Gabriel “Joey” Merrin is a doctoral student in Child Development at the University of Illinois Urbana—Champaign, Department of Educational Psychology. As a graduate student he has worked as a both teaching and research assistant while creating a program of research that seeks to understand the development of youth from early through late adolescence. As a teaching assistant, he has taught several courses including cultural diversity, research methods, and introductory statistics. In recognition of his teaching, he was recently awarded the University of Illinois, College of Education 2015-2016 Outstanding Teaching Award for Teaching Assistants, and has made the list of Teacher’s Ranked as Excellent for six consecutive semesters.

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As a research assistant, he has worked on several research projects in all aspects of the research process, from project conception to published manuscript. Currently a graduate assistant at the Bureau of Educational Research, he is working with a team to develop an online system that matches school based research projects with local schools. Moreover, as a part of his professional work, Gabriel has conducted several bullying prevention and gang trainings at schools and organizations throughout the state of Illinois. This includes supporting a local school’s effort to build a restorative justice system as an alternative approach to current punitive strategies, in an effort to reduce suspension rates. Furthermore, Gabriel is also committed to supporting and encouraging youth in his local community through his ongoing work with youth at the local juvenile detention center and local schools.

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Gabriel has three primary research interests that include (1) aggression, victimization, and violence in the school context; (2) the development of delinquency and substance use during adolescence; and (3) longitudinal quantitative methods. His work centers around the use of various social ecological correlates to examine the differential processes involved in the development and stability of antisocial behaviors. Using the same ecological approach, he also seeks to understand the psychosocial outcomes of individuals who experience multiple forms of victimization during adolescence, particularly in a school context. His past work has examined social ecological correlates of youth gang involvement, school safety, fighting, crime, and substance use. For example, a recently published study examined several social ecological factors and found family and peer domains to be particularly strong predictors of gang membership (see Merrin et. al., 2015). This study used a novel approach to examine the youth gang phenomena by also considering youth who resisted pressure to join a gang.

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As the past recipient of multiple fellowships from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology to attend advanced training in statistics, Gabriel is also interested in the application and development of longitudinal quantitative methods. As such, his current work utilizes novel and innovative methods to answer questions related to adolescent development. Using longitudinal multilevel modeling techniques, he is interested in examining the nested nature of data, which is inherent in much of human subjects research. As an example, a recent study that examined the longitudinal reciprocal associations among substance use, crime, and environmental risk used a novel longitudinal multilevel structural equation model, that partitions variance at both the within- and between-person levels of analysis (see Merrin, et. al., 2016). Using this developmentally appropriate method, this study uncovered new findings related to the association between substance use and increased crime. Contrary to the current literature that has found reciprocal relationships between substance use and crime, at the within-person level, we found no evidence of this relationship, rather the relationship between substance use to increased rates of criminal activity functioned through environmental risk. These findings have important implications for prevention and intervention efforts.

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Some of Gabriel’s current work includes a study that uses an accelerated longitudinal design to examine multilevel relations among parenting and peer ecologies with the development of delinquency from middle through the end high school. This study seeks to examine the buffering role of parental monitoring on the association between peer deviance and the development of delinquency. Additionally, his current dissertation work combines and extends much of his previous work by examining the longitudinal reciprocal relationships among delinquency, peer deviance, neighborhood violence, and parental monitoring during adolescences on a normative and at-risk sample. This study seeks to examine the mediating role of parental monitoring on the associations between peer deviance and neighborhood violence on increases in delinquency during the transition from middle to high school. Gabriel has also presented much of the research described above at conferences including, AERA, APA, SRCD, SRA, SPR, and ASC.

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Gabriel’s career goal is to become a professor and continue his research with the goal of influencing the development of intervention and prevention efforts. His ultimate objective is to help the lives of underprivileged youth who do not have the same opportunities to achieve success through education.

In Gabriel’s free time, he enjoys cooking, traveling, and using the latest technologies. To contact Gabriel “Joey” Merrin please email merrin1@illinois.edu.

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Selected Publications

Merrin, G. J., Davis, J. P., Berry, D., D’Amico, E. J., & Dumas, T. M. (2016). The longitudinal associations between substance use, criminal behavior, and social risk among emerging adults: A longitudinal within and between-person latent variables analysis. Drug and Alcohol Dependence.

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Merrin, G. J., Hong., J. S., & Espelage, D. L. (2015). Are the risk and protective factors similar for gang-involved, pressured-to-join, and non-gang involved youth? A social-ecological analysis. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 85(6), 522-535.

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Davis, J. P., Merrin, G. J., Berry, D. J., Dumas, T. M., Hong, J. S., & Smith, D. C. (2016). Examining within-person and between-person effects of victimization and social risk on cannabis use among emerging adults in substance-use treatment. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 30(1), 52.

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Hong, J. S., Merrin, G. J., Crosby, S., Hernandez-Jozefowicz, D., Lee, J., & Allen-Meares, P. (2015). Individual and contextual factors associated with immigrant youth’s feeling unsafe in school: A social-ecological analysis. Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health, 1-11.

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Hong, J. S., Merrin, G. J., Peguero, A. A., Gonzalez-Prendes, A. A., & Lee, N. Y. (2015). Exploring the social-ecological determinants of physical fighting in U.S. schools: What about youth in immigrant families? Child and Youth Care Forum, 45(2) 279-99.