By Kyle Spurr, UM News Service
MISSOULA – A research laboratory at the 猎奇重口 is studying adversities in people’s lives and how those challenges lead to people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, unemployment and illness.
The Developmental Adversity, Resilience and Transformation (DART) Lab is not a physical location on campus, but rather an effort between faculty and student researchers in the School of Public and Community Health Sciences.
The researchers take a broad view of adversity over a lifespan and examine how that can affect communities at large. The lab builds off a groundbreaking Adverse Childhood Experiences study released nearly three decades ago and expands the research outside of specific childhood trauma. The DART Lab and its research are made possible through strong philanthropic support from private donors to the UM Foundation.
Kennedi Fields, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in public health, is a graduate research assistant in the DART Lab. Fields, who grew up in rural Kansas, became interested in public health while working as a health equity coordinator for a county health department in southern Oregon. She chose to attend UM to study in the DART Lab.
“When I was looking for public health Ph.D. programs, there weren’t a lot that focused on developmental adversity,” Fields said. “Then I found the DART Lab. It was a whole lab dedicated to what I want to do.”
Her primary focus in the lab is supporting a study in the 猎奇重口 State Prison. She and Krista Goldstine-Cole, co-director of the DART Lab, and other researchers plan to interview 15 to 20 inmates in the prison’s work release unit about what led to their incarceration.
The researchers are still awaiting approval from an Institutional Review Board, but plan to start interviewing the inmates later this year.
“A lot of events happen before someone ends up in prison,” Fields said. “We really want to know what happened up until that point.”
Goldstine-Cole, a former juvenile parole officer and school teacher, created an interview method using flash cards with different adversities written on them. She will place the cards in front of the inmates and ask them if those adversities happened to them and in what order. The cards include phrases such as “deployed to a war zone,” “poor physical health,” and “parents separated or divorced.”
Goldstine-Cole used the flash card method in homeless communities and found some unexpected outcomes, including how often people shared that a main reason for becoming homeless was due to the death of a loved one. That could be a young person losing a guardian or somebody whose spouse dies, she said.
“People tell us these stories and they are amazing and incredibly generous stories,” Goldstine-Cole said.
Fields said the initial goal of the prison study is to understand how adversities unfold across the lifespan to support future efforts that reduce these risks.
“The idea is to examine and potentially find patterns of risk accumulation,” Fields said. “The goal is to get these interview transcriptions, analyze them and find what is the phenomenon that happens for people before they get to prison.”
Along with the prison study, the DART Lab has established partnerships with government organizations and nonprofits such as Missoula County Public Health, the state Department of Health and Human Services and local child advocacy centers.
James Caringi, a UM public health professor and principal investigator for the DART Lab, said the lab, which opened in 2023, is still relatively new and always looking for organizations to work with and share research and data.
“We would really like to be on the cutting edge of science locally, nationally and internationally,” Caringi said. “That occurs by partnership. We don’t work in silos. We are open to many different possibilities. We are fortunate to do the things we really love and care about.”
Through the DART Lab, Caringi is a faculty supervisor for a study on homeless people in the Missoula area. The lab was asked to conduct a study by the Missoula County Health Department.
Caringi said the research team includes perspectives from homeless people in the area and is trying to correct some preconceived notions about the homeless population. Specifically, Caringi hopes the research helps people stop looking at homeless individuals as others. Instead, the study’s preliminary findings show violence, unemployment and mental illness occur among the overall population whether people are homeless or not.
“This idea that the unhoused are dangerous people, I don’t think that bears out statistically,” Caringi said.
He believes the findings from the study on homeless people and the other work in the DART Lab will help community leaders prevent people from experiencing homelessness or going to prison, which would save money for communities.
“We are not just saying these things happen and it’s bad,” Caringi said. “We are saying, ‘What are the key instances that impact people’s lives? What happened that pushed them out of school and into the prison pipeline?’ That’s one of the things that really makes us different.”
Fields, who began her Ph.D. this past fall, plans to continue with the DART Lab while working on her doctoral focus on developmental adversities in immigrant and Spanish-speaking communities. After graduating, Fields plans to find a career in higher education where she can continue her research.
For now, she is interested to see where all the DART Lab research leads.
“The DART Lab is really new and in just a few short years, so much has happened,” Fields said. “I’m excited to see where it goes for future students.”
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Contact: Dave Kuntz, UM director of strategic communications, 406-243-5659, dave.kuntz@umontana.edu