Join the team!
Interested in joining our team? Homeplace scholars will have the opportunity to work on one or several projects with Dr. Mims on research and applied work exploring the brilliance of Black children and their families (virtually and in person) with the goal of positively impacting the well-being and development of Black children.
Specific tasks include:
Creating issue memos and/or one-pagers that summarize contemporary literature
Supporting data collection with Black parent-child dyads + interviews with parents (Brilliant Joy in a Box) and Black women and girls (A Folding Chair)
Coding audio and video data from guided play activities among families (Brilliant Joy in a Box) and focus group “dinner table” conversations (A Folding Chair)
Collaboratively analyzing data with other Homeplace scholars
Supporting the research team in writing (e.g., social media posts, op-ed articles, peer-reviewed manuscripts)
Developing independent research ideas (welcomed, but not required!)
Homeplace scholars must:
Commit 8-10 hours per week
Participate in a weekly lab meeting
Complete trainings in intersectional qualitative research methods
Engage in collaborative research
This is a great opportunity for passionate and creative scholar-activists who are interested in applied child development research and who enjoy working independently and as part of a community of brilliant scholars! You will be trained in intersectional qualitative research, so you do not need any advanced skills prior to joining Homeplace.
Applications to join Homeplace as an undergraduate and graduate student RA are closed.
Dr. Mims will not be accepting a graduate student in the 2024-2025 admissions cycle.
My Month as an Homeplace Research Assistant: Amina Anekwe
My name is Amina Patricia Anekwe and I am a Freshman at the NYU College of Arts in Sciences. I was honored to be hired as an undergraduate lab assistant this fall to help Dr. Lauren Mims on her various projects to support Black Youth!
In these past few months, I have really been working with Dr. Lauren Mims on the Black Youth Mental Health Initiative (BYMI) which is a project in collaboration with the Richmond Public Schools to adopt a whole child policy approach to support the mental health of Black youth. Over the past few years, there has been research that has found that Black youth are at an increased risk for suicidal ideation, attempts, and death by suicide (Congressional Black Caucus [CBC], 2019). Initially, my job was to research some current articles (2021-present) with data on Black Youth and add information about each article to our joint lab BYMHI Literature Review Matrix. After completing some preliminary research, Dr. Mims gave me an incredibly cool task to generate an Interview Questions template for students and faculty and create an Interview Protocol. I have never created this type of document before, so naturally I was a bit nervous. Luckily Dr. Mims provided me with a template of previous interview protocol used for another initiative entitled ‘Joy in the Box’ to give me a starting point. This work of generating cohesive questions that will allow us to gain a holistic perspective over youth and faculty’s current perspective and experience with mental health in the schools, was surprisingly extremely difficult. I did find it incredibly rewarding!
In addition to the Interview Protocol, I have also been lucky enough to find a new talent while analyzing data for the In Solidarity Collaboration. When Dr. Mims provided me with a 12 page document full of gray charts and hundreds of lines of data responses, I was incredibly intimidated. My assignment for the week was to sort data responses into categories and create a word cloud after organizing the data. I will not tell a lie, I was dreading the task. Coding seemed daunting and impossible to figure out. Turns out, it is not as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, so far, coding has been my favorite assignment to date! It is incredibly rewarding to organize qualitative data into a clear chart and be able to simply understand what the data is telling you, when before it felt like hieroglyphics. I love coding data!
Overall I have been loving my time so far in the Homeplace Research Collaborative. Not a lot of people are fortunate enough to say that they love their job and look forward to completing their work. I am privileged to say that I am an undergraduate research assistant with Dr. Lauren Mims and I can not wait to continue working on these wonderful, fascinating projects in the future! :)