Current Research Projects

Resilience
I focus on the quantification of resilience, primarily vis-à-vis academic success. Therefore, my interest is on the presence and operationalization of resilience within a population that has already demonstrated some success and that is not necessarily from a severely disadvantaged background. To study resilience there, I typically ask for students to provide self reports on experiences (e.g., stressful events, deleterious situations) and beliefs (e.g., about themselves); I analyze the relationships between these with measures of academic success. Not surprisingly, the development and proofing of self-report instruments are key to my research here, and so far represent most of my work here. A paper I presented with Dr. Ada Woo at AERA in 2009 summarizes one of the gists of this line of research.

Animal Welfare
- Animal-Assisted Interventions in collaboration with Lieve Meers and Frank O. Ödberg both of Ghent University’s Laboratory for Ethology, Simona Normando of the Dipartimento di Scienze Sperimentali Veterinarie at the Università di Padova, and others.
  This are an exciting series of both clinical and research projects primarily centering around establishing a strong theoretical foundation for Animal-Assisted Interventions so that this diverse and quickly-growing field can develop in an organized way. Most of the work is lead by Drs. Meers and Ödberg. They have done an excellent job of bridging the often-wide gaps between the field’s researchers and practitioners to ensure safety; planful program creation and implementation; and valid, informative inquiry. Not surprisingly then, subsumed under our efforts are also evaluations of programs both in terms of their efficacy and their ability to maintain the welfare of all involved—especially for the animals employed.
- Dog Bite Prevention in collaboration with many animal welfare and humane education organizations across North America.
  Largely completed, our energy now is mainly devoted to publishing and disseminating the results. Simply enough, we created a dog bite prevention program meant to represent the type of program conducted with lower elementary students and assess the effectiveness of that program. The program was found to increase students’ knowledge about bite prevention.

Modern (IRT) and Traditional Psychometrics
In addition to my work using traditional psychometrics to validate and explore the domains included in the Academic Resilience Inventory, above, I’m working with Prof. Ira Bernstein and Dr. Ada Woo to better estimate the ability (theta) of takers of computer adaptive tests near the lower cut-off scores. This would allow quicker and more accurate judgments to be made about whether a test taker does indeed pass a test or not.