Core Research Projects
The core research projects will advance injury prevention and control in areas of translation, policy, and methods. There are three independent core projects; each is under the direction of a principal investigator who is a core faculty member of CCISP.
Adolescent Depression and Suicidality are Increasing in the US: What is The Role of Social Media? Investigation in Two National Samples of Adolescents
Project Period: August 2019 - August 2022
Among adolescents, depressive symptoms, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and suicide have increased to historic highs in the past decade. A commonly-held hypothesis for increased depressive symptoms among adolescents is the profound change in the past decade in how adolescents interact with each other — the role of mobile smart-devices and social media. These technologies are hypothesized to produce less face-to-face time with other adolescents, increased real-time parental monitoring, more cyberbullying, and greater negative feeling such as envy and low self-worth. Yet the existing data on the role of social media in explaining trends and variation in mental health on a national level is limited, descriptive, and mixed in results. The present study will leverage, compare, and harmonize findings across two nationally representative datasets of adolescents covering the last decade to test whether social media, cyberbullying, and parental supervision explain population trends and subgroup differences in depressive symptoms, suicidal behavior, and self-esteem and derogation.
This project is being led by Dr. Kerry Keyes
Impacts of Ridesharing on Motor Vehicle Crashes and Assaults
Project Period: August 2019-August 2022
Ridesharing companies have been operating for over a decade, and they have had a big impact on the way people travel around cities. It's possible that they also affect injuries. This project examines how increases in ridesharing are associated with drunk driver crashes, other motor vehicle crashes, assaults, and other injury events. We'll also test whether impacts differ from city to city. In that way, we'll be able to identify the public health benefits of ridesharing, while also highlighting its possible costs.
This project is being led by Dr. Christopher Morrison
School Violence Exposure as an Adverse Childhood Experience: A Nationwide Study of K-12 School Responses to Violence and Their Impact on Youth Mental Health and Educational Outcomes
Project Period: August 2021 - August 2024
Drawing on a national sample of students, teachers, and principals from twelve K-12 schools with varying degrees of exposure to mass violence, this project seeks to examine if the strength of the association between exposure to school safety interventions and mental health outcomes in particular varies as a function of the burden of trauma experienced within a school.
This project is being co-led by Dr. Sonali Rajan and Dr. Charles Branas
Interventions to reduce opioid overdose: Transportability of evidence-based approaches through agent-based modeling
Project Period: August 2021 - August 2024
Drug overdose continues to be a devastating public health crisis. Interventions to reduce overdose are being urgently scaled up around the country. In a landscape of finite resources, the decision to invest more heavily in some interventions over others should be data driven and personalized to a community’s specific needs, existing resources and programs, and characteristics of people who use drugs. This project will use mathematical simulation models to predict the anticipated benefits of intervention in specific communities, leveraging scientific knowledge of the key parameters that modify (i.e., amplify or reduce) the effects of proposed interventions. We will produce a user-friendly product where public health and policy stakeholders can input a minimum set of parameters to estimate the potential effectiveness of overdose prevention interventions (e.g. naloxone distribution, medication for opioid use disorder) in their own community.
This project is being co-led by Dr. Kara Rudolph and Dr. Kerry Keyes