The Southam-Gerow lab is a busy and exciting place to work and learn. Our focus is the improvement of mental health services for children and families and we are active dissemination and implementation (D&I) researchers. To this end, we have studies that focus in a number of relevant directions. Some of our work involves adapting and testing treatments in community settings through input from stakeholders in the community in an effort to understand how best to adapt treatments for diverse settings.
We also are collaborating with Dr. Bryce McLeod on a research projects designed to develop measures of treatment integrity. Our treatment integrity work continues on two projects: (a) an IES-funded project related to school-based, treatment-delivered interventions and (b) an NIMH funded project revising our suite of treatment integrity measures to make them more pragmatic. See our TIMS/TIME page for more on a recently completed NIMH-funded study; the TIMS project is a basis for many student theses and dissertations.
Related more directly to D&I, we are analyzing data from a collaborative project with a large public, community-based mental health agency in the Washington, DC metro area.
We are also collaborating with Abbie Kinnebrew and Betsy Farmer) from VCU’s School of Social Work on a series of projects related to training and workforce development in social work. We have completed year 1 of a 2 year project that will comprise the dissertation for Julia Cox and ideally as a springboard for a long-term collaboration.
We also actively collaborate with researchers from PracticeWise, LLC, including Bruce Chorpita at UCLA, evaluating aspects (e.g., this recent paper) of the Managing and Adapting Practice (MAP) system being used in Los Angeles County and other states around the US.
Finally, our lab completed the following three studies that may be of interest to some prospective graduate students:
1. PEDS study: A pediatric primary care screening study in which we collected survey and focus group data on a sample of more than 180 children and their caregivers; we are considering using these data to inform a grant application to pilot integrated behavioral health care at VCU;
2. Emotion study: a cross-sectional study on emotion regulation/understanding and their relationship to child psychopathology in a sample of more than 100 children and caregivers. The latter study was conducted in collaboration with Dr. Pamela Garner (George Mason U.);
3. ADAPT: a partnership treatment adaptation project involving a mixed methods approach in a community mental health setting. We have data from single case series and a small open trial to be analyzed and published.
Lab Trivia
Our lab space is named after US States in their order of admission into the union
Lab computers are named after cities in each state.
Lab file cabinets are named after great women from history
We are addicted to Slack, Google Drive and DropBox; also, mad props to Cultured Code for their excellent new task management product, Things 3.