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About the Institute:
People
Erin Phelps
Research Scientist
Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development
Email:
erin.phelps@rcn.com
Currently a Research Scientist at the Institute for Applied
Research in Youth Development at Tufts University, Erin Phelps also
served as a Research Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute
for Applied Research in Youth Development in the
Eliot-Pearson
Department of Child Development
at Tufts University until June 2009. She received her Ed.D. in Human
Development from the Harvard
Graduate School of Education.
A developmental psychologist and research methodologist, Phelps
championed the use of longitudinal data for understanding
development in context across the life span and advocated for better
representation of underrepresented groups in research. Her research
involves the study of positive youth development and the use of
developmental methods to study lives in context. Finally, Dr. Phelps
has advocated for the use of secondary when available, in order to
fully use scarce resources and to conduct longitudinal research
using existing samples, that would otherwise take a lifetime to do.
Her teaching interests mirror this focus. She has taught courses in
Applied Data Analysis, Applied Multivariate Analysis, Intro to
Structural Equation Models for Developmental Research, with a focus
on analyzing real, messy data while learning statistics and analytic
techniques. Her first question to prospective students or when asked
to consult on a project is “What is your research question and how
do you think you can use the data at hand to answer it?”
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