On January 25th Project CoVitality, featuring the work of UC Santa Barbara faculty Michael J. Furlong, Erin Dowdy, and Karen Nylund-Gibson, presented at the Western Positive Psychology Association (WPPA) on the topics of the CoVitality Framework and the Social Emotional Health Survey (SEHS).
CoVitality is a web-based app featuring the Social Emotional Health Surveys. This tool was developed to help school psychologists and mental health professionals assess the complete mental health of adolescents. The app is based on the CoVitality Framework, which considers a student’s personal and social strengths and assets as well as their current distress. Over the past five years primary investigators Michael J. Furlong, Erin Dowdy, and Karen Nylund-Gibson have developed the Social Emotional Health Survey as a means to measure levels of assets and distress.. The SEHS has produced strong psychometric characteristics that persist across multiple studies that show strong reliability and a robust factor model.
The Western Positive Psychology Association, established in 2013, is dedicated to creating a collaborative scientific community of faculty, students, and scholars to advance and support an academic agenda in the field of positive psychology. The vision of the WPAA is to promote an influential and sustainable academic presence of positive psychology in the western region of the United States. WPPA encourages teaching, scientific research, interdisciplinary collaborative investigations and dissemination of knowledge in positive psychology and strongly supports the professional development of positive psychology faculty and students.
Michael Furlong is an emeritus professor at the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education (GGSE). He served as Associate Dean for Research at GGSE from 2016 to 2018, and was a Professor and Chair in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology (CCSP), in which he taught for 32 years. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Educational Research Association. From 2008 t0 2015 he was the Editor of the Journal of School Violence and co-edited the Handbook of Positive Psychology in the Schools (2009, 2014).
Erin Dowdy is a Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology. She obtained her B.S. from Florida State University, and her M.Ed. and Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Georgia. She received specialized training in pediatric and clinical psychology from her internship at the University of Southern California/Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. She is both a licensed psychologist and credentialed school psychologist. Her research interests include behavioral assessment and classification, specifically early identification of child behavioral problems and strengths. She is highly invested in training the next generation of school psychology scholars and providing evidence-based practices to diverse students.
Karen Nylund-Gibson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Education, specializing in quantitative research methodology. She earned her Ph.D. at UCLA, and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Mental Health at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on latent variable models, specifically mixture modeling. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on developments, best practices, and applications of latent class analysis, latent transition analysis, and growth mixture modeling.