The University Record, September 5 , 1995 By Bernie DeGroat
News and Information Services
Two research and training grants recently awarded to faculty in the School of Social Work will fund projects that address issues confronting children and the elderly.
Profs. Ruth Dunkle and Sheila Feld have received a $1.98 million renewal grant from the National Institute on Aging to fund their Social Research Training on Applied Issues of Aging, while Assistant Professor Susan McDonough has been given a $1.52 million award for five years by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the effects of poverty on children‘s mental health.
Dunkle‘s and Feld‘s grant funds a five-year continuation of a program that trains predoctoral and postdoctoral fellows in research methods in the study of aging and the aged.
“There is a paucity of gerontological research training in a social work context and a real need to focus on personal and social factors in applied research on aging,” Dunkle says.
McDonough‘s research will examine the effects of environmental risk factors and parent-child relationship problems on later emotional, social and behavioral difficulties.
“Mental health during early childhood is closely associated with the quality of social and family contexts,” McDonough says. “Infants with pediatric physiological regulation problems in areas of sleep, crying and feeding frequently have mental health problems during early childhood.”
Both grants became effective this summer and will run through the year 2000.
