Current Projects
Co-Designing an Intervention for Youths with Callous Traits
Disruptive behaviours are common, impairing, and costly for youth, families, and society. A subgroup of youth show callous-unemotional (CU) traits—such as low empathy, limited remorse or guilt, and reduced prosocial behaviour. These traits make disruptive behaviours harder to treat, and existing interventions often fall short. This project, funded by the American Psychological Foundation (PI: Lui), integrates user-centred design and implementation science to develop a tailored intervention for adolescents with disruptive behaviours and CU traits. To guide the design, we are gathering insights from researchers, clinicians, and caregivers, ensuring the intervention is both evidence-based and responsive to real-world needs.
Improving Access to Science
Many families struggle to find clear, trustworthy information about children’s and teens’ disruptive behaviours. This CIHR-funded project aims to change that. We are working in partnership with parents to create and share reliable, easy-to-understand information about disruptive behaviours and their treatments. Our goals are to: 1) Build a national parent advisory board that brings together diverse caregivers to share their experiences and guide the project. 2) Co-create practical, engaging, and evidence-based resources (like short videos and infographics) that help parents better understand disruptive behaviours and available supports.
Parent Beliefs about Youth Callous Traits
Youths with disruptive behaviours and callous-unemotional (CU) traits are at the highest risk for severe and persistent problems, including violence and criminality. Parents play a critical role in shaping their child’s behaviours and treatment outcomes, and one important factor may be their attributions—how they explain or make sense of their child’s behaviours. Despite this, there is currently no reliable and valid tool to measure parent attributions in the context of disruptive behaviours and CU traits. This SSHRC-funded project aims to fill this gap by developing and validating a new questionnaire that captures parent attributions of disruptive behaviours and CU traits, and is representative of both mothers’ and fathers’ perspectives across a wide age range of youths. Our approach involves qualitative interviews, literature review, pilot testing, and large-scale field validation.
Treating Parents and Children with ADHD
This NIMH-funded study (R01MH118320; PI: Chronis-Tuscano), conducted in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Maryland and Children’s National Hospital, is a hybrid effectiveness-implementation clinical trial. The trial tests the effectiveness of two treatment strategies for families in which both a parent and child have ADHD. A unique feature of this project is the inclusion of a community partner group that meets regularly throughout the trial to provide feedback on factors influencing both the clinical trial and the implementation of the treatment model. Our lab leads the qualitative analysis of these meetings to inform the development of an implementation toolkit.
Early Identification of ADHD in Electronic Health Records
This NIMH-funded project (R21MH128585; MPIs: Lui & Gao), in partnership with Dr. Gordon Gao at Johns Hopkins University, has three main goals: 1) Identify disparities in how often children are screened for ADHD, diagnosed, and connected to healthcare. 2) Develop a predictive algorithm using electronic health records to identify ADHD risk earlier than the typical age of diagnosis. 3) Create an implementation roadmap with stakeholders to guide how the algorithm can be integrated into primary care.
Past Projects
EBP Implementation in Los Angeles County
In collaboration with Dr. Anna Lau at UCLA, Dr. Lauren Brookman-Frazee at UCSD, and colleagues at the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health, we examined the implementation of evidence-based practices (EBPs) across Los Angeles County. We investigated factors at the EBP, youth, therapist, and organizational levels that influenced how successfully EBPs were implemented and sustained across time.
Mobile Crisis Team Use in Los Angeles County
In collaboration with Dr. Anna Lau from UCLA, we examined patterns of mobile crisis service use among youths in Los Angeles County, subsequent follow-up care, and factors that predict these care pathways. A particular focus was on identifying racial and ethnic disparities in care access and use.