“We wanted community members engaged in the science,” Miller says. Studies of this variety often receive feedback through community advisory boards, but that kind of engagement doesn’t go far enough, says Miller, who also serves as director of the Division of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Pitt and UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh. The study develops and tests interventions at various developmental stages. It’s the largest community-partnered intervention study following children (and their families) from before birth to adulthood. McCluskey Professor of Pediatric Medical Education, the Pittsburgh Study plans to recruit between 20,000 and 25,000 participants from Allegheny County in the next two decades. Heinz Distinguished Professor and Chair of Pediatrics, and Elizabeth Miller, Edmund R. The team consists of well over 100 community members and 73 academics, with cooperation from 16 area school districts and several nonprofit organizations like the Neighborhood Resilience Project (which Abernathy leads), as well as support from Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh Foundation, the Grable Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, PNC, the University of Pittsburgh and the Shear Family Foundation. The Pittsburgh Study, which aims to find out what factors help children thrive in Allegheny County and address root causes of inequality, has been structured to avoid the mistakes of past research projects. And it demonstrates that how researchers approach a study can undermine efforts to help a community. “It was: ‘You people have been through so much trauma that you’re all screwed up.’”Ībernathy, who leads the congregation at Saint Moses the Black Orthodox Christian Mission in Pittsburgh’s Hill District, says this anecdote is widely shared in the city. That’s how the presentation came off, says Abernathy. For most of the Black people in the crowd, this was the first time they had seen these White academics, who were uttering words about their children like “at risk” and “mental health problems” and “juvenile justice system.”Īs Abernathy tells it, at the end of the presentation, a woman raised her hand and said: “So, you’re saying we’re all messed up.” However, the researchers hadn’t engaged deeply with members of the community while gathering the data. Excited to share their work, the researchers delivered a slide presentation with graphs and charts that explained the consequences of childhood trauma.
Reverend Paul Abernathy has heard the story so many times that he can tell it as though he’d been there: Many years ago, a team of researchers studied the effects of adverse childhood experiences among Black residents in Pittsburgh, and they presented their results at a crowded church. Reverend Paul Abernathy (left) runs the Neighborhood Resilience Project, one of several local nonprofits that are part of the Pittsburgh Study.
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