Sbeglia project wins prestigious National Institute of Justice award
Colleen Sbeglia was a first-year doctoral student in psychological science at UC Irvine when she first heard about the National Institute of Justice’s Graduate Research Fellowship at a presentation by former NIJ director-turned-criminology, law & society Professor Nancy Rodriguez.
That led to Sbeglia speaking with her faculty advisor, Psychological Science Professor Elizabeth Cauffman, who was “immediately supportive and started helping me develop ideas,” says the now fifth-year Ph.D. candidate.
Last year, Sbeglia attended a student workshop about the NIJ Graduate Research Fellowship (GRF) led by Candice Odgers, professor of psychological science and the School of Social Ecology’s director of research and faculty development. Charis Kubrin and Miguel Quintana-Navarrete, professor and assistant professor of CLS respectively, “gave presentations on previous grants they wrote that were funded by NIJ, which was extremely helpful,” Sbeglia recalls.
That School of Social Ecology star power paid off: Earlier this year, the NIJ announced that among its 7,371 GRF awards distributed nationwide and totaling nearly $3.9 million was $166,500 for Sbeglia’s project, “Losing Sleep and Losing Control: The Impact of Subjective and Objective Sleep on the Problem Behavior and Mental Health of Justice-Involved Young Adults.”
In the spring, the same project, which will be Sbeglia’s dissertation, received a nearly $50,000 grant from the American Psychology-Law Society.
“The NIJ GRF will fund my salary for up to three years, along with some additional research expenses,” she explains. “Having this grant funding means I won’t have to teach or work on data management to support myself financially, so I can devote my full time and effort to working on this dissertation. It’s impossible to overstate how helpful it is to have the support of NIJ.”
Sbeglia expects to finish collecting data and complete her dissertation in the next few years, depending on how quickly she can recruit study participants from Cauffman’s Young Adult Court project.
“Broadly speaking, I study the experiences of adolescents and young adults (ages 18-25) who are involved in the justice system,” Sbeglia says. “The time period spanning adolescence and young adulthood is such an interesting and important time developmentally – your brain is rapidly developing, you’re starting to build who you’re going to be as an adult, and you also have a lot of what we call ‘neural plasticity.’ Basically, your brain is primed to learn new things, and you can be deeply affected by your experiences, for better or worse.”
On the worse end, of course, is getting arrested and charged with a crime.
“It’s important to understand how interactions with the justice system shape a person’s development,” Sbeglia says. “Does getting caught by the system actually prevent crime? Are youth developing aggressive tendencies because of the violence they’re exposed to in secure facilities? What other factors in these individuals’ lives might shape their mental health, their substance use, their ability to get education or a job? There is so much opportunity for researchers to better understand the lives and experiences of these youth, who have historically fallen through the cracks. If we can learn from them, we can create justice policy that helps them build the lives they want — and keep communities safer.”
She designed her study to understand how sleep is related to offending behavior, substance use and mental health among a segment of the population in the justice system that researchers often overlook. Sbeglia notes there is great scholarship on juveniles under age 18 and adults as a whole in the justice system, “but the 18-25-year-olds often get ignored. Legally, they’re adults, but developmentally, they’re actually much more like adolescents. My colleague Marie Gillespie, who is director of clinical programming with Young Adult Court, has a great phrase for this: ‘Adults under the law, adolescents under the science.’”
For a whole host of developmental and social reasons, justice-involved young adults are especially at-risk of poor sleep, according to Sbeglia. “Unfortunately, this seems to have some pretty serious consequences. Some of my research has shown that poor sleep is correlated with increased offending, and aggression/violence in particular, and other researchers consistently find links between sleep and mental health and substance use.”
Her subjects participate in two-week long daily diaries, in which they answer questions about their sleep, mental health, experiences and offending and substance behavior, and they also wear sleep-tracking devices to capture objective measures of their slumber.
“Because I’ll be asking them about these things daily, I’ll be able to look at what kind of effect sleep is having on their lives the very next day – or, if sleep is a mechanism that links other important things together,” says Sbeglia. “For instance, does discrimination lead to worse sleep, which in turn leads to worse mental health?”
“Colleen’s dissertation is not only academically rigorous but has great potential to influence treatment of young people in the justice system,” Cauffman says. “To see a student develop her own research ideas and then describe ways of applying this information to both practice and policy at such an early stage in her career is both impressive and exciting.”
Sbeglia credits the entire School of Social Ecology for being “wonderfully supportive when it comes to helping students find funding for applied scientific research” and her lab mates for having “vetted every manuscript, analysis, and grant application I’ve ever written. Everything we work on is a group effort at the end of the day. The best science is built on collaboration, and I count my lucky stars to have the opportunity to work with such a world-class, and unbelievably kind, team.”
She reserves her biggest thanks for her advisor.
“Beth Cauffman walks the walk when it comes to innovative, applied science,” Sbeglia says. “Everything she does is designed to help the lives of marginalized youth in the justice system, and she brings all of her students along with her from day one.”
Cauffman returns the kudos.
“Colleen is exceptional,” the professor says. “She conducts superlative research, has an exceptional mastery of core material in both psychology and law, and has connected her work to both practice and policy. … Colleen is poised to embark on a career in which she will make major contributions and has already demonstrated her enormous potential. I am so proud and honored to be her advisor.”
— Matt Coker