Jennifer Renick, PhD

Drawing upon my orientation as a community and developmental psychologist, my research is driven by a desire to improve environments so that they can better support the healthy development of individuals, guided by values of social justice and participatory research methods. I focus on educational environments specifically, with two main areas of research: the developmental appropriateness of adolescents’ educational environments and higher education institutions’ ability to address societal needs. I am a community-engaged researcher, partnering closely with educational practitioners, because I believe that it is crucial to collaborate with individuals on the ground in order to generate findings that are relevant to and usable for those outside of academia. I also conduct youth-participatory action research wherein young people act as co-researchers alongside me because I feel too often research is done on adolescents, but not with them, and as such, researchers can miss key issues in the lives of teenagers.