Colleen Halliday-Boykins

Dr. Colleen Halliday-Boykins' primary research interests are in understanding the ways in which school contexts contribute to or mitigate racial/ethnic disparities in antisocial behavior and substance use in children and adolescents.  Her interests include examining the effects of school discipline on youths’ mental and behavioral health and the ways in which school discipline may inadvertently contribute to racial/ethnic disparities in antisocial behavior, substance use, and juvenile justice involvement.  Dr. Halliday-Boykins' broad interests are in conceptualizing the psychosocial problems that disproportionally affect ethnic minority children and adolescents within the social ecological and ethnocultural contexts within which the youths are embedded.  Hence, her research endeavors involve examining the roles of families, peers, schools, and neighborhood/communities in contributing to, preventing, and addressing aggression, antisocial behavior, substance abuse, and violent victimization.  Her interests also include understanding the mechanisms by which race and ethnicity confer risk for mental and behavioral health problems, the roles of social ecological and ethnocultural factors in differential effects across racial/ethnic groups and within group variation, as well as identifying ways to reduce racial/ethnic mental and behavioral health disparities. Dr. Halliday-Boykins has received funding both as a principal investigator and as a co-investigator from National Institute on Drug Abuse and has collaborated on several other research projects funded by NIH and other agencies.  She has served on the editorial board for Developmental Psychology and as an ad hoc reviewer for several other scholarly journals and have numerous scholarly publications in high impact journals.   

Research, substance abuse, antisocial behavior, children and adolescents, schools, juvenile delinquency, aggression, interventions, racial disparities, families, psychology, public health, mental health,