UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Professor of Psychology Dawn Witherspoon has spent many years researching the ways that the spaces children inhabit play a critical role in their development, including in her role as director of the Parents And Children Together (PACT) research initiative.
Some of the results of that long-term scholarship went into the recently published monograph, titled “Place-Based Developmental Research: Conceptual and Methodological Advances in Studying Youth Development in Context,” for which Witherspoon served as lead author.
Published by Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), the open-access monograph builds on work that Witherspoon and her fellow collaborators have produced and thought about in recent years regarding the ways neighborhoods and the other places where children, youth and families spend their time affect adolescents emotionally, socially and academically.
The research that went into the monograph was funded largely by a U.S. National Science Foundation collaborative research grant that brought together researchers from several fields, including psychology, sociology and geography. Witherspoon’s co-writers are Rebecca M. B. White, professor of family and human development at Arizona State University; Mayra Y. Bámaca, associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Merced; Christopher R. Browning, distinguished professor of sociology at the Ohio State University; Tamara G. J. Leech, independent sociologist; Tama Leventhal, professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development and professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University; Stephen A. Matthews, Emeritus Liberal Arts Professor of Sociology, Anthropology and Demography at Penn State; Nicolo Pinchak, research fellow and postdoctoral researcher in the Centre for Social Investigation at the University of Oxford’s Nuffield College; Amanda L. Roy, associate professor of community and applied developmental psychology at University of Illinois Chicago; Naomi F. Sugie, associate professor of criminology, law and society at the University of California, Irvine; and Erin N. Winkler, associate professor of African and African Diaspora studies at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
“The project helped build collaborations among colleagues from different fields who might not otherwise have come together,” said Witherspoon, who is also the McCourtney Family Early Career Professor in Psychology. “The project has been a great labor of love. Hopefully, the monograph will be read by multiple individuals, not just scholars.”
For many years, social scientists have studied the role neighborhoods play in child developmental outcomes like achievement, behavioral and emotional issues, and sexual activity. Meanwhile, more recent scholarship has investigated the ways that racial, ethnic, cultural and immigrant social positions affect neighborhood environments and youth development, and how residential neighborhoods impact broader activity spaces where kids congregate, be it schools, workplaces, sports leagues or informal hang-out spots.
With that in mind, Witherspoon and her fellow researchers used the monograph to advance a comprehensive cultural-developmental place-based framework for studying development in context among children, youth and families from ethnically, racially, culturally and socioeconomically diverse backgrounds. Among other things, they looked at how setting structures and social dynamics help identify what drives the contextual effects on development.
“We were looking at space not just as a spatial boundary, but where meaning is being made and relationships and experiences matter,” said Witherspoon, who runs the Department of Psychology’s Context and Development Lab, which studies adolescents – from both urban and rural environments — to better understand how aspects of the residential neighborhood, school and family contexts are related to adolescents’ academic adjustment, beliefs and behaviors.