Chapin Hall

Doris Duke Fellowships Launched Fellows’ Careers and Facilitated Long-Term Connections

The Doris Duke Fellowships for the Promotion of Child Well-Being engaged 120 fellows in eight cohorts from diverse disciplines in a peer-learning network that fostered interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration while promoting actionable research. In 2023, we fielded a final survey of the fellows to assess whether the fellowships program met its goals and to understand how the program and its core strategies may have influenced the fellows’ careers years after the program ended. 

What We Did

Chapin Hall researchers invited all 120 fellows to participate in an online survey 2 years after the final cohort finished the fellowships program. The survey asked questions about their experiences in the program and how the program may have impacted their career. It assessed fellows’ leadership skills, interdisciplinary knowledge and research, innovation in their work, and visibility of the field. (Those were the four primary goals of the fellowships program.) We examined potential group differences in these outcomes, such as academic discipline, racial and ethnic identity, and first-generation college student status. 

What We Found

Ninety-seven (81%) of the 120 fellows completed the survey across the eight cohorts. Survey responses revealed the following:

• The fellows felt that the fellowships program contributed to their leadership skills and that building relationships was the most important skill in their institutions.
• Fellows are working collaboratively with colleagues from other disciplines by conducting joint research projects and producing interdisciplinary work.
• Fellows are generating innovative research questions and methods.
• Fellows have elevated the idea that preventing child maltreatment at an individual, community, or societal level is worthy of serious, rigorous, and thoughtful scholarly investigation.
• Fellows credited the financial support provided through the program as the most important mechanism for success. Second most important was connections with other fellows and their mentors.
• Fellows reported engaging in their work through a racial equity lens about 72% of the time, primarily when examining disparities in service access and service effects.

What It Means

• Fellows shared overwhelmingly positive experiences and described myriad benefits of the fellowships.
• The fellowships program reached its four primary goals.
• The program’s financial support is a critical component of this type of program, allowing fellows to focus on completing their dissertation and launching their careers sooner.
• Almost all fellows reported that connections with other fellows and their mentors had a positive impact on their career. Through these connections, they collaborated with other fellows on projects long after their active time as a fellow, received guidance on translating research to practice and policy, and supported one another in the job market.
• Principles of diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice were not formal components of the fellowships program, yet fellows reported reflecting on some of those principles in their work and in their institutions.
• The fellows remain well connected and provide each other with important resources to promote interdisciplinary learning and research.
• The Doris Duke Fellowships network has transitioned into the Child Well-Being Research Network, allowing these connections and collaborations to continue.

Read the report