Dr. Goodman’s Applied Child Research Team

What do you get when you cross a Q-sort card, a monster in the bedroom, and a jigger? Oh, you’ve heard this one before: that’s right—you get the Applied Child Research Team. Both doctoral students and future applicants to our program participate in our weekly meetings to discuss research in four key areas: 1) attachment organization and disorganization, 2) self and object representations and mentalization, 3) adult and child psychotherapy process, and 4) children’s literacy acquisition. Currently, we are focusing our efforts on transcribing Attachment Story-Completion Task protocols of Ugandan preschool children as well as protocols of their caregivers. We want to predict the development of Ugandan preschool children’s school readiness skills in three domains of functioning: emergent literacy, narrative comprehension, and social competence. The Applied Child Research Team has recently fielded or will be fielding three poster presentations:

Japko, D., Chu, D., Shroeder, M., Fanciullo, M., Fults, E., Ramotar, K., Lo, T., Apura, A., Bourie, F., Kozakowski, J., & Goodman, G. (2014, August). Reflective functioning levels in interaction structures between therapists and patients with BPD. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Washington, DC.

Japko, D., Barsky, T., & Goodman, G. (2013, August).

Fanciullo, M., Yellin, E., Blake, B., Chu, D., Schroeder, M., Fults, E., Gatto, R., Ross, M., Lo, T., Abdulkareem, A., Dent, V., & Goodman, G. (2013, June). An examination of rural Ugandan preschool children’s implicit perceptions of familial social roles. Paper presented at the meeting of the New York State Psychological Association, New York.

History of the Applied Child Research Team

The Applied Child Research Team began back in the fall of 1999, when I first came to Long Island University. I started what was then known as the Attachment Study Group—a group of students interested in discussing advances in attachment theory and research. The Attachment Study Group was the first study group of its kind on the C. W. Post campus. Students discussed ideas for dissertation topics related to attachment research and received hands-on experience transcribing the Adult Attachment Interview and the Attachment Story-Completion Task—two measures of attachment quality in adults and children, respectively. Some study group members conducted groundbreaking attachment research such as validating a children’s sentence completion measure of attachment quality and studying the impact of caregiver migration on the attachment patterns of Jamaican children as adults. The Attachment Study Group lasted until 2006, when I disbanded it. But like a Phoenix rising from the ashes, in 2007 I reconstituted this study group as the Applied Child Research Team. Moving in parallel to my own evolution as a theoretician and researcher, I wanted to establish a research presence in our program no longer specifically linked to attachment theory. I conceptualized the Applied Child Research Team as focusing more broadly on the four key areas of research mentioned above, which encompasses attachment issues.

Achievements of the Applied Child Research Team

In 2009, alumna Keiha Edwards won the Clinical Psychology Doctoral Program Dissertation Award for her groundbreaking psychotherapy process research on a small sample of inpatients diagnosed with borderline personality disorder. We trained a coding team to place 100 Q-sort cards into nine piles reliably. Three manuscripts from this dissertation were published in top-tier journals. In 2011, alumna Laura Athey-Lloyd won the American Psychological Association Dissertation Award in Psychotherapy Research for her single-case quantitative research study of a child diagnosed with Asperger’s disorder. This work was published in the Journal of Child Psychotherapy, with a second article in preparation. I also expect the work presented in the poster presentations listed above to be published within the next couple of years. In 2012, second-year student Eric Yellin made a documentary of our children’s literacy acquisition project in Kitengesa, a rural village in southeastern Uganda, a 45-minute drive south of the equator (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQXxDx3Aku0). This video was featured on the home page of the Long Island University website and can also be found on my website (http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/ggoodman/home.htm).

The Applied Child Research Team Difference

Students who participate on the Applied Child Research Team work hard, play hard, and laugh hard. We feel equally comfortable talking about extraction methods of jiggers (African fleas that burrow under toe nails) and atypical story responses to the monster-in-the-bedroom story stem of the Attachment Story-Completion Task (“the monster is going to be buried in Naaka’s head”). This coming year, students will be transcribing the Attachment Story-Completion Task in a sample of Ugandan preschool children and corresponding interviews with their primary caregivers regarding their physical health, depression, and indicators of social-contextual risk. Students who want to attend our Applied Child Research Team meetings are under no obligation to participate. We welcome anyone who wants to make a difference in the lives of underserved populations to join us. I also podcast all our training on the coding systems we use to provide coders who have missed meetings to catch up on their coding knowledge. These podcasts are also available on my website (http://myweb.cwpost.liu.edu/ggoodman/home.htm) under “CPQ Coding Team” and “Other Coding Teams.” Coders learn the coding system, apply it to videotaped data, and work with fellow raters to become reliable—so that all coders tend to perceive the same constructs to the same extent at the same time. Applied Child Research Team coding teams have consistently established interrater reliability on all the constructs they have attempted to code.

Future Directions

I am pleased to announce that the Applied Child Research Team will be sending one member, Michelle Fanciullo, to Nkozi, Uganda, for the entire month of August to conduct our follow-up evaluation of the Storytelling/Story-Acting (STSA) activity conducted in two rural villages—Mpigi and Kabubbu. In future years, I plan on returning to Uganda and possibly mounting research studies in other sub-Saharan countries with a convoy of Applied Child Research Team students in tow. The data are plentiful, and the videos are awaiting investigation. Who wants to get involved? Come join us! Anyone with questions about any of the four key research areas covered by the Applied Child Research Team is welcome to contact me at ggoodman@liu.edu. I look forward to talking with you and sharing some of my jigger-extraction tips with yo