This collaboration aims to stimulate innovative, interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of existing longitudinal data sets bearing on pathways through human development. Tracing the interacting effects of family, peer, neighborhood, and school influences during childhood on life success and problem behaviors in adulthood is a challenging task that is critical to understanding human development and designing interventions to treat maladaptive behavior. Individual longitudinal research projects that follow children over time usually have focused on a limited number of childhood factors that might shape later behavior. At the heart of this Collaborative is the recognition that each of the disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences has made substantial contributions to our collective understanding of human behavior and development. The evolution of our science now requires a coordinated approach to further elucidate the complexities of experience and development; thus, the current Collaborative involves sociologists, economists, education specialists, and psychologists. This Collaborative is broader in scope than previous efforts in several ways: (1) it begins with a relatively large set of established, similar, and committed longitudinal projects involving scholars from a range of behavioral science disciplines; (2) it examines the full span of life-course development, from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and across generations; (3) it examines human development in the many contexts in which it occurs, including families, the peer group, neighborhoods, schools, and communities; (4) it utilizes the most advanced statistical analysis techniques; (5) findings will have implications for understanding and creating effective interventions; and (6) there will be widespread dissemination of both the substantive and methodological knowledge. A sample of specific topics include: factors affecting children's school readiness; effects on children of parents obtaining additional educational experiences; the bidirectional effects of parenting strategies on children's behavior over time; and adulthood outcomes (e.g., educational and occupational success, substance use) of childhood and adolescent aggression. In sum, after several decades of productive yet fragmented longitudinal research in the field, this Collaborative intends to integrate and replicate findings from existing longitudinal (community-level, national, and international) studies and take many steps forward in our knowledge of developmental science.
The Collaborative fosters new methodological and statistical approaches, particularly models that examine simultaneous, multiple interacting ecological contexts, which will be disseminated through conferences, published papers, and invited talks. The Collaborative involves experts from a variety of disciplines in its meetings and activities, and encourages the participation of underrepresented undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral students, and faculty both from the University of Michigan and from the project sites. Results will inform psychosocial interventions and social policy. To the extent that researchers can more fully understand the influences and mechanisms that contribute to success and lack of success in life, the more likely it is that interventions can be created that will make a difference to individuals, families, schools, and neighborhoods. It is a specific focus of this Collaborative to examine social policies in different countries to understand how the well-being of children and families may differ due to the policy conditions in each country. Efforts will be made to disseminate the research findings of the Collaborative beyond academic circles to policymakers, researchers, and other important stakeholders in intervention and policy development.
The goal of this Integrative Research Activities in Developmental Science (IRADS) collaboration housed at the University of Michigan but with collaboraters across the U.S. and international community, was to stimulate innovative, interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of existing longitudinal datasets bearing on pathways through human development. At the heart of our research was the recognition that each of the disciplines in the social and behavioral sciences has made substantial contributions to our collective understanding of human behavior and development. The evolution of our science now requires a coordinated approach to further elucidate the complexities of experience and development. Thus, by having a collaborative of sociologists, economists, education specialists, epidemiologists, and psychologists contribute their various view on these issues, it is possible to bring together knowledge through coordinated interdisciplinary research and training. This IRADS collaborative focused on replicating developmental science across multiple data sets thus creating a new method for how to use accumulated information across the social science. It also allowed for robust tests of important outcomes such as achievement, behavior problems, drug use, aggression, and educational attainment. This collaboration serves as a model of how the social, educational, and life sciences can work together to create new discoveries with existing data that is available through national archives and community samples. More than 25 prominant U.S. and international researchers in developmental and educational science collaborated together on important and relevant research projects. For example, our collaborative found that math achievement during the transition to schooling is predicted by early math and attention skills (Duncan, et al, 2007) and that fractions and division skills in middle childhood predict to algebra skills in high school (Siegler, et al., 2012). These findings were replicated over multiple data sets and countries and gives strong evidence for where the focus of school interventions may need to be to increase math achievement. Researchers in this collaborative also had important findings related to children's behavior such as work by Gershoff, et al., (2012) that found that spanking children increased aggression in all children no matter the race or socio-economic class of the family. Research by Olson, et al.(2013) demonstrated the importance of looking at the longitudinal change in children's behavior across time to understand the normative changes that occur. For example, the majority of children do not show aggressive behavior across time, but for those that do, it is quite stable across early childhood to adolescence. Emotional regulation is generally stable until adolescence and then starts to become dysregulated. Hence, it is important for researchers to understand the age of the child and when behaviors are most likely to occur. For a decade, this research collaborative published and produced replicated findings that have changed the way that developmental and educational science approach their science. All of the research of the collaborative has broad and lasting impact on all the fields and science and family and child interventions. In the past, developmental science has been dominated by the single study with little regard to representation of the population that is being studied. This collaboration demonstrated the importance of longitudinal research, representative samples, and replication methods for increasing the robustness of the findings. It is only when scientists provide the strongest and most well tested research that policy makers and interventionist can use the information to the advantage of the general population. The collaborations represented in this Integrative Resaerch Activities for Developmental Science (IRADS) grant provided that information and is an excellent example of what interdisicplinary science can provide to the scientific field but also the general public. More funding opportunities such as these need to be made available to increase the scientific robustness of the findings across all sciences.
