Lab U collaborates with Virginia Tech faculty and educators to investigate child abuse

Associate professors Grant Drew and Shawn Thomas of U of A and Virginia Tech assistant professor Yotishka Datta are working with the parenting organization to develop a spatial risk assessment of child abuse across Texas communities.

Drawve is associate professor and associate director of the Crime and Security Data Analytics Laboratory, and Thomas is associate professor and director of the Center for Social Research in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at the U of A. Datta. in the Virginia Tech Department of Statistics and previously at the U.A. The research team brings together their expertise in crime analysis, communities and statistics to identify child abuse and identify service gaps and evidence-based prevention efforts.

Broadly speaking, parenting seeks to increase children’s well-being, life and well-being. The current research project incorporates this effort with an innovative approach to reach vulnerable populations.

“This is an exciting project with real-world applications and an opportunity to improve the lives of vulnerable populations in our region,” Thomas said. “These efforts are aligned with the mission of CSR to solve complex social issues and informed decision-making for the public good and the land grant and main responsibilities of universities to participate, collaborate and serve citizens, businesses, governmental and public bodies in the region”

Drawve said, “This work builds on a project we completed in Little Rock on child abuse and service gaps. We know spatial issues for crime, so this project brings that knowledge to an understudied outcome: child abuse.”

Click here for more information about the Little Rock Project. Setting this research project apart from Little Rock is the wealth of data on child trauma in Texas, allowing for greater depth and analysis.

Datta added, “The main objective of this project is to build an interpretable modeling framework that removes tautological ambiguity from crime prediction tools. We will apply multi-resolution spatio-temporal modeling approaches to understand the dynamics by moving from granularity to granularity. Identifying the nature, geographic and socio-demographic indicators of criminal activity.” Overall, this project takes a place-based approach to lead people-based prevention efforts.

The Department of Sociology and Criminology offers three degree programs and four student organizations; Liaison with three research units: Social Research Center, Community and Family Institute and Terrorism Research Center; and research emphasis on community, crime, health and safety, and social data analytics. In the year In 2020, U of A’s Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences also supported the creation of TRC’s Crime and Security Data Analytics Lab (CASDAL) to meet the analytical needs of students, faculty and external partners, providing space for research projects on crime and security issues.