Health Project (PI: Roberta Paikoff, Ph.D.) includes both basic and intervention research. The basic project is a longitudinal study of family influences on HIV risk in a sample of urban African-American children. The study examines family process, family support, mental health and psychosocial adaptation, as well as other social relational, social cognitive, and biological factors in predicting early indicators of HIV risk exposure. This basic study serves as the basis for an HIV prevention intervention project, a longitudinal family-based intervention aimed at promoting health and preventing HIV exposure in urban, African American 4th and 5th graders living in areas with high rates of HIV infection. In addition to coursework and research activities, trainees plan and participate in a series of other career development activities on campus. In the first year of the grant, trainees organized and participated in a monthly seminar series focused on multi-disciplinary perspectives on prevention issues. The seminar series aimed to generate discussion about a series of important topics in community-based prevention research in a way that highlighted and contrasted the perspectives of numerous disciplines. Core and affiliated faculty members and their students were invited to discuss and debate cutting edge issues relevant to prevention scientists, including program evaluation, resilience, public policy, the role of basic research in prevention programming, ethics, preventive interventions in diverse settings, and statistical modeling in prevention research. In addition, trainees were involved in the planning of various aspects of the 5th Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action. In the second year of the grant, trainees organized a half-day conference on Collaborative Efforts in Prevention Research. This conference highlighted a number of the research projects listed above in which trainees have ongoing relationships. The goal of the workshop was to learn how to develop and maintain successful community/academic partnerships. Multiple perspectives (i.e., community, school, academic) on relevant themes such as building relationships, cultural and diversity issues, and community empowerment. In future years trainees will continue to participate in a broad array of coursework, research, and professional development activities to become the prevention scientists of the 21st century.
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