Director pursues interdisciplinary research leadership in health policy and child maltreatment

July 27, 2016

Dr. Lina Svedin (College of Social and Behavioral Science, Political Science Dept. – Master of Public Administration, Master of Public Policy programs) has been awarded a 2016-2018 Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant. Over the next three years she will train together with her team members, Kristine Campbell University of Utah School of Medicine, Dept. of Pediatrics –Div. of Child Protection and Family Health and Tonya Myrup Deputy Director for the Utah Div. of Child and Family Services, to become interdisciplinary research leaders. The fellowship is a new RWJF program that will involve Princeton and the University of Minnesota, and will allow the team to conduct a pilot version of a larger study that will be submitted to the same Foundation in 2018. Svedin, Campbell and Myrup are going to study state policy systems around children who have been reported as maltreated in the U.S. and study the effects of a new Utah law, which increases communication among policy system actors, on child health outcomes in maltreatment cases in Utah.

Kristine Campbell: “The Interdisciplinary Research Leaders program we have proposed requires immediate immersion in a fully collaborative process, asking each team member to apply her individual expertise to tackle a problem that cannot be solved—or even described—by an individual academic or clinical discipline.”

The team aims to “create a new path for the action-oriented, policy-relevant research needed to improve health-related outcomes for children involved with the child welfare system” (Kristine Campbell).

The research findings this collaborative research Svedin, Campbell and Myrup intend to present as a team to policy, child welfare, and child health care audiences.