L-R: Alyssa Palmer and Ann Masten
The HSWH-RP fellowship program was a formative training experience that has deeply influenced my interdisciplinary approach to research as an independent scholar. During my time as a fellow, I engaged with representatives from state agencies to better understand how to use and interpret administrative data. My fellowship project identified a relationship between families’ use of emergency shelters and their subsequent involvement with child protective services but not substantiated maltreatment. Involvement with either or both systems was related to worse adjustment at school. These findings suggest that improving housing stability and offering coordinated supports across the system may help children better adapt and thrive. I have had the opportunity to disseminate this work to both academic and public audiences through research briefs, community presentations, a training module, and a national presentation to data owners in the homeless management system. I also participated in an invited UNICEF presentation.
Building on the foundational relationships and skills I gained through the fellowship, I then pursued funding for and led a collaborative study that combined data our lab collected with multiple administrative data sources through Minn-LInK. This work focused on the importance of identifying young children at risk for struggling in school due to self-regulatory challenges, especially for children with early experiences of homelessness and child protective service involvement. This has also led to multiple publications, presentations, and research briefs. I have continued this line of work in my postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Los Angeles and now as assistant professor at the University of Utah. One of my goals is to leverage interdisciplinary administrative data and community partnerships to advance our understanding of child development and promote healthy, adaptive pathways for children facing housing instability.
— Alyssa Palmer (PhD '23), Minn-LInK Fellow