The White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse was established via Presidential Memorandum on June 16, 2022 to address online harassment and abuse, specifically technology-facilitated gender-based violence. In consultation with survivors, advocates, educators, experts from diverse fields, and the private sector, the Task Force developed specific recommendations to improve prevention, response, and protection efforts through programs and policies in the United States and globally. As part of this effort, NIH hosted a scientific workshop to identify gaps, opportunities, and challenges in advancing a research agenda to better understand the clinical, health, and developmental impacts of online harassment and abuse and develop innovative prevention and intervention efforts.

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Key Highlights From the Workshop

Landscape Analysis Summary for the NIH Online Harassment Research Portfolio

The 2023 NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Festival was held on Tuesday, December 5, 2023, from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm ET. To access a recording and materials from this festival, please click here.

In this talk Professor Williamson will provide an introduction to Evidential Pluralism, a new approach to causal inference that has emerged from recent philosophical research on mechanisms in science. According to Evidential Pluralism, in order to establish that A is a cause of B one needs to establish both that A is correlated with B (conditional on potential confounders) and that there is a mechanism from A to B that can account for that correlation; so, in order to assess whether A is a cause of B one needs to scrutinise mechanistic studies alongside studies that measure the extent to which A and B are correlated. Evidential Pluralism motivates a new approach to evidence-based medicine, called EBM+, and a new approach to evidence-based policy assessment, EBP+. It also provides a general framework for integrating quantitative and qualitative evidence, and for integrating social and biomedical mechanisms in the health sciences. Dr. Williamson will discuss some of these developments and show how Evidential Pluralism can explain the role and limits of specific methods for causal enquiry such as randomised controlled trials, graphical causal modelling and theory-based evaluation.

NIH Videocast: https://videocast.nih.gov/watch=52416

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1616288038?pwd=NjNscVU3UGZTUStxZ2FZb2F4YlplUT09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

OBSSR and the Adherence Research Network at NIH are hosting a series of workshops titled An Action Agenda: Promoting the Science and Practice of Health Behavior Maintenance. The goal of this workshop series is to develop a more complete understanding of health behavior maintenance to promote and sustain health outcomes. Workshop 3 aims to share the state of the science for interventions to promote behavior maintenance across behaviors, disease contexts, and populations, emphasizing innovative approaches to support and understand maintenance behaviors and processes in the context of intervention research. Particular attention will be given to addressing health equity and disparities in intervention development. The first half of Workshop 3 will highlight example interventions for promoting behavior maintenance. While the focus of this workshop is person-based interventions to promote behavior maintenance, examples also will explore the relative effects of multilevel interventions. The second half of the workshop will include a panel discussion highlighting gaps and opportunities to advance understanding of behavior maintenance in behavioral interventions.

OBSSR and the Adherence Research Network at NIH are hosting a series of workshops titled An Action Agenda: Promoting the Science and Practice of Health Behavior Maintenance. The goal of this workshop series is to develop a more complete understanding of health behavior maintenance to promote and sustain health outcomes. Workshop 2 will describe the state of the science regarding the criteria and tools that are used to conceptualize and assess behavioral maintenance behaviors across disease contexts and populations. The first half of Workshop 2 will focus on how behavior maintenance is defined across various exemplar behaviors, including how changes in patterns of behavior are conceptualized and the criteria used to identify whether someone has reached maintenance and whether someone has or has not successfully sustained maintenance. Presentations will be followed by a discussion of synergies, points of potential disconnect, and commonalities across behaviors. The second half of the workshop will highlight innovative tools and methodologies that have been developed and tested to measure and monitor behavior maintenance in daily life and across contexts.

Health equity has become a hot topic over the past few years. The COVID-19 pandemic made salient just how separate and unequal the United States remains in modern life, and the consequences of that inequality for the health and wellbeing of individuals and broader collectives. In response, scientists, policymakers, and the broader public renewed their interest in (or became interested in the first time) what can be done to address these issues and improve health equity in our society. Although broad interest in health equity is relatively new, research on this topic is extensive—social scientists have been studying it for decades. In this talk, I will discuss what we have learned (and what we still need to learn), the implications of that knowledge and how it is generated, and why the pursuit of health equity is important for advancing theories across the sciences, which has practical benefits for broader society.

Location: https://nih.zoomgov.com/j/1612552260?pwd=WkwvQkZaengxVUFOL3A5dTVHWHBDdz09

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

On June 14 and 15, 2023, OBSSR and collaborating NIH ICOs will host a virtual workshop, Advancing the science of aggression across species and disciplines. The workshop will be available for live public viewing on the NIH Videocast. Goals of the workshop include bringing together both animal and human aggression researchers from various backgrounds to facilitate dialogue across disciplines, individual and interpersonal levels of analysis, lifespan, and disorders/diseases; identifying barriers and potential solutions to move research on basic mechanisms of aggression and health to inform intervention development as well as identify opportunities for more use-inspired basic research; and identifying research gaps and opportunities in the science of aggression and health in the service of advancing progress in prevention, assessment, and treatment.

Registration is not required. This virtual workshop will be live streamed through NIH Videocast. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions through the live videocast.

On June 14 and 15, 2023, OBSSR and collaborating NIH ICOs will host a virtual workshop, Advancing the science of aggression across species and disciplines. The workshop will be available for live public viewing on the NIH Videocast. Goals of the workshop include bringing together both animal and human aggression researchers from various backgrounds to facilitate dialogue across disciplines, individual and interpersonal levels of analysis, lifespan, and disorders/diseases; identifying barriers and potential solutions to move research on basic mechanisms of aggression and health to inform intervention development as well as identify opportunities for more use-inspired basic research; and identifying research gaps and opportunities in the science of aggression and health in the service of advancing progress in prevention, assessment, and treatment.

Registration is not required. This virtual workshop will be live streamed through NIH Videocast. Participants will have the opportunity to ask questions through the live videocast.

The United States had more mass shootings than days of the year in 2022, and firearm injury has overtaken car crashes as the leading cause of death for American children. Meanwhile, our youth — particularly young women and sexual- and gender-minority youth — are reporting unprecedented rates of depression and suicidal thoughts. In this talk, Dr. Ranney will present work that illuminates the current state of knowledge on physical, digital, and firearm violence and co-occurring disorders (such as depressive symptoms and substance use disorder). She will discuss novel approaches, drawn from her and others’ work, to studying, preventing, and treating these interdependent crises across the social-ecological model. Attendees will leave with clarity on what we know, what we don’t know, and where we need to move faster.

This half-day event featured a keynote address from the 2023 Distinguished Lecturer, Jennifer J. Manly, Ph.D., and highlighted innovative behavioral and social sciences research findings from four Early-stage Investigator (ESI) Honorees.

The NIH Behavioral and Social Sciences Research Coordinating Committee (BSSR-CC) was established to enhance information exchange, communication, integration, and coordination of behavioral and social sciences research/training activities at the NIH. The BSSR-CC alternates between closed and open meetings each month. In Open BSSR-CC sessions, the public, including representatives of professional organizations, are welcome to attend, and the content of meetings is restricted to those topics appropriate for public awareness or discussion.

The purpose of this session is to honor the work that has been done toward health equity and to move beyond reproductive health and rights to reproductive justice. Participants will vision about the blueprint for reproductive justice and focus attention on what we should be working toward.