CORE Lab
Contextualized Research for Equity in Child and Adolescent Development
About the CORE Lab
The COntextualized Research for Equity in Child and Adolescent Development Lab (CORE Lab) at SDSU, directed by Dr. Jane Leer, conducts rigorous research examining how the contexts that children and adolescents live, learn, and play in shape their development. The goal of our research is to understand and address some of our world’s most critical problems, including racial and socioeconomic housing and health disparities, intergenerational poverty, and educational inequities.
Our research is community-engaged and policy-relevant. We partner with non-profits and government agencies to support youth development using a contextualized, strengths-based perspective spanning multiple cultural contexts (in the US and globally), developmental phases (early childhood through emerging adulthood), and outcomes (mental health, educational attainment and achievement, and intergroup dynamics).
Research Areas
Our current projects aim to understand:
How poverty, housing, and neighborhood inequalities affect children and families.
The role of social policies in supporting children’s health and learning.
Outcomes of interest include youth mental and behavioral health, academic trajectories, family economic wellbeing, and youth and parents’ social cognition (e.g., beliefs about social inequality and mobility). The social policies we focus on include public housing redevelopment with collaborators at the HOME Study, rental assistance programs, McKinney-Vento Assistance grants to support students experiencing homelessness, and guaranteed income for families with low-incomes.