This webinar – part of LCRN’s series on Using Existing Data to Examine Life Course Health Development – features Margaret L. Kern, PhD.

Dr. Kern is a senior lecturer at the Centre for Positive Psychology at the University of Melbourne’s Graduate School of Education in Australia. Originally trained in social, personality, and developmental psychology, Dr. Kern received her undergraduate degree in psychology from Arizona State University, a Masters and PhD in social/personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside, and postdoctoral training at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles and chapters, and was recently selected as an early career rising star by the Association for Psychological Science. Her research examines the question of who flourishes in life (physically, mentally, and socially), why, and what enhances or hinders healthy life trajectories.

Numerous studies have followed people across significant portions of their lives. Secondary analyses with these studies offer opportunities to study life trajectories across diverse samples. To aid integrative efforts, Dr. Kern and her colleagues developed TADPOHLS (The Anatomy of Developmental Predictors of Healthy Lives Study), a database that categorizes items and constructs from 25 prospective longitudinal studies that have followed participants from adolescence into adulthood. To classify items and measures, they created an extensive typology that provides a common language for categorizing study concepts. This webinar will present the database and coding typology, and illustrate how the database can be used to integrate multiple studies at the item level to examine adolescent predictors of adult health outcomes.

Webinar recording available here