Oregon Social Learning Center

Utopia Airways

Mission & Overview

Mission

We are a collaborative, multidisciplinary center dedicated to increasing the scientific understanding of social and psychological processes related to healthy development and family functioning. We apply that understanding to the design and evaluation of interventions that strengthen children, adolescents, families, and communities.

Overview

The Oregon Social Learning Center (OSLC) is located in the Eugene-Springfield, Oregon metropolitan area. The center was established in 1977. The research group that founded OSLC was started by clinical psychologist Gerald R. Patterson in the late 1950’s while he worked as a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oregon.

Patterson moved the group to the non-profit Oregon Research Institute (ORI) in the mid-1960’s, and the group eventually grew to include clinical psychologist John B. Reid, therapists Marion Forgatch and Patti Chamberlain, administrator Mary Perry, and a variety of other researchers and clinicians. During these early years, the group developed the theoretical foundation and techniques for a version of parent management training (PMT), an intervention strategy that has been quite influential in the fields of clinical psychology and prevention science.

Since 1977, research at OSLC has grown around a strong emphasis on rigorous methodology, including the collection of multiple measures to defining key behaviors and processes. A typical developmental or intervention research project as OSLC includes the direct observation of family social interaction; interviewing and collecting questionnaires from teachers, peers, children, and parents; and the collection of school and court records. Intervention studies at OSLC employ scientifically rigorous evaluation designs, most frequently the randomized controlled trial.

Intervention studies have concentrated on improving the strengths and decreasing the problems of youth ages 3 through 18 years, including studies tailored to children with conduct problems or delinquency, and children who have been abused or neglected by their parents. Multidimensional Treatment Foster Care was originally designed to intervene with chronic offending delinquent adolescents. Studies have been conducted with samples of male and female youth. MTFC has also been extended to preschool aged children in the child welfare system.

A number of preventive interventions have also been developed at OSLC. The prevention studies involve intervention with a variety of populations. Most include a focus on testing the effect of parent management training with specific populations, such as with recently divorced mothers, with step families, with the siblings of at risk youth, with incarcerated fathers and mothers, with mothers and fathers involved in community corrections, with at risk girls involved in the child welfare system, and with youth at risk for substance use. A universal school-based prevention program, Linking the Interests of Families and Teachers, was designed to promote healthy behavior at home, in the classroom, and on the playground by group interventions for elementary school students and their parents.

In 1990, OSLC was designated as a Prevention Research Center funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. The theme of the Oregon Prevention Research Center was the prevention of antisocial behavior problems and delinquency during childhood. In 2004, OSLC was designated as a Translational Prevention Research Center funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The center works with child welfare systems in various locales throughout the country to develop interventions for parents and children.

Another major and ongoing focus of research at OSLC is contributing to the understanding of family, peer, and contextual influences on long-term developmental patterns of behavior for youth, including such areas as delinquency, substance use, depression, sexual risk behavior, social competency, domestic violence, and the breakdown of romantic relationships. This work currently spans infancy to early adulthood, often involves study of more than one child per family, and has been expanded to include biological as well as social and emotional factors.

Studies in the developmental area include longitudinal studies of siblings and divorced fathers, as well as several long-term longitudinal studies of general population, at-risk, and high-risk families. The longest running study at OSLC began in 1983, the Oregon Youth Study (OYS). OYS was extended several years ago to follow the couple relationships of participants, as well as three generations of family members. Several studies have used genetically informed designs and physiologically based indicators. Other recent extensions include work in a variety of local, rural, urban, national, and international communities involving understudied populations, including preventive intervention development and testing work done in concert with Native American tribes, with Latino populations in Oregon, with rural communities, and with practitioners nationwide in Norway.

Over the last three decades, OSLC research scientists have received national and international awards in recognition of their contributions to theory, prevention, and treatment. The body of research grants awarded to the scientists at OSLC reflects a dual and complimentary focus on intervention (prevention and clinical treatment) and theory building. In the next decade, research at OSLC will include a greater consideration of biological influences on behavior, the rigorous examination of intervention processes, and the development of effective strategies for implementing evidence-based programs in community settings.

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