About
Shabnam Javdani is an associate professor of applied psychology at NYU Steinhardt, within the Institute of Human Development and Social Change. She is a clinical and community psychologist whose scholarship focuses on examining and intervening in health and mental health disparities created by persistent inequality. Javdani completed her doctoral work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2012 and completed an APA-approved clinical internship at the Institute for Juvenile Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago prior to her current position. She is the founding Director and Principal Investigator of the RISE Research Team and serves as the Faculty Director of the NYU Prison Education Program. Her research aims to understand and reduce the development of inequality-related mental health and legal problems, studying community and institutional responses to these complex challenges. Javdani's work explores pathways to violence and disruptive behavior among adults and adolescents, with a focus on gender-sensitive models and the influence of trauma, school discipline, and neighborhood resources. She also investigates systemic responses, including juvenile and criminal legal systems, and develops interventions targeting at-risk youth, such as NYC ROSES and SAFE Spaces. Her program of research emphasizes social justice, applying diverse methodological approaches to address issues affecting urban and under-resourced communities.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Psychology
- Social psychology
- Clinical psychology
- Gender studies
- Computer Science
- Psychiatry
- Developmental psychology
- Criminology
- Demography
- Medical emergency
- Medicine
- Public relations
Selected publications
Partner Abuse · 2025-09-22
articleExploring the needs of girls of color in the juvenile legal system: A latent class analysis
American Journal of Community Psychology · 2024-02-08 · 1 citations
articleOpen accessGirls of color are overrepresented in the juvenile legal system and experience high levels of unmet needs. Assessing and meeting girls' needs may prevent system contact or deeper involvement by providing for these needs in community-based settings, rather than through juvenile legal systems. This study used a structured interview-based assessment adapted from an advocacy intervention to examine girls' self-identified needs and perceived effectiveness and difficulty of accessing resources for these needs. Descriptive analyses found that girls reported needing resources beyond those typically assessed and supported in existing programming, such as technology, extracurriculars, and employment. Latent class analysis revealed four subgroups of girls with distinct but overlapping areas of needs: (1) High Employment, Current School, and Logistical Needs, (2) Low Overall Needs, (3) High Employment Needs, and (4) High Employment, Current School, and Social/Emotional Needs. Girls also reported wide variation in their ability and difficulty accessing needed resources, with employment being most difficult to access and school and social/emotional resources being the easiest to access. These findings suggest that more comprehensive and individualized approaches to programming and community services for system-impacted girls of color are essential.
Persistent Paternalism: The Instantiation of Gendered Attributions in the System Response to Girls
Criminal Justice and Behavior · 2023-02-07 · 9 citations
articleOpen accessPrior research suggests that the juvenile legal system does too little to address the sources and underlying reasons for girls' court referrals. Drawing on attribution theories, the current study examined perspectives that characterize the response of the system to girls' behaviors. Data from this study were derived from a multimethod, qualitative study on system-involved girls. We find that court actors hold gendered attributions of girls' delinquency, in turn informing their decision-making about how to treat and sanction girls. Paternalism remains a persistent feature in how the system locates, defines, and responds to girls through varying gendered attributions. The findings lend further support to attribution perspectives that suggest implicit gender-biases influence court actor decision-making, exacerbating the challenges girls face in and out of the juvenile legal system. By extension, this study offers concrete policy and practice implications for systems change and improving its response to girls.
Mixed methods in community psychology: A values‐forward synthesis
American Journal of Community Psychology · 2023-10-03 · 3 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingMixed methods research (MMR) combines multiple traditions, methods, and worldviews to enrich research design and interpretation of data. In this virtual special issue, we highlight the use of MMR within the field of community psychology. The first MMR studies appeared in flagship community psychology journals over 30 years ago (in 1991). To explore the uses of MMR in the field, we first review existing literature by identifying all papers appearing in either Journal of Community Psychology or American Journal of Community Psychology in which the word "mixed" appeared. A total of 88 publications were identified. Many of these papers illustrate the pragmatic use of MMR to evaluate programs and to answer different research questions using different methods. We coded articles based on Green et al.'s classifications of the purpose of the mixing: triangulation, development, complementarity, expansion, and initiation. Complementarity was the most frequently used purpose (46.6% of articles), and nearly a quarter of articles mixed for multiple purposes (23.86%). We also coded for any community psychology values advanced by the use of mixed methods. We outline three themes here with corresponding exemplars. These articles illustrate how MMR can highlight ecological analysis and reconsider dominant, individual-level paradigms; center participant and community member experiences; and unpack paradoxes to increase the usefulness of research findings.
Psychology Public Policy and Law · 2023-12-21
articleOpen accessCurrent criminology and corrections research is limited in its ability to fully conceptualize and analyze inequities in the legal systems' response to young people, particularly those with multiple marginalized identities. This article presents a novel methodological framework-the Critical Case File (CCF) approach-to advance methodological innovations in criminal and juvenile legal system research. Specifically, the CCF approach leverages the rich multisystem information available within case file data and analyzes it through a critical lens to examine (a) the structural factors (e.g., economic and housing precarity) undergirding legal system contact and (b) how the legal system responds to these structural factors to perpetuate the well-documented disparities that exist across the legal continuum. In this article, we present the CCF approach, which systematizes best practices for capturing the breadth of information available within case files. We first propose a six-step methodological process to describe how information from legal system-impacted people's case files can be extracted, analyzed, and disseminated with an equity-oriented lens. We then exemplify how the CCF approach differentiates from other methods typically used in social science and criminology research. Practice and policy implications are presented to demonstrate the ways that the CCF approach can leverage case file data to generate novel, meaningful, and data-driven solutions that illuminate structural factors that may drive and exacerbate legal system contact and delineate the potential of research-practice-policy partnerships to reduce structural disparities.
Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-05-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingResearch has established critical consciousness (CC) as an important developmental competency, yet less is known about how to promote it, particularly for privileged youth. Service-learning experiences hold promise as context of CC development, but more research is needed to understand if they foster CC, for whom, and under what circumstances. This study examines the development of CC within what we term a critical service learning experience: the Resilience, Opportunity, Safety, Education, and Strength (ROSES) advocacy program. We connect specific features of this experience to expected growth in CC components among a group of educationally privileged university students serving as advocates for juvenile legal system-impacted girls. We delineate how engagement with ROSES is likely to influence critical consciousness among advocates themselves, then leverage exploratory data from advocates to empirically examine changes in CC over the course of ROSES. We examine changes in advocates’ interpersonal skills, critical reflection, critical motivation, and critical action as a result of participation in ROSES. We discuss patterns in these findings and examine how key characteristics of advocacy intervention implementation influenced skill development. We end by theorizing further on mechanisms of change in CC due to ROSES program participation and other service learning experiences.
Profiles of Risk for Self-injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Among System-Impacted Girls of Color
Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry · 2023-06-24 · 4 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorAmerican Journal of Community Psychology · 2023-04-05 · 11 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorCorrespondingScholarship on girlhood-especially for girls of Color-is often relegated to studying risk and emphasizing individual deficits over humanizing girls and centering their voices. This approach to generating scholarship renders oppressive systems and processes invisible from inquiry and unaddressed by practice, with particularly insidious consequences for youth in the legal system. Critical youth participatory action research (YPAR) is acknowledged as an antidote to these conceptualizations because it resists deficit-oriented narratives circling systems-impacted youth by inviting them to the knowledge-generating table. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of the promises and perils that emerged as we conducted a year-long critical YPAR project alongside five system-impacted girls of Color. Our thematic analysis of process notes (30 meetings, 120 h) documents the stories posited by girls, in a democratized space, about the injustices of interconnected institutions, and unearths a complicated tension for both youth and adult coresearchers around the promises and perils of engaging in YPAR within the academy. These findings underscore the importance of using intersectional, collaborative research to challenge perceptions around how we legitimize knowledge. We describe lessons learned in conducting YPAR in academic settings and highlight recommendations to grow youth-adult partnerships within oppressive systems to share power.
2023-01-01
book-chapterSenior authorJournal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology · 2023 · 12 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Psychology
- Criminology
OBJECTIVE: Toward the overall goal of interrogating systems that contribute to racial inequity in child and adolescent psychology, we examine the role and function of Residential Treatment Centers (RTCs) in creating or exacerbating race and gender inequities using the language of mental health and the logic that treatment intentions justify children's confinement. METHODS: = 318, 95% Black, Latine, Indigenous youth, mean age = 14, range = 8-16). RESULTS: Across studies, we find evidence for a potential treatment-to-prison pipeline through which youth in RTCs incur new arrests and are charged with crimes during and following treatment. This pattern is pronounced for Black and Latine youth and especially girls, for whom use of physical restraint and boundary violations are recurring challenges. CONCLUSIONS: We argue that the role and function of RTCs via the alliance between mental health and juvenile legal systems, however passive or unintentional, provides a critical exemplar of structural racism; and thus invite a different approach that implicates our field to publicly advocate to end violent policies and practices and recommend actions to address these inequities.
Frequent coauthors
- 36 shared
Rania Mustafa
Arab Academy for Science, Technology, and Maritime Transport
- 23 shared
Nicole E. Allen
- 22 shared
Naomi Sadeh
University of Delaware
- 20 shared
Edelyn Verona
University of South Florida
- 10 shared
Corianna E. Sichel
Chestnut Health Systems
- 9 shared
Erin B. Godfrey
New York University
- 9 shared
Christopher Houck
- 9 shared
Larry K. Brown
Brown University
Labs
RISE LabPI
Education
- 2012
Clinical Internship, Psychiatry
University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine
- 2012
Ph.D., Psychology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
- 2004
B.A., Psychology
University of California Berkeley
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