CURRENT RESEARCH PROJECTS BY CONSORTIUM FACULTY

FACULTY MEMBER: Oscar A. Barbarin III, Ph.D.

Project Title: Strengthening Literacy Practices in African American Families
Project Description: This research project addresses the problem of school readiness by implementing a family focused intervention with high-risk children. The principal activities of the project involve refining and implementing a promising family focused intervention. Specifically, the project will implement a program to enrich the home literacy experiences of preschoolers in North Carolina, especially African American children. Although parents are children’s first and primary teachers, they are not always confident of their abilities to help their children. We believe, however, that parents are quite capable of conversing with, reading to and teaching their preschoolers in a fashion that is likely to produce positive outcomes when they are provided with the right strategies and tools for doing so. Thus, by strengthening parental competence and increasing the use of effective learning practices, this newly developed program will enhance the school readiness of high-risk children.

The proposed project is designed to empower parents by showing them how mundane interactions with their children can be turned into an opportunity to promote learning. The intervention is built around a modular curriculum with modules on specific skill areas related to literacy, language development, and social competence. It is derived from the understanding that language is the foundation of the earliest literacy skills children acquire and that the acquisition of language often occurs through parent-child conversations and interactions. The program begins with an individual assessment of parent skills. Modules are then tailored to fit the parent’s individual circumstances and skill level and delivered principally through home visits arranged on a weekly or bi-weekly basis. Videotaped parent-child interactions will be used in generating discussions of practices, identifying and building on what parents are doing right, and suggesting ways parents can enrich the language development and early reading skills of their children.

This project involves collaboration between UNC and the Governor’s-More-at-4 program. The initial refinement phase will begin with a small number of families enrolled in More-at-4 programs. The sites will be selected in consultation with the Governor’s staff. An initial group of about six families will be involved in the testing of modules. They will be asked to evaluate what was helpful and what was not through interviews and questionnaires. Refinement will focus on how interesting, engaging and effective the modules are in increasing parental skills. The project expects to recruit parents of 50 children between 38 and 44 months old. Half of the children will be males and half will be females. Funds will be used to cover personnel and travel expenses, to reimburse participants (for childcare or travel if required) and to purchase assessment materials. To evaluate the efficacy of the program, assessments of children’s language and literacy before and after the intervention will be conducted. No additional funds other than those requested in our budget will be needed to carry out the activities proposed here.

We expect several outcomes from this work. Most importantly is a scientifically valid family intervention. Secondly, by the end of this funded project, we will work with the Governor’s More-at-4-Program to establish program standards and refine family program guidelines based on our experiences in North Carolina. In addition, we will respond to an RFA from NICHD to compare the effectiveness of parent programs across multiple states to determine which approaches work best for which families. Although these efforts are unlikely to usurp the role of pre-kindergarten programs as they are currently operated, this intervention complements the efforts of high quality pre-k programs by marshalling the resources of families to help their children learn. We believe the efforts of teachers are more likely to take hold when there is congruence between and reinforcement of what occurs in the classroom setting and what occurs at home.

FACULTY MEMBER: Susan Calkins, Ph.D.

Project Description: Susan Calkins is currently conducting three longitudinal studies of children's emotional development. In one longitudinal study, which has followed children from age 2 to age 7, she is examining the child and family factors that affect children's emotional functioning and its relation to early behavior problems. In a second study, she is following a group of infants selected for extreme temperaments and examining the development of emotion regulation skills across preschool. In a third study involving preschoolers, she is studying the links between emotional skills and cognitive skills to identify their contributions to early school success.

FACULTY MEMBER: Jane Costello, Ph.D.

Project Description: Dr. Jane Costello and colleagues are conducting two ongoing longitudinal studies that provide unique data sets for identifying key points for interventions to reduce violence: the Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS), and Caring for Children in the Community (CCC). Together they provide data on some 2,300 young people, starting at age 9. Participants are of both sexes, and White, African American, and American Indian youth are represented in large enough numbers to permit comparisons among them. Because the study areas are mainly rural, we can begin to disaggregate poverty, race/ethnicity, and inner-city residence as risk factors. Information has been collected from participants, parents, and teachers, about violent behavior, its antecedents and consequences, co-morbid psychopathology and risk and protective factor. Most of the measurement is at the level of the individual (hormones, psychiatric disorders, substance abuse, relationships, physical and sexual abuse, etc.) and the family (structure, stability, relationships, resources, gun ownership, parental criminality and psychopathology, etc.) This data is being analyzed in grants which study the effects of poverty on psychiatric disorders, violence, depression co-morbid with externalizing problems in children, and vulnerability to substance use disorders.

FACULTY MEMBER: Martha J. Cox, Ph.D.

Project Title: The Durham Child Health and Development Study
Project Description: This longitudinal study has the following aims:

1. To describe the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children from age 1 to 4 years. Competence in our culture is attributed to children who show effective learning, memory, and language; regulation of arousal, attention, and emotion; and appropriate interactions and relationships with their families, peers, and other caregiving adults. We will describe various trajectories of social, emotional, and cognitive development during this formative and salient period of development.

2. To examine the timing and integration of events or processes in functional development. Social, emotional, and cognitive competencies are clearly interrelated and interwoven in development, yet we know little about how these acquisitions become integrated and maintained over time to support emerging competence.

3. To examine the biological, psychological, interpersonal, and broader contextual processes that contribute to continuity and change in functioning. Continuity and change in social, emotional and cognitive development is best conceptualized as the relation between the child’s internal and external environment than as continuity or change in the child’s individual characteristics. Important processes of development cannot be studied adequately without a multidisciplinary approach that recognizes the complexity of development. Human behavior patterns represent the melding of sociological, interactional, genetic, intergenerational, and biosocial events in concrete ecological contexts.

4. To provide policy and program directions based on interdisciplinary evidence. The research that currently informs policy and practice usually does not flow from multidisciplinary approaches that recognize the complexity of development. Children and their families in our society have varying individual and relational resources to face important developmental challenges. We are an increasingly diverse society, but we know little about the varying goals, beliefs, and values of families of different cultural backgrounds.

The families in this longitudinal study were recruited from birth records in Durham, North Carolina and surrounding areas. The final sample includes over 200 families from African-American and European-American families at high and low-income levels have been recruited. These families are being seen at 3, 6, 12, and 18 months. They will be followed at 24 and 36 months for home, lab, and child care visits.

FACULTY MEMBER: Thomas W. Farmer, Ph.D.

Project Description: Dr. Farmer directs the Social Development and Intervention Research Program (SDIRP) at the Center for Developmental Science. Currently, several longitudinal and intervention projects are being conducted. For more detail visit the SDIRP page.  Dr. Farmer is also director of the National Research Center on Rural Education Support (NRCRES). Please visit the NRCRES site for more information on these research projects at www.nrcres.org.

FACULTY MEMBER: Jill Fitzgerald, Ph.D.

Project Title: Reading Excellence Act Database
Project Description: Data were collected in 16 NC high-poverty, low-achieving schools that received between $100,000 and $1,000,000 from the federal Reading Excellence Act for a two-year period to improve classroom reading instruction in kindergarten through third grade. Data sources at all schools included: Child literacy measures; staff development logs; and principal, teacher, and literacy facilitator questionnaires and interviews. Four of the 16 schools were focal schools where additional data sources were used, classroom observations of reading instruction three times a year. Several research issues will be addressed, including: Examination of the students’ reading growth; teacher change in classroom instruction; quality, type, and change in classroom instruction, especially in relation to student growth; and English-language learners’ progress, especially in relation to native-English peers and classroom instruction variables. Considerable data have been coded and entered into the database. Analyses will involve both quantitative (including HLM) methods as well as qualitative.

FACULTY MEMBER: Jean-Louis Gariepy, Ph.D.

Project Description: The regulation of hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) activity and behavioral capacities for emotion regulation are currently regarded as integrated processes that have significant impact on the physical health, cognitive development, and social adjustment of the child. Further progress in understanding how these relations arise requires developmental information on regulative processes in both their physiological and behavioral aspects, and of the conditions under which these processes are integrated within the individual. Our study traces normative changes in HPA activity and behavioral processes of emotion regulation and examine child and caregiver factors that affect the development of these functions over the first 36 months of life. This research is guided by the hypothesis that the organization of this biobehavioral system is supported by temperamental dispositions and affective security, the quality of the nurturing environment, and developmental transactions among these factors. The various components of this hypothesis are tested in a sample of 200 children recruited by the Carolina Child Development Research Collaborative study (CDRC). Our findings will contribute to the parameterization of HPA activity and behavioral indexes of emotion regulation and clarify transactional mechanisms that account for the organization, stability, and plasticity of these systems over early childhood.

FACULTY MEMBER: Amy Halberstadt, Ph.D.

Project Description: The importance of parents’ beliefs about emotions as an aspect of parents’ emotional socialization has been suggested by theoretical and empirical work in recent years. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions influence parents’ emotion socialization behaviors and children’s emotion-related outcomes. To date, however, the parental emotional beliefs that have been studied have been few, broadly defined, and have been defined based on the responses of a homogenous participant sample, predominantly white middle-class mothers. My five-year plan is to assess how parental beliefs about emotion and parents’ emotion-related behaviors influence and are themselves influenced by children’s emotional well-being and affective social competence. We have begun this process by: (1) exploring parents’ beliefs in three ethnic groups via a large-scale focus group study, (b) developing a questionnaire for parents that assesses their beliefs about children’s emotions, and in which ethnic diversity is central in questionnaire development, and (3) assessing the factor structure and demonstrating psychometric reliability and validity of the questionnaire for both mothers and fathers of children aged 4- to 10-years, in these three different ethnic groups. Our next step (2004-2005) will be to examine the relationships between parents’ beliefs about children’s emotions and parents’ behavior while discussing family conflicts, and to assess how parental beliefs about emotion, and parental behaviors during parent-child discussions of conflict, are associated with children’s frequency and complexity of emotion talk during those discussions. Future work will then be directed toward a more comprehensive examination of the relationship between parental beliefs and behaviors regarding emotion and children’s affective social competence, including children’s experience and expression of emotion.

FACULTY MEMBER: Nancy E. Hill, Ph.D.

Project Title: Project PASS (Promoting Academic Success for Students)
Project Description: A pattern of differential achievement levels across ethnic groups is present both nationally and locally. As early as third grade, we find that less than half of African American children are performing at grade level or above in math and English, compared to approximately 75% of Euro-American children. These children, at least in the local public school district, are sitting the same classrooms and presumably receiving the same level of instruction but are not learning at the same pace. There are very few longitudinal studies that have explored early parenting and family socialization practices that might be predictive of later school success. Moreover, most studies comparing ethnic minority and majority samples confound ethnicity with other demographic factors. Project PASS is a longitudinal study of socioeconomically comparable samples of African American and Euro-American kindergarten children and their families. The study seeks to understand ethnic and socioeconomic variations in the prediction of fourth grade school performance based on kindergarten school readiness, family socialization strategies, and community context. This study examines ethnic and socioeconomic variations in the predictive relationships among parenting, family and academic socialization factors and school achievement. In addition, we are starting a new study examining the changing in parent-school involvement and family school relations developmentally between elementary and middle school levels using qualitative and quantitative methodologies.

Project Title: Durham Child Health and Development Study (Principal Investigators: Martha Cox & Steve Reznick)
Project Description: As part of the study we are examining neighborhood and community factors including “objective” characteristics of the neighborhood, maternal perceptions of the neighborhood, and collective socialization within the neighborhood as they support or undermine parents’ beliefs about their parenting role, satisfaction and efficacy in the parenting role. In addition, we are examining the extent to which African American parents' attitudes about ethnic socialization may in large part be determined by the characteristics of neighborhoods in which they reside.

FACULTY MEMBERS: Diane Holditch-Davis, Ph.D. & Margaret S. Miles, Ph.D.

Project Title: Nursing Support Intervention for Mothers of Prematures
Project Description: Premature infants are at risk for developmental problems, and Rural African American prematures are at higher risk for these problems than other prematures. This health discrepancy is probably due to interactions among factors, such as poverty, barriers to service usage, the mothers’ emotional distress from the infant’s birth and hospitalization, and resultant parenting styles that may be less facilitative of infant development.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effectiveness of a culturally congruent intervention providing support to rural, African American mothers of prematures from the time their infants are in intermediate care until they are 18 month of age. During phone calls and home visits, the intervention nurse will help mothers resolve emotional distress due to prematurity and reduce stress related to parenting in the context of work and family, support them in developing relationships with their infants, and help them identify acceptable resources and fit resources to her goals in order to meet complex infant health and developmental needs. The context for the intervention is a therapeutic relationship in which a culturally proficient nurse uses guided discovery to focus on the mothers’ experiences and concerns and help the mother to identify ways to reduce distress, improve parenting, and tap into strengths available in her family and culture. Mothers receiving the intervention and mothers receiving usual care will be compared to determine whether the intervention affects psychological well-being, mother-child relationship quality, length of use of child health and developmental surveillance services, and child development. We expect that improvements in maternal psychological well-being will lead to longer use of services, better mother-child relationship quality, and better infant developmental status, particularly lessening the decrease in developmental status that is often seen after 12 months. The cost-effectiveness of the intervention will also be determined.

Two hundred and twelve rural, African American mothers and their high-risk prematures will be recruited when the babies are in intermediate care and followed until they are 24 months corrected age. The mothers will be randomly assigned to control and intervention groups. The intervention will consist of an in-person contact in the hospital followed by a home visit 1-2 weeks after discharge and at 5, 10 and 15 months. Phone contacts will be made weekly during the first month, bimonthly for 2 months, and then monthly. Maternal psychological well-being will be measured using depressive symptoms, anxiety, posttraumatic stress symptoms, parenting stress, and minor daily stresses. The quality of the infant's social environment will be measured using a 1-hour naturalistic observation of mother-infant interaction, the HOME Inventory, and two measures of maternal perception of the child. Length of use of services will be measured by the Child Services Survey and immunization status, a proxy for adequacy of well-child care, and confirmed from medical records. Child development will be measured by the Bayley II and a language assessment.

FACULTY MEMBER: Andrea Hussong, Ph.D.

Project Description: Dr. Hussong is involved in three prospective studies of adolescent substance use and high-risk behavior. The first is a two-year investigation of the development of adjustment problems in the transition to high school. The second is a collaborative project of high-risk youth in which, along with Dr. Curran, she is studying processes of risk and resilience associated with stress-exposure in children of alcoholic and non-alcoholic parents across three different samples ranging from 3 to 30 years old. The third is a study directed by Dr. Ennett in UNC-CH's School of Public Health. The study examines social network influences on adolescent risk-behavior as embedded in the contexts of schools, families and neighborhoods and as assessed in a sample of 6,000 adolescents surveyed biannually over a four year period. These three studies include the use of blended methodologies including experience sampling techniques, social network analysis, and cohort-sequential designs. The use of advanced statistical methods involving hierarchical linear modeling and latent trajectory modeling is emphasized in this work.

FACULTY MEMBER: J. Kupersmidt, Ph.D.

Project Description: Dr. Kupersmidt is conducting a large NICHD project that involves a kindergarten readiness intervention with 4-year olds. The primary goal of the proposed intervention is to conduct a longitudinal effectiveness trial of a multimodal, integrated preschool program designed to improve children’s school readiness by promoting pre-literacy, communication, mathematics and socio-emotional skills in children at risk for school difficulties. The proposed intervention program consists of a variety of integrated curriculum materials and training methods including intensive teacher training workshops, individual on-site technical assistance with formalized protocols, specific math and pre-literacy classroom activities, and individual primer/booster sessions for a subgroup of aggressive children. Children living in a low-income family or community are at particularly high risk for school failure and constitute the primary target population for this proposal. The sample will include children attending Head Start and community childcare programs. Teachers will be randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Control, Workshops Only, or Workshops Plus. Teachers in both treatment conditions will receive 30 hours of group-based teacher training. Teachers in the Workshops Plus condition will additionally receive on-site technical assistance consisting of individual consultation and mentoring. Teacher outcomes will be assessed in baseline, intervention, and maintenance years. Child assessments will be conducted in the fall and spring of the intervention year and after the children have made the transition to kindergarten. The outcomes of the proposed research will inform teachers, program directors, and policymakers as they make important decisions about the directions and expansion of early childhood efforts in the U.S.

FACULTY MEMBER: Beth Kurtz-Costes, Ph.D.

Project Description: Two projects are underway that are aimed at understanding race socialization, race identity development, and achievement striving in African American youth. The first project, which is a longitudinal study with assessments of children and parents when the children are in fifth and seventh grades, is focused on the transition to middle school. The goal of this project is to identify factors that lead to success across the transition to middle school for Black youth, and to investigate how the process differs for students entering predominantly Black schools versus ethnically diverse schools. Race identity, parents' race socialization, and attributions about reasons for success and failure are examined as predictors and mediators of achievement striving. The second project is an investigation of sex differences in academic achievement and identity development in African American youth. Many theorists have argued that African Americans--boys in particular—form identities that do not emphasize their academic skills. The goal of this project is to identify the factors that lead to gender differences in achievement striving among Black youth, with a special focus on the role of parents in shaping adolescents' developing identities.

FACULTY MEMBER: Peter Ornstein, Ph.D.

Project Title: Developmental Pathways to Skilled Remembering (NICHD)
Project Description: Given the critical role of memory in all aspects of successful adaptation, Peter Ornstein, Catherine Haden, and Carol Eckerman are examining contrasting developmental pathways to skilled remembering in young children. This project builds upon a rich database regarding age-related changes in children's memory that has been amassed over the last 20 years. The wealth of information regarding the mnemonic abilities of children of different ages notwithstanding, critical issues concerning the development of these skills remain largely unaddressed. For example, little is known about the experiential factors that are associated with the emergence and refinement of these cognitive skills. This project is designed to address these issues by providing a longitudinal analysis of children's varied abilities to remember, with a sample of approximately 120 children. Using two overlapping cohorts of children, age-related changes in remembering are being tracked from 18 to 72 months of age, concentrating especially on the multiple contributions of language and social communication to the development of memory. Taking nonverbal indices of young children's memory as a foundation, the emergence, refinement, and generalization of verbal skills for remembering is being charted.

Project Title: Linking teacher “talk” and the development of children’s memory (NSF)
Project Description: During the elementary school years, children become increasingly facile users of a broad array of techniques for remembering information. Unfortunately, however, relatively little is known about the developmental course of these skills within individual children, and even less is understood about the factors that influence the emergence, modification, and effectiveness of mnemonic strategies. To address these issues, Peter Ornstein has launched a longitudinal study in which a sample of approximately 105 children (in 15 classrooms in four different schools) is being followed through the first and second grades of elementary school. These children are being assessed repeatedly each year on a wide range of memory tasks. In addition, in order to understand the forces that propel developmental change, an extensive series of observations is being carried out in the classrooms of the participants, with particular emphasis being placed on the nature of “teacher talk” about remembering, the memory demands that are expressed, the specific strategies that are modeled or discussed, and the expectations that are transmitted by teachers.

FACULTY MEMBER: Elizabeth Pungello, Ph.D.

Project Title: Family Factors, Childcare Quality, & Cognitive Outcomes
Project Description: The majority of children in the U.S. are cared for at least part-time by a non-relative on a regular basis before they enter kindergarten. The most common type of childcare used for very young children is family day care in a home, and the use of center day care increases with age of the child. Much of the care in these out-of-home settings is of poor quality, and research has demonstrated that childcare quality is related to the child's cognitive and language outcomes. Young children from low-income families and of minority ethnic status may be more likely to experience childcare of lower quality than other children. This leads to the tragic conclusion that many children in the U.S., particularly those from disadvantaged backgrounds, are cared for in settings that do not promote optimal cognitive and language development. In addition, some research suggests that the effects of childcare quality may be stronger for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our primary goal is to explore the relations among family factors, childcare quality, and cognitive outcomes. The proposed research is a collateral study to an ongoing longitudinal project funded by the National Science Foundation's Children's Research Initiative (BCS-0126475, Cox, PI). This project, the Durham Child Health and Development Study (DCHDS) examines multiple levels of influence on communication and cognitive outcomes from infancy through age 3 years. The DCHDS will assess family processes and children's language and cognitive outcomes in a sample that includes 200 low- and middle-income African-American and Euro-American families. In the proposed research, we will assess the quality of the out-of-home childcare settings experienced by the children in the DCHDS from the age of 18 months through 3 years to examine the following: 1) the association between childcare quality and language and cognitive outcomes, and to investigate the moderating effects of family income and ethnicity on this relationship; 2) whether family processes associated with language stimulation in the home interact with childcare quality to influence children's language and cognitive outcomes; and 3) whether a discrepancy between parents' and childcare providers' authoritarian child-rearing beliefs is associated with lower language and cognitive outcomes.

FACULTY MEMBERS: Debra Skinner, Ph.D. & Linda Burton Ph.D.

Project Title: An Ethnography of Rural Communities, Families, and Young Children
Project Description: This project is an RO1 of the Program Project: Children in Rural Poverty: Risk and Protective Mechanisms (Lynne Vernon-Feagans, PI). This five-year ethnographic project in 6 rural counties in NC and PA will conduct fine-grained assessments, over time, of the relationship between community forces and resources, social networks, family routines and adaptations, and the development of infant and preschool children. The ethnographic study comprises two components. The first is a community ethnography involving in-depth contextual appraisals of community characteristics hypothesized to affect families’ and children’s lives. These appraisals will be conducted for a period of five years in selected communities and at the county level in the program project’s six focal localities--Blair, Cambria, and Huntington counties in Pennsylvania; and Wilson, Wayne, and Sampson counties in North Carolina. The second component is a family ethnography involving intensive interviews and participant observation with 72 families distributed equally across the six counties. Our sample of families will mirror those involved in the program project core in terms of poverty status, locality and race/ethnicity, with the exception that we will purposively recruit expectant mothers and their families, 33% of whom also have children age 2-4. We will follow the sample intensively for five years. By employing this design, the ethnography will gather data on target infants while simultaneously generating insights on a subsample of toddler and preschool siblings. In doing so, the ethnography maintains a subsample of children that will be “developmentally ahead” of the target children involved in the program project core, better enabling the core to use the ethnographic data to inform the conceptual models and the selection of measures they plan to use in evaluating the core sample of children through their preschool years. Our conceptual and methodological approaches for the proposed ethnography are embedded in the model “Structured Discovery.” Structured discovery is a highly successful set of strategies that we developed and are using to conduct a large interdisciplinary, multi-investigator, multi-site ethnographic study of poor and welfare-dependent urban families -- Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study.

Report of year’s work: In the first year of this project, we hired and trained ethnographers and began the recruitment process. We have recruited 35 families (i.e., consenting the mother or primary caregiver and any other family member that takes part in interviews or observations). We interviewed 8 people as key informants as part of the community ethnography. We will continue to recruit key informants for a one-time interview. We anticipate a total of 20 key informant interviews in the next year. We will continue to collect data from the 35 families and will try to recruit 2 more in the coming year. Interviews have been done with each family approximately every 6 weeks, and this schedule will continue through Year 2. We have also begun transcribing the audiotaped interviews and in the coming year will begin data analysis. No family member or key informant has expressed any concern or complaints about the project. To our knowledge, no one has suffered any ill effects or become upset as a result of participating in the project.

FACULTY MEMBER: Lynne Vernon-Feagans, Ph.D.

Project Title: The Penn State Health and Development Project
Project Description: This project followed 140 children from daycare entry in the first year of life until 3 years of age with a multi-method approach that examined the childcare and the home setting. It is a unique data set because it has very detailed information on the quality of childcare, including observations in the classrooms; quality of the home environment, including questionnaires from parents and triadic interactions in the home; and child characteristics, including weekly health screenings by certified nurses, standardized hearing assessments, temperament and behavior ratings by parents and teachers, extensive child language data in SALT, standardized tests, and observational data of social interactions in childcare. Initial papers from this data set include results that support a cumulative risk model. Children in low quality care with other negative child characteristics have the poorest outcomes. High quality care appears to buffer children against negative effects.

Project Title: The Family Life Project
Project Description: The grant, one of the largest awarded by NICHD to UNC-Chapel Hill, follows 1,400 children from selected rural counties in North Carolina and in Pennsylvania for three years beginning in infancy. “This is the first large study to examine the resources within the child, the family and these rural communities and how they are linked to good and poor outcomes for families and their children,” said Dr. Lynne Vernon-Feagans, the principal investigator. In North Carolina, 800 newborns are followed in Wayne, Wilson and Sampson counties.

Vernon-Feagans is the Friday Distinguished Professor and coordinator of the Early Childhood, Families, and Literacy Program in the School of Education at UNC-Chapel Hill. The co-principal investigator is Dr. Martha Cox, who is director of the Center for Developmental Science, a professor of psychology at UNC-Chapel Hill and a fellow at the FPG Child Development Institute (FPG).

Vernon-Feagans said, “We want to understand how community, employment, family economic resources, family contexts, parent-child relationships, and individual differences in the children themselves interact over time to shape the development of competence in rural children.”
The project data will have important implications for national policy, said Cox, “particularly for the services most needed by these families, including Early Head Start and other early childhood programs, physical and mental health services, and parental employment and training.”

In addition, she said, “results will provide the basis for prevention programs in the preschool years for children and families at risk for physical and mental health programs and later school failure.”
Vernon-Feagans said, “Although this grant is funded for only five years, we hope the children will be followed as they make the transition to school in order to understand the risk and protective factors in early childhood that predict successful adjustment to schooling.”

The grant includes five individual projects with 23 investigators representing over 10 disciplines, including education, psychology, human development, sociology, medicine and geography.
Other UNC-Chapel Hill researchers are Dr. Peg Burchinal, a senior scientist at FPG; Dr. Debra Skinner, a scientist at FPG; Dr. Kathie Harris, a professor in the Department of Sociology; Dr. Greg Randolph, a clinical assistant professor of medicine; Dr. Desmond Runyan, chair of the Department of Social Medicine; and Dr. Lorraine Taylor, assistant professor of psychology.

Among the other investigators are Dr. Donna-Marie Winn of Duke University and Dr. Robert Pianta, a professor of Education at the University of Virginia. Pianta is also a researcher with the National Center for Early Development & [CQ] Learning, which is based at FPG. The Penn State site will be led by Dr. Nan Crouter, professor of Human Development .

The individual projects are:

• Project I: Directed by Dr. Mark Greenberg of Penn State, this project examines child-related factors by measuring child temperamental reactivity and self-regulation.
• Project II: Directed by Vernon-Feagans, this focuses on competence as a precursor of later skills acquired in school. This includes the family and the community.
• Project III: Directed by Cox, this project examines family factors and relationship processes associated with rural life in areas of deep poverty.
• Project IV: Directed by Dr. Nan Crouter of Penn State, this focuses on the impact of parents’ changing occupational conditions on parenting and the children’s development of competence.
• Project V: Directed by Dr. Linda Burton of Penn State, this project appraises community characteristics and their affect on families’ and children’s lives.

FACULTY MEMBER: Barbara Wasik, Ph.D.

Project Title: The Partners for Literacy Project
Project Description: A three and a half year, $3.5 million project funded to develop and implement an intervention for the federal Even Start Family Literacy Program. The project is expanding upon the curriculum used in the Abecedarian Project, Project CARE, and the Infant Health and Development Program. We are tailoring our intervention for the Even Start program and expanding to make it more appropriate for ESOL families and families from diverse cultures. We will implement the curriculum in two different models, one for early childhood education only, and one with early childhood education and parent education. A pilot study will be conducted in the spring of 2004, national training in the summer of 2004, and the implementation conducted from August 2004-summer 2006. Postdoctoral fellows can be involved in several areas, including analyzing process data, helping monitor program implementation, and/or participating as a trainer by learning the curriculum and providing onsite training around the country. A data set from a recently completed study on family literacy will be made available to a postdoctoral fellow to use for research purposes. Postdoctoral fellows can also work with the PI on the analyses of the follow up Project CARE data for young adults. PI is Barbara H Wasik, William R. Kenan, Jr. Distinguished Professor, School of Education and Fellow, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute, and consortium member.