Johnson aims to better children's lives
Experimental psychologist heads Research Center for Children and Youth

By DONNA LONGENECKER
Reporter Assistant Editor

As an undergraduate theater arts major who longed to become an actress, Jeanette Johnson recalls sitting in a child psychology class and thinking, "This is it; this is what I want to do."

With all the blind enthusiasm of youth, coupled with confidence in her newfound calling, she immediately switched majors and never looked back. The blinders have since come off, yet Johnson, director of the Research Center for Children and Youth in the School of Social Work, is still, 20 years later, a dedicated researcher committed to improving the lives of children and families. "I never swayed from it," she says of her choice to become an experimental psychologist. "You just have to follow your calling—you have to be brave enough to look for it."

The Research Center for Children and Youth, which moved to the School of Social Work last fall from the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences, brings together faculty from social work, education, law, nursing, psychology and sociology to conduct collaborative research with a focus on children and youth.

Before coming to UB, Johnson was director of substance abuse research in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Maryland and brings with her an impressive record of research activity that has indeed made a difference. She testified before Congress in February about her work studying the effectiveness and efficacy of Baltimore area substance-abuse programs. Her testimony, backed by nearly four years of research, was key in landing the city an additional $7 million in funding for its drug and alcohol programs. As principal investigator on the project, Johnson was able to show significant reductions in drug and alcohol use, crime, such risky health behaviors as unprotected sex and needle sharing, and a decrease in depression among participants who voluntarily entered Baltimore's publicly funded, treatment-on-demand rehab programs.

The UB center is focused primarily on children who have come from risky and/or impoverished environments, says Johnson, whose major interest is in the characteristics and theories of resilience in children and adults, which Johnson defines as is the ability to refrain from acting out the risks that were inherent in one's biological and psychological environment. In other words, persisting in spite of adversity.

"We ask questions like, 'how is it that somebody could become the president of the United States who came from a broken home, whose mother was a gambler, whose stepfather was a drinker, whose brother was a drug addict—that's Clinton's background," says Johnson.

"We examine the risks and protective factors that people have acquired, develop and inherit, because nobody really knows how these come about. We have some clues, but there is not a lot of data on resilience," she says.

"Understanding the poetry and drama of resilience is vastly different than understanding the data. What helps us make sense of the poetry of resilience is the hope that it brings—the hope that it gives to children and gives to our research—and it's not deficit-oriented research; it's challenge-oriented research."

Johnson say that resilience and hope are inherent in such statements as, "If I can overcome a troubled past and go on to be a healthy, productive adult, then anyone can." Of course, not every child from a troubled environment goes on to lead a healthy life, but researchers hope to understand the protective factors that have helped those children from such environments who do succeed as adults.

"How do children of alcoholic parents make it? she asks. "They have a parent who sticks to family rituals—when the parent says dinner is at 6, the parent sticks to it. If the parent has planned a birthday party, the party happens," says Johnson, citing the research of many of her peers. "Deliberateness and maintenance of family rituals—you deliberately plan something and maintain the plan, regardless of what the alcoholic parent is doing—will protect the children," says Johnson. And therefore, children of alcoholics are less likely to become alcoholics themselves.

In addition, Johnson differentiates between the medical model—which focuses on risks, disease and victims—and what some proponents of resilience theory call the challenge model—which focuses on the strengths and courage embodied in even the most damaged youth.

"Most treatment and diagnosis based on a medical model sees problems as diseases and deficits," says Johnson. "If you have a problem, you are missing something, something is wrong. Therefore, medication can be prescribed as one of many treatment options. There are many presumptions implicit and explicit about that approach. When we focus on risks, we focus on deficits."

"The medical model is certainly appropriate and has its place. But to take the medical model and apply it to something like behavior does something else. It makes us feel like we're diseased if our parents were alcoholic, diseased if our parents are schizophrenic—diseased, defective or deficient in some way," says Johnson.

A growing body of research shows that children who make it often have a close bond with at least one caretaker—it doesn't have to be a parent—and are able to problem solve and engage in socially positive activities. And they don't have to be brilliant either, Johnson notes, just able to make good use of what they have available to them.

"If you take a non-medical perspective, we are challenged by certain things in our environment and our biology; we are not placed at risk," says Johnson.

"Understanding resilience is my passion. I love kids," she adds. And well she should, since she comes from a family of six siblings.

Johnson, who also studies the efficacy of drug-abuse treatment for women, sees program evaluation as another important task of the center. "We do a lot of program evaluation—a major focus (of the center) is examining the effectiveness of a wide variety of programs," she says.

"The government used to give us money for doing good things. They don't do that anymore unless we prove we're doing the good thing. So accountability is the big catchword in any kind of relationship that you have with a funder," says Johnson.

Funders are requiring a level of evaluation that service providers don't have the capacity to carry out—they are trained to deliver a good service, says Johnson, but find it difficult to evaluate their programs.

"A lot of clinicians and service providers are being required to deliver the service and evaluate their programs simultaneously. There are two problems with that: they don't have the training and can't provide an objective evaluation of their own program. Johnson teaches service providers how to develop specific monitoring programs and offers basic skills in evaluating them.