Chapin Hall

Communities Experiencing Adversity Focus of 2023 UChicago-Chapin Hall Joint Research Fund Awards

$200K awarded to study child well-being among dual-language refugees, effectiveness of robot coaches for children and more

The University of Chicago and Chapin Hall announce funding for three studies that address interventions to promote well-being among children and families, with a particular emphasis on communities that experience adversity. Now in its 10^th year, the University of Chicago-Chapin Hall Joint Research Fund (JRF) awarded approximately $200,000 across three research teams. The investigators and their projects are:

In Promoting Positive Child Development and Mental Health Outcomes via Home visiting with Dual-Language Refugee and Immigrant families, Ms. Reiko Kakuyama-Villaber (Researcher, Chapin Hall) and Dr. Aimee Hilado (Assistant Professor, Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice) will investigate home visiting as a promising approach to promote child well-being among dual-language refugees. The immigration landscape in the U.S. continues to change along with global migration patterns. In 2022, international migration added an additional 2.9 million people to the population, with foreign-born individuals comprising nearly 15% of the population. Forced migration fractures family and community supports, depletes individual and family coping, and impairs social functioning. As a consequence of their pre-migration and migration experiences, newcomer parents and their young children often struggle with mental health problems including traumatic grief, distress, and somatization (a condition of multiple medical symptoms with no discernible cause). The team will use a multi-site case study design to examine the potential of home visiting programs to promote child and caregiver mental health outcomes among dual-language refugee and immigrant families. Hilado and Kakayuma-Villaber will lead with a quantitative phase of data collection and analysis followed by qualitative study of family experiences. Their findings can serve to inform interventions on a global scale.

Designing Robot Coaches to Support Child Social Emotional Learning. Social emotional learning (SEL) is an educational approach that helps children develop essential skills like self-awareness, relationship skills, and decision making that enable them to reach academic and interpersonal success. Kiljoong Kim (Senior Policy Analyst, Chapin Hall) and Sarah Sebo, (Assistant Professor, University of Chicago, Computer Science) plan to conduct a two-phase inquiry into the feasibility of a social robot as coach in 4th grade classes. In phase one, observations and interviews will aid the construction of a process map that details how SEL and related classroom instruction typically occur. Phase two entails programming and initial testing of the Misty 2.0 Robot. A two-week classroom feasibility trial will pilot two forms of robot interaction: The SEL instructor, where the robot acts as an instructor or tutor, delivering content and guiding the student; and the SEL learner, where the robot acts as a novice, asking the child for help to learn how to apply concepts to the robot’s and the child’s circumstances. This work has the potential to support SEL among students for whom behavior is a barrier to learning.

Ethical Dilemmas: Developing a Protocol to Examine Home Visitor Responses of Culturally Diverse Families. It has long been recognized that the effectiveness of family-oriented social services depends upon relationships — whether between parent and child, therapist and client, or home visitor and parent — and the cultural and political systems they cross. Ethnoracial disparities in health, safety and well-being outcomes during pregnancy and the early childhood years are increasingly understood as a consequence of structural inequities and implicit bias. In a study embedded in early childhood home visiting, Ms. Jennifer Baquedano (Associate Researcher, Chapin Hall) and Dr. Miwa Yasui (Associate Professor, Crown School of Social Work) aim to identify common challenges home visitors face when working with families whose ethnoracial identity differs from their own. They will ascertain the strategies and rationales that professionals use when working with families whose race, ethnicity, and culture is different from their own. The team will also develop and test vignettes with varied family characteristics. The vignettes, once validated, can serve as professional development and training tools with broad application.

The Joint Research Fund awards foster long-term, policy-relevant research collaborations between University of Chicago faculty and Chapin Hall researchers, with an emphasis on early career scholars. The funding supports research consistent with our shared commitment to rigorous inquiry and translational impact. In the previous eight years, the Fund made awards to 24 research teams.

The JRF Steering Committee, made up of appointees from the University and Chapin Hall, reviewed highly competitive proposals from partnerships of faculty across the University and Chapin Hall staff. Interested faculty and staff may visit the Joint Research Fund webpage and sign up for updates.