CURRENT RESEARCH: PREVENTING VIOLENCE
In 2018, an interdisciplinary team led by Melissa Tracy, associate professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, received almost half a million dollars from NIH to study the processes that contribute to violence within social networks and test strategies that could potentially prevent it. Today, the work is still underway, with a focus on characterizing the pathways between individual characteristics and patterns of violence transmission. Recent findings show that children who are exposed to both physical or emotional abuse by a caregiver, along with domestic violence between adults in their household, have almost double the risk of depressive symptoms and illegal substance use in adolescence compared to children who are not exposed to family violence. Currently, the team is conducting analyses to understand the role of biological factors in the link between childhood family violence exposure and subsequent violent behaviors, as well as how parenting practices and other behaviors lead to the transmission of weapon-involved violence between parents and their adolescent children.
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