Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
About the Webinar
The use of integrative data analysis (IDA) to harmonize extant school-based cluster randomized prevention trials with longitudinal follow-up allows the opportunity to analyze existing data in novel ways and answer important research questions that are not feasible in individual studies. There are central challenges in how to appropriately harmonize and link measures of key constructs across independent studies. In this presentation, Dr. Musci extends the emerging techniques—related to measurement invariance and differential item functioning for factor analytic models—to develop an approach to IDA with outcome analyses. She illustrates this approach using baseline data from six school-based prevention intervention trials with longitudinal follow-up. Implementing prevention programming in early childhood, these trials collected teacher-reported classroom behavior along with mental health-related outcomes across adolescence and adulthood, which will be harmonized across each study. The pooled data set contains just over 10,000 participants from mostly urban school districts with high diversity. Advancement of IDA methodology allows for novel research questions to be answered with existing data, which can inform future research on the development and adaptation of prevention programming.
About Rashelle J. Musci
Rashelle J. Musci, Ph.D., is the Dr. Ali and Rose Kawi Professor in Mental Health. Dr. Musci is an expert in prevention science, child mental health, and quantitative methods and measurement in public health. Her research focuses on advanced latent variable methodology for use in developmental science, exploring the intergenerational transmission of self-regulation and how that transmission may be impacted by universal prevention programming. Dr. Musci has demonstrated her expertise and enthusiasm for prevention science, public mental health, child development, statistical methods, team collaborations, and education. Dr. Musci holds a doctoral degree in human development, as well as a Master of Science in child development and Bachelor of Science in neurobiology, physiology and behavior from the University of California, Davis. She completed two postdoctoral fellowships in prevention science (National Institute of Mental Health-supported Institutional Research Training Grant [T32]) and adolescent health (Leadership and Education in Adolescent Health [LEAH] Award) at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Currently, Dr. Musci is an Associate Professor of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.