Research
Our faculty study a wide range of ecologies (e.g., families, schools, neighborhoods, policy contexts, programs) and preventive interventions (e.g., pertaining to school readiness; school success; HIV and health behaviors; mental health; housing and homelessness), locally, nationally and internationally. Our faculty also conducts work on how cultural factors and identities influence and interact with experiences of these ecologies and interventions. Our New York City location provides students and faculty with an ideal urban setting for studying many kinds of communities and settings combined with easy access to gateways to the world at large.
Student Research
Students work collaboratively with faculty on a range of activities in these research areas, including study design, data collection, primary and secondary data analysis, journal publications, conference presentations, policy briefs, and evaluation activities carried out with service, community, and policy organizations.
Students are required to participate on the research team of a PSI faculty member (or another Applied Psychology faculty, by program approval), beginning the first semester of their first year. Students are expected to allocate at least half of their time (20 hours per week) to this activity. By year 3, in line with our training expectations to be exposed to more than one project, students should spend a minimum of 5 hours (of the 20 hours per week) working with another research mentor (within or outside of the program by approval of primary research mentor). Students are free to transition onto new research teams throughout their doctoral training.
Affiliated Research Labs/Projects
ARCADIA
PSI Faculty: Pamela Morris-Perez, Ph.D.
ARCADIA for Early Childhood takes a developmentally informed, partnered approach to understanding how children's early experiences at home and in child care/early childhood education affect their behavior and development. ARCADIA-Early Childhood draws on our team's prior work, including an IES-funded partnership with NYC Public Schools (NYCPS) to support the historic scale-up of the Pre-K for All program and a 10-year NICHD-funded trial of Smart Beginnings, a tiered school readiness parenting intervention launched from pediatric offices. Our current work includes a partnership with the NYCPS Arts Office to study Early Childhood Strings Pathways, a program that embeds violin instruction in Pre-K to Grade 2 classrooms to improve children’s musical fluency and support children’s growth in language, numeracy, and self-regulatory skills.
ARCADIA for Suicide Prevention takes a developmentally-informed, population-health approach to adolescent suicide. We focus on the places where adolescents already are (schools, primary care, emergency rooms), leverage trusted sources of support (peers, parents, trusted adults), are attuned to the developmental needs of adolescent autonomy and identity, and are guided by the ideas of youth themselves. Our focus is to strengthen bridges, integrating prevention and intervention within and across the places where youth are situated. We approach our work as a partnership between academia and public agencies to integrate seamlessly into practice at scale.
Baby's First Years: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Poverty Reduction
PSI Faculty: Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Ph.D.
Baby’s First Years is the first study in the United States to assess the causal impact of poverty reduction on family life and children’s cognitive, emotional, and brain development. It is a randomized control trial that provides monthly, unconditional cash gifts (either $333/month or $20/month) to low-income mothers and their children in the first years of a child’s life.
Core PIs: Drs. Kimberly Noble, Katherine Magnuson, Greg Duncan, Lisa Gennetian, Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Nathan Fox
CONNECT
Strengthening Connections & Opportunities for Learning in and out of Schools
PSI Faculty: Elise Cappella, Ph.D.
The CONNECT lab at NYU conducts research to understand and strengthen contexts for learning and mental health in low-income education settings. We study natural opportunities for academic, social, and emotional learning via productive relationships and quality interactions.
Using social network approaches, we investigate and enhance connections among children, between children and non-familial adults (educators, practitioners), and among adults who work with youth. We collaborate with school and community partners to activate internal resources to support children with and without behavioral difficulties.
Intergroup Conflict and Social Change Lab
PIs: Rezarta Bilali and Michelle Twali
The Intergroup Conflict and Social Change Lab conducts basic and applied research on conflict, violence, oppression, and social change. We examine processes that maintain intergroup violence and oppression, and develop and test interventions and strategies to dismantle them. Our research examines the role that historical and sociopolitical contexts play in these processes. The overarching goal of this research is to generate knowledge and develop theoretically grounded interventions to reduce violence and promote peace and justice. We use multiple methods, including field and lab experiments, surveys, focus groups, and interviews, and situate our work in multiple contexts, internationally and in the United States.
Ongoing Research Project:
- The role of historical narratives in shaping present-day collective action and social change.
- Construals of conflict and how they shape attitudes and behaviors.
- Interventions to improve relations between refugees and host communities.
The Learning Race Lab
PSI Faculty: Diane Hughes, Ph.D.
We call our research lab at New York University THE LEARNING RACE LAB. It’s name reflects the fact that all of our projects focus on the variety of ways that children and adolescents in the United States come to make meaning of “racial” groups. Although race is not biologically real in any sense, we in the United States have made it real. We attach meaning to differences in physical appearance (skin color, hair texture, facial features) and assume that people who look more alike on the outside have DNA that looks more alike on the inside (which is not the case). Therefore, in all of our projects we seek to understand how children and adolescents make meaning of race based on what they observe, experience, hear, and are told in the varieties of spaces they enter (family, school, neighborhood, church, etc), combined with what their developmental competencies and tendencies are.
The Researching Inequity in Society Ecologically (RISE)
PSI Faculty: Erin Godfrey, Ph.D.
The RISE team’s research and activities serve traditionally marginalized populations, focusing on health and mental health disparities in women and youth who are involved or at risk of involvement with the justice system. As such, the RISE Team takes a contextual, multi-level and interdisciplinary approach to systems change and implementing evidence-based practices promoting health and well-being, working closely with community partners to bridge the gap between research and practice.
SAFE Spaces: Systems Aligning For Equity
PSI Faculty: Erin Godfrey, Ph.D.
Developed in partnership with the NYC Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), SAFE Spaces uses evidence-based principles to provide training and coaching support for frontline staff working in ACS Close to Home (CTH) non-secure and limited-secure placement facilities.
Through unique skills-based staff training activities and guidance from a trained coach, SAFE Spaces aims to increase the professional development, job satisfaction, retention, and well-being in CTH staff who work directly with youth. By focusing on these staff outcomes and the environment in which they work, we also help to promote and encourage a healthier environment for youth’s lives and promote their safety, well-being and positive development. The efficacy of SAFE Spaces is being assessed through a cluster-randomized control trial supported by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH).
SCALE: Systems for Children, Adolescents, and Learning Evidence
PSI Faculty: Florencia Lopez Boo, Ph.D.
We partner with national governments in Latin America and the Caribbean, including Argentina, Colombia, El Salvador, Uruguay, and Haiti, to generate rigorous evidence that informs policy at scale. Our work focuses on quality-improvement systems, the long-term economic impacts of education, and cost-effectiveness.
Argentina & Uruguay | Education Policy Reforms Research
We are evaluating the long-term impacts of a 1990s preschool expansion in Uruguay on employment and wages in adulthood, and of recent extended school hours on child and family outcomes in the Province of Buenos Aires.
Colombia & El Salvador | Supporting National Policymakers to Meet Their Research Agendas
In Colombia, with IPA and the Instituto Colombiano de Bienestar Familiar (ICBF), we are co-leading a five-city survey of 12-17-year-olds on substance use, digital risky behaviors, and mental health. The survey aims to identify risk factors for teenage addiction and to inform ICBF's preventive policies. In El Salvador, we are providing expert advice for the mid-term evaluation of the National Early Childhood Policy launched in 2019.
Haiti | Remote Learning Pilot
With J-PAL support, we are evaluating a remote learning pilot to improve foundational learning in crisis settings, in partnership with GHESKIO, the Fonds d'Assistance Économique et Sociale (FAES), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
Active and Upcoming Areas
- Hybrid and cost-effective service delivery for child development programs
- Evaluations of smartphone bans in schools in LAC
- Redefining childcare in the context of declining fertility
- Screens and early childhood: diagnostics, impact, and mitigation within parenting programs in LMIC
Schools for All (SfA) Lab
PSI Faculty: Alejandro Ganimian
The Schools for All (SfA) lab studies how education systems in low- and middle-income countries can meet the needs of first-generation learners: children who are the first in their families to attend school. Rapid expansions in access have brought students with widely differing preparation into classrooms. The lab seeks to help school systems respond to these differences so that all students develop the academic and social-emotional skills needed to participate fully in the economy and society.
Its research examines three complementary approaches: preventing early learning gaps by supporting caregivers and high-quality early childhood education; helping schools manage differences in students’ learning levels by strengthening foundational skills and supporting differentiated instruction; and mitigating the consequences of learning gaps by supplementing classroom instruction with remedial education and personalized technology.
The lab pursues this agenda through sustained partnerships with governments, nonprofits, and private companies, primarily in South Asia and Latin America. It combines large-scale experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations with measurement approaches from education and psychology to understand whether interventions work and how they affect learning and behavior. Partners help identify priorities, develop feasible interventions, and use the findings to improve programs and inform decisions about expansion.
Affiliated Research Centers and Institutes
IHDSC
The Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC)'s mission is to stimulate interdisciplinary research and influence social policy on children, youth, families, and communities in the context of a rapidly changing social world.
Research Alliance for New York City Schools
The Research Alliance for New York City Schools strives to advance equity and excellence in education by providing nonpartisan evidence about policies and practices that promote NYC students' development and academic success.
Global Ties
NYU Global TIES for Children is an international research center embedded within NYU’s Institute of Human Development and Social Change (IHDSC) and supported by the NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute and NYU New York. Established in 2014, Global TIES for Children was developed to lead efforts in generating rigorous evidence to support the best and most effective humanitarian and development aid. To date, Global TIES for Children has secured a position at the front lines of advances in methods and measures for assessing child development and for understanding variation in program impacts at multiple levels in low-income and crisis-affected contexts.