The Wellesley Centers for Women is home to more than 50 individual research, education, and action projects. Some are short-term, specifically focused investigations, evaluations, and trainings. Others are part of larger, long-term initiatives addressing critical areas in the lives of women, children, and families. Our Postdoctoral Research Training program offers three full-time research fellow positions and our international collaborations strive to improve the lives of women and girls across the globe. Learn more about these important initiatives.
This collaboration between the Asian University
for Women (AUW) and the Wellesley
Centers for Women
resulted in the design of a year-long gender studies course, Women Shaping
Society.
Racial/ethnic self-identification can vary over time and place, in other words, some adolescents of mixed ancestry report different single-race or mixed-race identifications at different times and in different situations. This report seeks to explore whether adolescents of mixed-ancestry have particular strengths or weaknesses compared within their single-race-reporting peers.
A National Research, Writing and Action Initiative
The primary objective of this project is to manage the continuation of the well established Afterschool Matters Initiative, which includes several publications and a Research Grantee program, in addition to planning for the national expansion of a related action/research writing initiative.
APAS is an assessment system that helps programs link quality and youth outcomes together in a comprehensive and integrated fashion. It was developed to help address the accountability challenge that faces afterschool programs.
During this phase of work, NIOST will design and develop two additional measurement tools—a youth survey (SAYO-Y) and a family survey (SAYO-F). These two tools will be used by Massachusetts Department of Education grantees to better understand youth needs, their program experiences and help pinpoint areas where youth may benefit from additional support.
WCW researchers participated in a study, led by Dr. Valora Washington and under the auspices of the Bessie Tartt Wilson Children’s Foundation, to evaluate the child care voucher system in Massachusetts.
The CLLIP Research and Evaluation Project is designed to assess the impact of a literacy intervention for low-income poor performing school districts in the state of Ohio. Longitudinal data consisting of standardized literacy assessments, and surveys from students (preschool through 6th grade), parents, and teachers are analyzed and evaluated to demonstrate the effectiveness of the CLLIP intervention.
The project involves a needs assessment of child and adolescent refugee mental health services in New Hampshire and utilizes community dialogue strategies for integrating youth, family, provider, school and community knowledge and expertise towards addressing refugee mental health needs especially as it relates to trauma and in the context of resettlement.
This program brings together a working group of lawyers and jurists
from Asia to focus on law reform in the region. The working group will
examine the role that gender-based strategic litigation can play in
advancing equality, non-discrimination, and human rights.
This project connected high-level leaders from different cities and states to educate them on the dynamic landscape of after-school programs. in hopes of directing the influence, funding, and high expectations of these leaders towards a "critical mass" of associated initiatives across the country.
A Collaborative Multi-Level Experimental Evaluation
The goal of this study is to increase the capacity of schools to prevent Dating Violence/Harassment (DV/H) by evaluating the effectiveness of current multi-level DV/H prevention programming in middle schools within a large urban school district.
This project explores the ways in which states attempt to regulate consensual adolescent sexual behavior through criminal law. In the end, the researchers hope to encourage a close-in-age exemption for Massachusetts, which currently is one of a small number of states that do not have any such exemption.
Sexual Violence/Harassment Prevention Programs in Middle Schools
This study is designed to help increase the capacity of programs
to prevent sexual violence and harassment. The long-term goal/objective
of this study is to help prevent intimate partner violence,
sexual violence, and sexual harassment by employing the most
rigorous
methods to evaluate strategies for altering the violence-supportive
attitudes and norms of youth.
One of the major developmental tasks of preschoolers is to develop empathy; this project researches and designs curriculum in order better understand and cultivate empathy at a young and critical age.
This project is a multi-faceted engagement with Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts to conduct an evaluation of the Get Real middle school sexual education curriculum.
This project seeks to help scientific researchers better communicate their findings on gender as it relates to science, technology, engineering and math to key audiences: media, advocates, policy makers, public.
The project combines
out-of-school time (OST) professional advisors, the National Institute on Out-of-School
Time (NIOST), and NASA experts from across the agency to use research-based
strategies to develop afterschool activity guides adapted from NASA Planetary
Science formal education curricula.
The mission of this project is to facilitate research, monitoring, training, and policy recommendations that will positively affect the experiences of women and children within the court and criminal justice systems, and to advance women's economic growth through education and the workforce.
Peggy McIntosh offers presentations, workshops, and consulting on: white privilege and privilege systems in general, diversifying organizational thinking, gender-fair and multicultural curricula, diversifying teaching methods, and feelings of fraudulence.
The workshops, courses, trainings, and publications at the Institute utilize the Relational-Cultural Model of development, which focuses on 'growth-fostering relationships' as central to positive human development.
Early Care and Education and School Readiness: Massachusetts
Researchers focus on aspects of school readiness, including social and language development, along with other data such as hours in care, so as to better understand the ways in which a child's growth is influenced by situational factors.
Assessment of Early Care and Education in Massachusetts
This group of inter-related research projects seeks to understand the state of early care and education in Massachusetts and make recommendations for quality outcomes.
This research project addresses a critical issue by examining the overlap of bullying perpetration/victimization and sexual violence in order to inform sexual violence prevention in US schools.
This long-term program has brought national attention to the importance of children's out-of-school time using research, training and advocacy to strengthen children's emotional, physical, and social development.
The National Institute on Out-of-School Time will partner with The Forum for Youth Investment as champions for action with the Career Pathway's sites in San Diego and Long Beach, California. This will include leading research aspects of the project as well as working to anticipate the site's needs for information, support and tools in a variety of areas.
