SPARK_Logo

What is the SPARK Project?

SPARK stands for Studying Pathways to Adjustment and Resilience in Kids. We are a federally-funded research project from the National Institutes of Health focused on understanding what helps children who have experienced abuse and neglect recover and successfully manage the stressful experiences in their lives.

We work with children who are in Jackson County, Missouri custody who live in residential facilities and in foster homes. Children in state custody are a chronically understudied population, and this project represents one of the few efforts nationwide to understand the process of resilience and gather empirical data on children exposed to maltreatment. The point of gathering this information is to use our results to help guide systems-level changes to improve how we care for children in foster care and promote their life-long success.

Our team is housed within both the Department of Psychology and the Department of Applied Behavioral Science, and the Schiefelbusch Institute for Lifespan Studies (a unit of the KU Center for Research). Thank you for visiting us today!

You can find out more about the SPARK Project by clicking any of the links below:

SPARK Data collection Progress!

Progress Thermometer

The above image shows progress we have made with SPARK Project data collection. The number of youth who have completed Time 1 are in green; purple represents those who have completed Time 2; and yellow represents those who have completed Time 3. Our goal is to have 300 youth complete all three timepoints.		  

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