Wednesday, January 15, 2025
1/15/2025
PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT This K01 will provide the Principal Investigator (PI), Dr. Na Zhang, with training and research experiences that will support and prepare her to become an interdisciplinary independent researcher who optimizes and evaluates digital parenting interventions by leveraging mindfulness techniques to prevent parent and child mental health problems in high-risk families such as divorced families. Divorce is highly prevalent, and it confers significant risks of mental health problems to both children and parents. The training activities will provide Dr. Zhang the necessary research experience and skills to achieve her long-term career goals, including clinical training, intervention development, RCTs, and expertise in studying the proposed intervention targets, parental cognitive control and emotion socialization. These training goals will be accomplished by directed readings, coursework, workshops, seminars/webinars, practicum, hands-on training, collaborative papers, conference activities, and applied research experiences. The proposed research is aimed to meet the needs of distressed divorced parents to ensure that they can benefit from evidence-based practices, by adding mindfulness training (MT) to the electronic New Beginnings Program/eNBP. The proposed research has three Aims: 1) To elucidate the perspectives of end users and stakeholders; 2) To design and refine digital mindfulness training modules and engagement strategies via user testing; and 3) To determine feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary efficacy of the MT+eNBP. Co-primary mentorship will be provided by Dr. Sharlene Wolchik (Arizona State University; clinical psychologist, expert in parenting interventions for high-risk families, and co-developer of the eNBP) and Dr. Kim Gans (University of Connecticut; expert in mixed method formative research for intervention development and in conducting RCTs). Collaborators include Dr. Judson Brewer (Brown University; expert in digital mindfulness-based interventions), Dr. Larissa Duncan (University of Wisconsin - Madison; expert in mindfulness-enhanced parenting interventions and mindful parenting), Dr. Aaron Lyon (University of Washington; expert in user-centered design), Dr. Kirby Deater-Deckard (University of Massachusetts - Amherst; expert in parental self-regulation, executive functions, and parenting), and Lynn Katz (University of Washington; expert in parental meta-emotion philosophy and emotion coaching). The proposed K01 training and research activities will be completed at the University of Connecticut, Department of Human Development and Family Sciences and the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP).
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