Doctoral Candidate Stephanie Kennedy to join University of Connecticut faculty

University of Connecticut (UConn) was my top choice because of the School of Social Work faculty’s history of social activism and community-engaged research. I can’t wait to build relationships with faculty and students across the UConn campus and in the greater Hartford community as we all work to help clients recognize the strength of their own voice, empower themselves as agents, and vision a different way forward for themselves and their families .

My dissertation is titled, “The Relationship between Childhood Polyvictimization and Subsequent Mental Health and Substance Misuse Outcomes for Incarcerated Women” (Chair: Stephen Tripodi). My research interests grew out of my foundational experience as a member of Dr. Tripodi’s NIMH-funded data collection project research team conducted in two women’s prisons in North Carolina. The goals of Dr. Tripodi’s project were to assess the relationship between childhood trauma and a variety of behavioral health and interpersonal challenges for incarcerated women, and to examine whether experiences of trauma increased a woman’s risk of being re-arrested or re-incarcerated after release. I was given the opportunity to lead several analyses of these data for publication and conference presentations, inspired by my practice experience in victim advocacy and inpatient behavioral health.

My dissertation research expands our measurement of childhood trauma to include not just physical and sexual abuse, but also to capture other forms of interpersonal trauma (e.g., being a victim of violent crime, peer bullying, and witnessing family or community violence). My goal was to evaluate the relationships between childhood polyvictimization – a cumulative interpersonal trauma construct – and a range of negative criminal offending, mental health, and substance misuse outcomes for incarcerated women. To test my hypotheses, I designed and implemented a data collection project inside a Florida women’s prison. Although collecting my own data within the prison setting was extraordinarily challenging (a huge understatement), this experience helped me to gain confidence as a researcher and scholar, and has absolutely prepared me to become an independent researcher at UConn and to better mentor students as they work towards their own research and practice goals.

My scholarship is broadly focused on understanding the relationships between childhood trauma and a range of behavioral and interpersonal challenges for institutionalized populations, with particular attention to incarcerated women. Related to this general theme, I have pursued research in three areas: 1) the examination of the behavioral health effects of trauma across the life course; 2) the evaluation of the effectiveness of empirically-supported interventions offered to individuals and families affected by violence; and 3) the assessment of service provider attitudes and behaviors towards clients in crisis. I look forward to situating my research within the Connecticut context and creating intra- and interdisciplinary collaborations to examine the true social impact of institutionalization on parenting and families, child welfare involvement, aging and older adults, disease burden, disability, and where the social work profession can best direct prevention, intervention, and remediation efforts. I am particularly excited about the work being done at UConn through the Institute for Violence Prevention and Reduction and the Human Rights Institute and I hope to contribute to this work through my desire to design and implement targeted interventions for trauma-affected individuals and families and to promote resilience and recovery for those who make contact with our institutional systems.