September 25, 2003

David DiLillo, an assistant professor of psychology, is using funds from a K01 grant given by the National Institute of Mental Health to find ways to help couples deal with a partner's history of being sexually abused. Photo by Alan Jackson/Jackson Studios.

Professors earn K01 research grants

DiLillo examines effects of childhood abuse on adults

By Kim Hachiya, University Communications

Psychologist David DiLillo kept running into a problem during his clinical work with troubled married couples. The couples were struggling with issues related to one partner's, usually the wife's, history of sexual abuse. But there was nothing in the therapeutic literature that would suggest ways to help these couples. DiLillo hopes to fill that gap.

Armed with a $630,000 K01 grant from the National Institute of Mental Health, DiLillo, an assistant professor of psychology, will undertake a study titled "Family functioning of adults maltreated as children."

The ultimate goal of his research, DiLillo said, is to develop interventions and strategies to help couples. Currently there is no empirically supported treatment, he said. And because about 25 percent of females experience sexual abuse as a child, there is a population of couples who probably need help.

Probably is an important word, he said, because there's been no study of how prior abuse history affects a person's interpersonal relationships. That's what DiLillo hopes to learn from this study.

There's a wealth of research into certain aspects of adult functioning, he said. For instance, studies have shown that rates of depression, anxiety and substance abuse are higher for individuals who have experienced child sexual abuse. The gap, however, is in determining whether that history has an impact on other aspects of adult functioning, particularly interpersonal or marital functioning.

"We know that prior sexual abuse leads to a lot of individual problems, but we don't know as much about how it affects interpersonal relationships," he said.

Because sexual abuse involves such severe interpersonal boundary violations, DiLillo said one might presume that people who have experienced it might have difficulties in close interpersonal interactions later in life. Because marriage is an intense personal interaction, DiLillo will study married couples to try to understand how abuse history affects marital interactions.

He and a team of graduate and undergraduate students are recruiting 200 newlywed couples randomly selected from a list of people who have obtained marriage licenses in Lancaster County, Nebraska, in the past year. The couples can be of any age, but the marriage must be the first for each and they must be married less than 12 months.

Couples will be invited to participate. If they agree, DiLillo will assess their abuse histories, their mental health functioning and the quality of their marital relationships through paper questionnaires. The couples also will be observed to assess how they engage in tasks such as conflict resolution and also how supportive they are of each other.

Preliminary data collection shows that about 23 percent of the participants are reporting a history of sexual abuse, right at the national average. Recruitment begins in the fall, and the team is expecting about 50 of the 200 couples to report past sexual abuse. The team will follow these couples for two years, assessing them three times over that period.

Because of the sensitivity of the topic, couples will be given information about where to seek help should they need it. They also will be thoroughly debriefed and all aspects of the project will be explained in detail.

DiLillo expects some couples will separate or divorce during the period, and he's interested in seeing whether "victim couple" marriages fail at a greater rate than average.

One challenge will be to keep in touch with the couples. To try to avoid losing couples, they will be paid as an incentive to remain in contact with the researchers.

"I would love to be able to follow these newlyweds beyond five years to look at other developmental transitions, such as the birth of children," DiLillo said. "Some issues might not arise until couples face the challenges of parenting. I would hope it might be just a start to look at the trajectory of changes over time."

K01 awards are designed to help untenured faculty jumpstart their research careers. One hallmark of the award, formally named "Mentored Research Scientist Awards," is that recipients work closely with senior faculty mentors. DiLillo's mentors are Dave Hansen, psychology; Les Whitbeck, sociology; Allen McCutcheon, Gallup Research Center; and Thomas Bradbury, psychology of UCLA.

DiLillo would like to develop ways to help these couples.

"But until we know about the nature of the problems they face, we don't know what to target. Sexual dysfunction, problems with decision-making, control and trust issues - any of these could stem from abuse. We need to see what the relationships look like in order to develop an empirically supported treatment."

"This is where clinical work and research can each inform the other. I hope this study can inform what I and others do clinically in the future. I see it as feeding back into the way people work therapeutically with couples with a history of abuse. We are a few years away from the therapy part of this, however."

DiLillo has been a faculty member at UNL since 2000. He earned his doctoral degree from Oklahoma State University, where he was interested in the long-term effects of child maltreatment on adults. He spent three years at the University of Missouri directing a federal grant that explored the predictors of unintentional injury among young children. The experience of running that grant, coupled with his interest in past abuse histories, converged for this project, he said.

Kimberly Tyler will expand her previous studies on homeless teens by focusing on homeless adults ages 19-25. The assistant professor of sociology hopes to learn how these young adults' chances for future success are affected by abuse or neglect. Photo by Alan Jackson/Jackson Studios.

Tyler to study homeless during crucial phase of life

By Kim Hachiya, University Communications

Just a few months into a five-year K01 grant, Kimberly Tyler is ebullient about her research and the opportunities the grant provides.

An assistant professor of sociology, Tyler has been studying issues regarding homeless teens. Her next phase of research will examine young adults ages 19-25. It's a population that few have studied, she said, but it's a population at a critical life stage for future success. She will be following this group of young adults long-term to see how their histories of sexual and/or physical abuse and neglect influence their life trajectories.

Tyler said there is a significant body of research on homeless adults over age 30, and a growing body of work on homeless teens. But the young-adult cohort has been largely unstudied.

"This is a critical transition period in their lives when work patterns are established and marital relations are formed," she said. "Failure to successfully establish oneself as a young adult may have lifelong repercussions." Her hypothesis is that folks who don't make a successful transition during young adulthood will have significantly difficult lives. She wants to see how some manage to get off the streets and turn their lives around.

The K01 grant, worth approximately $660,000 and awarded by the National Institute of Mental Health, allows Tyler to reduce her teaching load and take some courses in educational psychology as she prepares to undertake a preliminary study of her subjects. At the end of the grant period, the plan is to apply for and win a single investigator grant - the holy grail of academic research.

Tyler is interested in the mental health outcomes of her subjects, and she studies some particularly unsavory behavior among young people: self-mutilation and dissociation. Self-mutilation includes behavior such as cutting oneself with a razor or knife. Dissociation is thought to alter an individual's thoughts or actions by separating feelings from memories of specific traumatic incidents, such as sexual abuse. She's interested in discovering the prevalence of these behaviors and why young people engage in them. The long-term goal is developing prevention or intervention strategies, she said.

Tyler's research also involves qualitative interviews with her subjects. The youths were found in homeless shelters or on the streets in the Midwest, she said. The long, in-depth interviews tease out the teens' stories, which are often desperately sad, Tyler said. Teens report sexual or physical abuse or neglect at home prompted them to run away, with the average age of first-running being 13. Some have as many as 30 "transitions" or moves from home to the street, from a shelter to a friend's house or some other location, indicating very little stability. Many have been robbed, sexually victimized or abused drugs or alcohol.

"I feel for these kids," she said. "It's difficult to do this research because their stories are so very sad. There are times I have to put it down because I start crying."

She will be doing a "matched sample" study in which two 75 member groups of similarly aged young adults, some housed and some homeless, will be interviewed. The individuals will be studied in Lincoln, Omaha and Des Moines, Iowa. A subset of 35 individuals will be followed for a one-year period. Tyler will look for their resilient characteristics and how some manage to become successful. The sample will be somewhat small, she said, in part because the K01 is designed to allow her to learn how to manage this type of study in preparation for a larger sample she hopes to study down the road.

K awards are designed to help untenured faculty jumpstart their research careers. One hallmark of the award, formally named "Mentored Research Scientist Awards," is that the recipient works closely with senior faculty mentors. Tyler's mentors are Ana Mari Cauce of the University of Washington and James D. Wright of the University of Central Florida, who has particular expertise in sampling homeless populations. Her co-mentors at UNL are Les Whitbeck, sociology, and Ralph DeAyala, educational psychology.

She'll spend the first year of the grant taking classes and workshops, the second and third years in data collection, the fourth year in writing her research, and the fifth year writing her R01 grant based on her findings.

It is believed that Tyler is the first UNL researcher to win a K award. She joined the UNL faculty in 2001 and earned her Ph.D. from Iowa State University.

"I hope the research will have important practice implications for professionals working with these individuals," she said.

An exact number of homeless teens is hard to determine, Tyler said. "Kids who don't want to be found just won't be found," she said. But the National Runaway Switchboard, the federally designated national communication system for runaway and homeless youth, estimates that between 1.3 million and 2.8 million runaway and homeless youth live on the streets of America every day.

In addition to her work studying homeless young adults, Tyler also is involved in a project to develop measures for neglect. Neglect, she said, is difficult to define because there are clear cases, such as abandonment, and less clear cases such as emotional, psychological and even educational neglect. Developing definitions and understanding levels that inflict damage are the first steps in helping to alleviate this problem, Tyler said.

New display honors scholars, leaders

By Tom Workman, Student Involvement

UNL students, faculty and staff who have won various awards as scholars and leaders will be permanently honored on the second floor of the Nebraska Union in a wall display unveiled at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 26 during a ceremony and reception before the start of Parents Weekend activities.

"Scholars and Leaders of Distinction" will highlight winners of a variety of academic and leadership awards, many of which currently have no permanent display on the campus. The UNL Parents Association, the Office of Admissions and the Office of Undergraduate Education provided support for the display, which is located at the top of the large circular staircase at the north entrance of the Union.

Conceived by Marilyn Bugenhagen, former director of Student Involvement, and initially funded through a grant by the UNL Parents Association, the wall display recognizes a number of UNL students, faculty and staff who have earned recognition on the national and local levels.

Awards featured include the Lowe R. and Mavis M. Folsom Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation and Masters Thesis, the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, U.S. Fulbright Scholars, the NCAA Today's Top VIII Award, the Outstanding Student Leader Award, the Outstanding Recognized Student Organization Adviser Award, Sue Tidball Award for Creative Humanity and others.

"We wanted a dynamic campus display that recognizes the wide array of contributions made by students, faculty and staff," said Linda Major, director of Student Involvement, who leads a committee that designed, planned and selected the honors for the display.

"Our goal was to honor all campus contributions, whether they were academic or co-curricular. They all contribute to the pride we feel for the university," Major said.

To attend The new 'Scholars and Leaders of Distinction' display will be unveiled at 4:30 p.m. Sept. 26 on the second floor near the north entrance of the Nebraska Union. The ceremony is free; call 472-2454 for information.

Committee named for SVCAA search

This e-mail was sent to all faculty and staff by Chancellor Harvey Perlman on Sept. 18.

Dear Colleagues:

At the State of the University Address, I announced to you that, with great regret, I had accepted Rick Edwards' decision to resign as Senior Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and return to the classroom. Rick has done a superb job as SVCAA, and I have greatly appreciated his leadership in this critical post.

I know you will appreciate how important this position is for the future of the university. Accordingly, the search for a replacement for Rick will begin immediately. John Owens, vice chancellor for agriculture and natural resources, has agreed to chair the search advisory committee to identify a pool of highly qualified candidates. The other members of the committee are:

• Kyle Arganbright, ASUN president
• Ruma Banerjee, biochemistry
• John Bergmeyer, attorney and chair, CBA Advisory Board
• Learthen Dorsey, history
• John Hibbing, political science
• Jack Oliva, dean of fine and performing arts
• Lance Perez, electrical engineering
• Kay Logan Peters, libraries
• Barbara Plake, educational psychology
• Linda Pratt, English
• Annie Scott, Lincoln Public Schools
• Joe Starita, journalism
• Dolores Tarver, graduate student
• Charles Wood, biological sciences

I appreciate greatly their willingness to serve and Professor John Wunder's assistance as president of the Academic Senate in helping to identify faculty members for the committee.

While we will, of course, advertise in the appropriate media, it is my experience that the strongest candidates are often identified by members of the UNL community and actively encouraged by them to become candidates for the position. While the search committee will have the primary responsibility for seeking out candidates, I ask that all members of our university community consider who they believe would be good candidates - whether currently a UNL employee or not - and recommend them to the committee. To do so, you may send your nomination to any member of the search advisory committee or Renee Hagerman (472-2116 or <rhagerman1@unl.edu>) of my office, who will be providing staff support. The job description can be found at the Office of the Chancellor link on the UNL homepage.

Again, thanks to Rick Edwards for a job well done and to you for your support of this important search.

Harvey