Faculty Directory
Theresa Betancourt
Salem Professor in Global Practice
Director, Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA)
Theresa Betancourt
Sc.D.
Contact
McGuinn Hall 106Q
Telephone: 617-552-8251
Email: theresa.betancourt@bc.edu
Education
- B.A., Linfield College
- M.A., University of Louisville
- Sc.D., Harvard
Research Interests
Implementation Science, health and human rights.
Expertise
- Child Welfare
- Global Practice
- Immigrants and Refugees
- Innovations in Research Methods
- Maternal and Child Health
- Mental Health
- Trauma
Profile
Theresa S. Betancourt, ScD, MA, is the Salem Professor in Global Practice at the Boston College School of Social Work and Director of the Research Program on Children and Adversity (RPCA). Her central research interests include the developmental and psychosocial consequences of concentrated adversity on children, youth and families; resilience and protective processes in child and adolescent mental health and child development; refugee families; and applied cross-cultural mental health research. She is Principal Investigator of an intergenerational study of war/prospective longitudinal study of war-affected youth in Sierra Leone (LSWAY). This research led to the development of a group mental health intervention for war-affected youth that demonstrated effectiveness for improving emotion regulation, daily functioning and school functioning in war-affected youth. This intervention, the Youth Readiness Intervention (YRI), is now at the core of a scale-up study within youth employment programs now underway in collaboration with the World Bank and Government of Sierra Leone as a part of the NIMH-funded Mental Health Services and Implementation Science Research Hub called Youth FORWARD.
Betancourt has also developed and evaluated the impact of a Family Strengthening Intervention for HIV-affected children and families and is leading the investigation of a home-visiting early childhood development (ECD) intervention to promote enriched parent-child relationships and prevent violence. This intervention, called Sugira Muryango (Strengthen the Family), has a focus on father engagement and violence reduction and can be integrated within poverty reduction/social protection initiatives in low-resource settings. With support from the LEGO Foundation, the RPCA will be conducting implementation research on the PLAY Collaborative, a multi-level strategy to scale out the intervention to all families ranked as living in extreme poverty across three Districts in Rwanda in the years ahead. Domestically, she is engaged in community-based participatory research on family-based prevention of emotional and behavioral problems in refugee children and adolescents resettled in the U.S. She has written extensively on mental health and resilience in children facing adversity including recent articles in Child Development, The Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Social Science and Medicine, JAMA Psychiatry, AJPH and PLOS One. Her work has been profiled in the New Yorker, National Geographic, NPR, CNN.com and in an interview with Larry King.
Selected Publications
Betancourt, T.S. ,Thompson, D., & VanderWeele, T.J.(2017). War-Related Traumas and Mental Health Across Generations. JAMA Psychiatry.http://doi.org/10.1001/jamapschiatry.2017.3530
Betancourt, T.S., Ng, L.C., Kirk, C.M., Brennan, R.T., Beardslee, W.R., Stulac, S., Mushashi, C., Nduwimana, E., Mukunzi, S., Nyirandagijimana, B., Kalisa, G., Cyamatare, F. R. & Sezibera, V. (2017). Family-Based Promotion of Mental Health in Children Affected by HIV: A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 58(8), 922-930.
Betancourt, T.S., McBain, R. K., Newnham, E. A., & Brennan, R. T. (2015). The intergenerational impact of war: longitudinal relationships between caregiver and child mental health in postconflict Sierra Leone. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 56(10), 1101-1107.
Betancourt, T.S., Frounfelker, R., Mishra, T., Hussein, A., Falzarano, R. (2015). Addressing Health Disparities in the Mental Health of Refugee Children and Adolescents Through Community-Based Participatory Research: A Study in 2 Communities. American Journal of Public Health
Santavirta T., Santavirta N., Betancourt T.S., & Gilman S.E. (2015). Long term mental health outcomes of Finnish children evacuated to Swedish families during the second world war and their non-evacuated siblings: cohort study. British Medical Journal, 350:g7753.
Betancourt, T.S., McBain, R., Newnham, E. A., Akinsulure-Smith, A. M., Brennan, R. T., Weisz, J. R., & Hansen, N.B. (2014). A Behavioral Intervention for War-Affected Youth in Sierra Leone: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 53(12), 1288-1297.
Betancourt, T.S., Ng, L.C., Kirk, C.M., Muyanah, M., Mushashi, C., Ingabire, C., Teta, S., Beardslee, W., Brennan, R.T., Zahn, I., Stulac, S., Cyamatare, F.R., & Sezibera, V. (2014). Family-based prevention of mental health problems in children affected by HIV and AIDS: An open trial. AIDS, (Suppl 3):S359–S368.
Betancourt, T.S., Scorza, P., Kanyanganzi, F., Fawzi, M. C. S., Sezibera, V., Cyamatare, F., Beardslee, W., Stulac, S., Bizimana, J.I., Stevenson, A., & Kayiteshonga, Y. (2014). HIV and Child Mental Health: A Case-Control Study in Rwanda. Pediatrics, 134(2):e464-72.
Selected Grants
1U01 MD010613-01 Betancourt (PI)
NIH/NIMHD
Addressing Mental Health Disparities in Refugee Children Through Family and Community-based Prevention: A CBPR Collaboration and Hybrid Implementation
Effectiveness Trial
The proposed study will employ a cross-cultural CBPR to evaluate the effectiveness of the Family Strengthening Intervention for Refugees, a preventative family home-based visiting intervention intended to mitigate mental health disparities among refugee children and families.
1U19MH109989-01 Betancourt (PI)
NIH/NIMH
Youth FORWARD: Capacity Building in Alternate Delivery Platforms and Implementation Models for Bringing Evidence-Based Behavioral Interventions to Scale for Youth Facing Adversity in West Africa
This program aims to build mental health research capacity in West Africa through the scale-up and implementation of a behavioral intervention for violence-affected youth in collaboration withWorld Bank youth employment initiatives in Sierra Leone, followed by Liberia.
1R01HD073349 Betancourt (PI)
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Intergenerational impact of war: A prospective longitudinal study
A fourth wave of follow-up to examine the intergenerational effects of war and the post-conflict environment on a cohort of Sierra Leonean young adults affected by war as children, their children, and their intimate partners.