FSOS research teams continue to examine pandemic’s impact on families
Jodi Dworkin, head of the Department of Family Social Science, professor and extension specialist, awarded two more collaborative teams grants to study the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on individuals and families.
Helping health care workers with mindfulness
Front line health care workers (HWCs) are facing unprecedented stressors due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Since more than half of HCWs are women and are more likely to be the primary caregiver of their children, the concern of infecting their children and other family members contributes to high stress levels. Research studies have shown that heightened stress can disrupt effective parenting behaviors, and consequently have a negative impact on children’s psychological functioning.
Abigail Gewirtz, professor and director of the Institute on Translational Research on Children’s Mental Health, and doctoral candidate Jingchen Zhang, will launch a research project to develop and deliver an app-based tool to help HCWs manage their stress through mindfulness. They are collaborating with Dr. Inbal (Billie) Nahum-Shani and Dr. Stephanie Carpenter from the University of Michigan.
“If we can help health care workers regulate their emotions and stress, we can help them protect not only their mental health, but the mental health of their family as well,” says Dr. Gewirtz. “Research has shown that mindfulness practices have been proven to reduce perceived stress and improve emotion regulation in this population.”
The research proposal outlines the feasibility of a mobile-based health strategy since social interactions are limited due to the pandemic. The goal of their study is to deliver app-based mindfulness intervention to HCWs exposed to COVID-19 and examine when and under which conditions the intervention is seen as helpful.
Expanding online tools for Early Childhood Family Education
Susan Walker, associate professor, is conducting research on the delivery of Minnesota’s Early Childhood Family Education program (ECFE) online. The state’s 40+ year program is traditionally offered face to face to parents and their children birth through five years of age through interaction with licensed parenting and early childhood education teaching staff and other families. With school closings due to COVID-19, ECFE has had to adopt new, virtual measures to continue the program.
Walker developed parentopia in collaboration with educators and parents as a social engagement and learning platform to complement face to face delivery. Originally developed and deployed with the St. Paul Public and Albert Lea school districts, parentopia grew exponentially this past spring as educators searched for new online resources due to the COVID-19 pandemic. New parentopia users include eight school districts (including Anoka-Hennepin, the state’s largest district), 20 ECFE sites, 155 classes and nearly 2,500 parents and educators.
Walker’s research project will survey parents and staff on their experiences to quantify the value of the parentopia platform to enhance the ECFE and gain insight into the user experience to inform future programming. The research will also seek to understand how parentopia could contribute to the professional development needs of parent and family education professionals on technology integration and explore how an online platform for Early Childhood Family Education (ECFE) programming could be expanded.
Read more stories about FSoS grants studying the pandemic’s effects
Cathy Solheim, professor and director of graduate studies, leads a team that includes FSoS graduate students Lekie Dwanyen, Nusroon Fatiha, Gretchen Buchanan, and Zamzam Dini as well as Jaime Ballard, FSOS graduate alumna and research associate that are examining the pandemic’s impact on refugee families.
Timothy Piehler, assistant professor, and Athena Chan, graduate student, are collaborating with the Hong Kong Polytechnic University School of Nursing to ascertain the pandemic’s impact on families in the U.S. and Hong Kong.