COVID-19 and Children's Well-Being: A Rapid Research Agenda.

PURPOSE: Understanding the full impact of COVID-19 on U.S. children, families, and communities is critical to (a) document the scope of the problem, (b) identify solutions to mitigate harm, and (c) build more resilient response systems. We sought to develop a research agenda to understand the short- and long-term mechanisms and impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on children's healthy development, with the goal of devising and ultimately testing interventions to respond to urgent needs and prepare for future pandemics. DESCRIPTION: The Life Course Intervention Research Network facilitated a series of virtual meetings that included members of 10 Maternal and Child Health (MCH) research programs, their research and implementation partners, as well as family and community representatives, to develop an MCH COVID-19 Research Agenda. Stakeholders from academia, clinical practice, nonprofit organizations, and family advocates participated in four meetings, with 30-35 participants at each meeting. ASSESSMENT: Investigating the impacts of COVID-19 on children's mental health and ways to address them emerged as the highest research priority, followed by studying resilience at individual and community levels; identifying and mitigating the disparate negative effects of the pandemic on children and families of color, prioritizing community-based research partnerships, and strengthening local, state and national measurement systems to monitor children's well-being during a national crisis. CONCLUSION: Enacting this research agenda will require engaging the community, especially youth, as equal partners in research co-design processes; centering anti-racist perspectives; adopting a "strengths-based" approach; and integrating young researchers who identify as Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). New collaborative funding models and investments in data infrastructure are also needed.

What Makes an Intervention a Life Course Intervention?

OBJECTIVES: To develop an initial list of characteristics of life course interventions to inform the emerging discipline of life course intervention research. METHODS: The Life Course Intervention Research Network, a collaborative national network of >75 researchers, service providers, community representatives, and thought leaders, considered the principles, characteristics, and utility of life course interventions. After an in-person launch meeting in 2019, the steering committee collaboratively and iteratively developed a list of life course intervention characteristics, incorporating a modified Delphi review process. RESULTS: The Life Course Intervention Research Network identified 12 characteristics of life course interventions. These interventions (1) are aimed at optimizing health trajectories; (2) are developmentally focused, (3) longitudinally focused, and (4) strategically timed; and are (5) designed to address multiple levels of the ecosystem where children are born, live, learn, and grow and (6) vertically, horizontally, and longitudinally integrated to produce a seamless, forward-leaning, health optimizing system. Interventions are designed to (7) support emerging health development capabilities; are (8) collaboratively codesigned by transdisciplinary research teams, including stakeholders; and incorporate (9) family-centered, (10) strengths-based, and (11) antiracist approaches with (12) a focus on health equity. CONCLUSIONS: The intention for this list of characteristics of life course interventions is to provide a starting point for wider discussion and to guide research development. Incorporation of these characteristics into intervention designs may improve emerging health trajectories and move critical developmental processes and pathways back on track, even optimizing them to prevent or reduce adverse outcomes.

Building a Life Course Intervention Research Framework.

OBJECTIVES: To report on first steps toward building a Life Course Intervention Research Framework (LCIRF) to guide researchers studying interventions to improve lifelong health. METHODS: The Life Course Intervention Research Network, a collaborative national network of >75 researchers, service providers, community representatives and thought leaders, participated in an iterative review process. Building on the revised Medical Research Council Guidance for Developing and Evaluating Complex Interventions, they identified 12 additional key models with features for inclusion in the LCIRF, then incorporated the 12 characteristics identified by the Life Course Intervention Research Network as actionable features of Life Course Interventions to produce the new LCIRF. RESULTS: The LCIRF sets out a detailed step-wise approach to intervention development: (1) conceptualization and planning, (2) design, (3) implementation, (4) evaluation, and (5) spreading and scaling of interventions. Each step is infused with life course intervention characteristics including a focus on (1) collaborative codesign (2) health optimization, (3) supporting emerging health development capabilities (4) strategic timing, (5) multilevel approaches, and (6) health equity. Key features include a detailed transdisciplinary knowledge synthesis to inform intervention development; formation of strong partnerships with family, community, and youth representatives in intervention codesign; a means of testing the impact of each intervention on biobehavioral processes underlying emerging health trajectories; and close attention to intervention context. CONCLUSIONS: This first iteration of the LCIRF has been largely expert driven. Next steps will involve widespread partner engagement in framework refinement and further development. Implementation will require changes to the way intervention studies are organized and funded.

Family Health Development in Life Course Research: A Scoping Review of Family Functioning Measures.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Our objective is to identify common family functioning measurement tools and assess their compatibility with family-health development and life-course perspectives. METHODS: Data sources include PubMed, ERIC, CINAHL, Families and Societies Worldwide, PsychInfo, Web of Science, PsychNet, and Health and Psychosocial Instruments. Title and abstract screening and full-text review of articles were conducted by multiple reviewers based on prespecified inclusion criteria. Data extraction focused on features of identified measurements tools, including: (1) name (2) domains of family functioning measured, (3) established psychometric properties, and (4) original context of psychometric evaluation (eg, details about the study sample). RESULTS: Of the 50 measurement tools identified, 94% measured organizational patterns (eg, flexibility, connectedness, or resources), 46% measured belief systems (eg, making meaning of adversity, or positive outlook), and 54% measured communication processes (eg, open emotional sharing, or collaborative problem-solving). CONCLUSIONS: Existing measures of family functioning can aid life-course researchers in understanding family processes as contexts for health and well-being. There also remain opportunities to refine or develop measures of family functioning more compatible with a life-course perspective that assess family processes (1) at various life stages; (2) with various backgrounds, identities, structures, and experiences; and (3) embedded in or impacted by various contexts that may facilitate or hinder family functioning.