PIPages
Labs

Elizabeth Shewark

University of Notre Dame, IN·Psychology·Early-career

Growing up in a poor or violent neighborhood strongly predicts problems across life, yet some young people thrive despite these conditions. Most research on youth resilience, meaning doing well in the face of adversity, has focused on family hardship rather than neighborhood hardship.

Fields

Psychology

Social Science

Public Health & Epidemiology

Topics

youth resilience

neighborhood disadvantage

neighborhood effects

Grants
1 known grant, through Jul 2027

What they work on

  1. Map trajectories of psychiatric, social, emotional and academic resilience to neighborhood disadvantage from middle childhood to adolescence, using longitudinal analysis methods.
  2. Test whether warm and involved parenting changes how youth resilience to neighborhood adversity develops from middle childhood into adolescence.
  3. Determine how positive structural neighborhood features, previously linked to resident well-being, promote youth resilience across the transitions from middle childhood to emerging adulthood.

More about the research

It has also mostly looked at mental health alone, and has found mixed evidence on whether resilience stays stable as children grow. This project asks how resilience to neighborhood disadvantage changes from middle childhood through adolescence and into emerging adulthood, periods when young people gain independence and self-control.

Why it matters

Youth in disadvantaged neighborhoods face higher risk of difficulties in mental health, relationships and school. By pinpointing which parenting behaviors and neighborhood features help young people thrive, this work could identify changeable protective factors that intervention programs, families and community planners could target to promote healthy youth development.

Known grants

From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.

The Development of Youth Resilience to Neighborhood Disadvantage

NIH · Sep 2024 – Jul 2027

Closest labs

Erin Thompson

Florida International University, FL·Psychology·Early-career

Examine how exclusionary school discipline, such as suspension, relates to adolescent mental health and substance use in the ABCD Study, accounting for neighborhood, school, behavioral and socioeconomic factors.

Michael A Mooney

Oregon Health & Science University, OR·Psychology

Map how inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, irritability, executive functioning, vigilance and reward delay discounting co-develop from ages 7–19, using longitudinal data from the Oregon-ADHD-1000 and ABCD cohorts.

Robert Crosnoe

University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science

Document whether exposure to family member deaths in childhood and adolescence predicts unstable trajectories of socioeconomic attainment, family-building, and health in young adulthood, using longitudinal causal-inference techniques on the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health.

The school

University of Notre Dame: 19 labs on PI Pages, $346M a year on research, 277 research doctorates a year.

More about University of Notre Dame

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