Research Projects
Some examples of current research projects being conducted by members of the BRIYS include:
Adolescent Development
Researchers in the Adolescent Development Lab are focused on understanding youth resilience, particularly with regard to academic underachievement, risk behaviours, optimal experiences, spirituality, and media/technology influences on lifestyle choices. A better understanding of resilience could suggest how and why lowered achievement and risk behaviours persist and escalate among some youth, but decrease and discontinue among others.
Researchers in the lab examine the relation between developmental pathways and protective factors that promote and strengthen resilience. For example, they are examining different pathways of academic achievement from childhood to adolescence and how they are related to positive adjustment in adolescence and early adulthood. Another research interest is the impact of technology-based environments on learning. A major goal of educators and researchers is to understand how learners become self-regulated or strategic and flexible in their thinking.
Findings from research on children's use of strategies has led researchers in the lab to explore the role of technology on strategic thinking, particularly as learning with computers and the Internet offer a new opportunity for adolescents to engage in self-regulatory activity. Current lab projects include examining the role of domain knowledge when learning from the Internet and how learners can be supported if they have low domain knowledge.
Social Development
Researchers in the Social Development Lab examine the roles of parents (e.g., parenting style, attachment security), friendships, and temperament in the development of social competence across a wide age range, from preschoolers to emerging adults. Much of their work has been focused on shyness and social withdrawal.
Representative recent projects include a study of children’s and parents’ beliefs about the nature of shyness (e.g., can shyness be changed?); a comparison of the quality of friendship in shy/withdrawn, aggressive, and average children; and an examination of the use of psychological language in children who are both aggressive and withdrawn.
In addition, they are studying the quality of activity-related experiences of shy/withdrawn children and youth, as well as testing the idea that involvement in some activities may reduce some of the negative outcomes sometimes associated with social anxiety in childhood.
The Youth Lifestyle Choices - Community University Research Alliance
A long-term strategic partnership between 15 faculty from six departments at Brock University and 36 individuals from 34 youth-serving Niagara agencies to better understand resilience and youth lifestyle choices. Working as a multidisciplinary team, the members of YLC-CURA have adopted a multi-faceted approach to the study of resilience in areas such as substance use, gambling, aggression, sexual activity, physical activity and academic achievement.
Survey data, collected biennially, serves as the foundational research base for the YLC-CURA. We identify developmental pathways in a large sample of elementary and secondary students and examine the relation between developmental pathways and protective factors that promote and strengthen resilience. The YLC-CURA is funded by SSHRC and HRDC.
The Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement
A national consortium of six core partners and a growing number of other partners and associates. The core partners include the Students' Commission (Toronto), the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (Dr. Ian Manion, Ottawa), Environmental Youth Alliance (Vancouver), Integrated School-Linked Services/The Saskatoon Action Circle on Youth Sexuality (Saskatoon), Dr. Mark Pancer of Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo), and Youth Lifestyle Choices - Community-University Research Alliance (Brock).
It has been funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada since 2000 and directed by the Students Commission in Toronto. The overall focus of the Centre of Excellence for Youth Engagement is to find, describe and build models of effective strategies for engaging youth in meaningful participation and making decisions for healthy living. Youth engagement in a variety of activities (e.g., extracurricular activities, community service) has been found to predict a number of positive outcomes. However, the process by which these outcomes are achieved and the ways in which adults and institutions may promote such engagements are not well understood.
In this context, we have been studying a broad range of youth and their adult allies to learn about their engagement experiences in order to understand how youth became involved in a variety of activities, obstacles they faced, support they received, benefits they have obtained from their engagement, and their views about future involvement. In addition, we are examining the longitudinal trajectory of youth engagement and the impact of programs designed to enhance positive youth involvement.
The Youth Gambling Research Group
The YGRG at Brock University is a multidisciplinary research team combining both clinical and research expertise in the field of youth gambling. The research group is a joint initiative of the Brock University Wellness Institute and the Niagara Alcohol and Drug Assessment Service's Problem Gambling Program. University faculty, clinicians, youth, community members, and parents are all a part of the advisory board that guides the research group's agenda.
YGRG is dedicated to research about youth gambling and related risk behaviours and to ensuring that this knowledge is disseminated effectively to academics, professionals, and lay persons to inform the development of policy and programming leading to prevention and treatment of problem gambling among youth.
For more information, contact:
Jennifer McPhee (Project Manager)
Dr. Drew Dane (Principal Investigator)
Leave The Pack Behind
A unique comprehensive tobacco control initiative involving college and university students, researchers, administrators, student health services and professionals from public health departments in southern and central Ontario.
Directed by Brock University, this program is now established on the following campuses: University of Guelph, McMaster University, Mohawk College, Niagara College, University of Ottawa, Queen’s University, Ryerson University, University of Toronto, and University of Windsor.
Community Partners are: Windsor-Essex Public Health Unit, Hamilton-Wentworth Public Health Department, Toronto Public Health Department, Ottawa-Carleton Public Health Department, Regional Niagara Public Health Department, Canadian Cancer Society, and Cancer Care Ontario.
Leave The Pack Behind was established to direct and support:
1) sustained, co-ordinated, comprehensive tobacco control programming on diverse campuses;
2) peer-to-peer education and programming;
3) the use of Clinical Tobacco Intervention by campus health care professionals;
4) research on young adult smoking behaviours and attitudes and program effectiveness;
5) positive policy development on campus.
The key objectives of Leave The Pack Behind are:
1) to ensure that smoking awareness/reduction/cessation programs and services are always available on campus;
2) maximize recruitment using and sustained, multi-channel communication campaign;
3) contribute to students knowledge and skill development through training.
Dr. Kelli-an Lawrance (Principal Investigator, Community Health Sciences)
Funding for this program has been provided in part by the Government of Ontario and Health Canada. Ce program est finance par le Gouvernement de l'Ontario et par Sante Canada. The 'Leave The Pack Behind' name for this program has been adopted, with permission, from the World Health organization's 1999 World No Tobacco Day campaign
Popular Media as Children’s Cultural Mirror
In the past parents and teachers have made careful selections of materials and resources for teaching their children. They also have participated in the way these materials and resources are presented and interpreted. More recently, the information explosion and media saturation that characterizes our times has served to change the role influential adults are playing in the lives of children.
Adults have noted the ability of the media to transcend the influence of parents and teachers in providing information about the world both past and present. While this is undoubtedly a shift from traditional ways of raising children, the nature of this cultural change in Canada has not been investigated adequately. A team of six researchers and a number of graduate students from Brock University, Faculty of Education have collaborated to address this topic in a study supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of the Federal Government.
The study has recently received additional funding and support from HRDC. In this study to explore the influence of popular media on children’s beliefs and values over a three-year period, we listened to children in the elementary grades (one to eight). During the 2001-2002 school year, we talked with children in grades one, four and six from thirteen different geographically located schools across Ontario and Quebec.
We continued to follow these children as they moved into grades two, five and seven. We also administered a group questionnaire concerning reading, viewing and technological habits and conducted a one-on-one interview with smaller number groups.
For more information, contact: Dr. Anne Elliott (Principle Investigator)
Frances Owen
Frances Owen is a psychologist interested in the interface between organizational systems and clinical practice especially as they relate to children, youth and adults who have disabilities. She is working with colleagues on the development of systemic approaches to human rights education for persons with intellectual disabilities. This includes projects focused on rights education in everyday contexts, in health care and rights-related issues in families. She is also involved in investigating the nature of resource allocation and service access in families of preschool children who have communication delays.
Sandra Bosacki
Sandra Bosacki investigates the social and emotional antecedents and consequences of psychological understanding in middle childhood. How do children use their psychological understanding skills to navigate their emotional and social relationships with themselves and their peers? To address this question, she investigates children's ability to understand people's thoughts and feelings, and its relation to their self-concepts, peer relationships, and language competence within the school setting. Given that these skills prepare children for adaptive functioning in their personal and social worlds, she also investigates the role psychological understanding plays in school recess behaviour in a sub-sample of children labeled as socially withdrawn by their teachers.
In general, it is expected that psychological understanding will have different implications for socioemotional development in girls and boys. This research program will lead to the development of intervention programs and curriculum materials that encourage the use of psychological explanations to promote children's sociocognitive and emotional competence.
Rebecca Raby
Dr. Raby is a sociologist whose research interests include constructions of childhood and adolescence, particularly how they are experienced by children and adolescents themselves; theories of rebellion and resistance among adolescents/youth; the relationship between adolescence and other (constructed) life stages; and children and youth as active participants in research. She is currently investigating secondary school dress and discipline codes in the Niagara and Toronto regions: the language they use, and how they are both applied and received in the classroom.
This investigation into the governance and of youth through school rules also studies Ontario's Safe Schools Act. More broadly, Dr. Raby's research draws on qualitative methods to investigate perceptions and experiences of life courses; gender, race, class and sexual orientation as they intersect with childhood and adolescence; social inequality; identity formation; and gender and sexuality.