The Children's Research Initiative -- Integrative Approaches -- CRI: Planning For a Center for Integrative Development Science Focused on Development During Key Transitions

Abstract

Planning Grant for a Center for Integrative Developmental Science Focused on Development During Key Transitions

J. Lawrence Aber & Jeanne Brooks-Gunn

The well-being of children and families remains a prominent issue on public agendas across the political spectrum. But problems in this area - child poverty, child abuse and neglect, violence, and unequal access to health care or education, to name a few - have outlasted numerous policy initiatives aimed at relieving them. The Institute for Child and Family Policy (ICFP) at Columbia University marshals the interdisciplinary resources of a leading research university to confront problems that have eluded the grasp of isolated disciplines. The National Science Foundation's Children's Research Initiative will allow ICFP to create a Working Group on Integrative Developmental Science. The purpose of the Working Group is to bring together scientists from a broad range of disciplines at Columbia (developmental psychology, educational psychology, social psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, economics, sociology, and social work) in order to design and plan new and more integrative forms of scientific inquiry into children's learning and development.

To understand - and develop solutions for - the intractable problems facing children and adolescents, the focus of inquiry will be on 'turning points in children's development during key periods of transition.' Independently, Columbia scientists and affiliates are already studying children during four key transitions over the first two decades of life: (1) Prenatal to Toddler years, (2) Preschool to Middle Childhood, (2) Middle Childhood to Adolescence, and (4) Adolescence to Young Adulthood. These transitions represent periods of dramatic growth and qualitative change in children's biological, social-emotional, and cognitive processes. They are also periods of important changes in the structure and meaning of children's interpersonal relationships and social and learning contexts.

During these key periods of transition, children's development is especially open or receptive to influence, positive and negative. The Working Group of scientists at Columbia proposes to design new studies of how certain experiences or events function as critical 'turning points' (moments of decisive influence) in development. In order to pose and answer the most important scientific questions, it is necessary to effectively integrate both theories and methods across a range of disciplines. No single discipline or current cross-disciplinary collaboration is sufficiently integrative to arrive at the most important new scientific breakthroughs.

Over a nine-month planning period, the Working Group will: (1) hold the first Columbia Conference on Integrative Developmental Science to broaden and deepen the theoretical and analytic approaches scientists take to their studies; (2) organize and support 2-3 smaller research planning subgroups to design new multidisciplinary, integrative research on aspects of 'turning points in development;' and (3) prepare a proposal for the National Science Foundation to create a Columbia University Center on Integrative Developmental Science that will conduct the studies designed by the subgroup(s).