Background

Jennifer Dineen, PhD, is an Associate Professor In-Residence in the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut, and a Fellow with the Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy (InCHIP). As a Fellow at InCHIP, Dineen will be spending the next few years focusing on health policy research, more specifically in gun injury prevention. “I’m really invested in how we better understand the attitudes and the behaviors of everyone, but especially people who own firearms, in order to ensure safety for all people,” she says. Dineen is a survey methodologist; her training is focused on measuring attitudes, opinions, and behaviors through surveys and other qualitative methods such as focus groups and interviews. She works in a variety of research areas, mainly focusing on the topic of firearm injury prevention, although she also engages in school-based mental health research.

While pursuing her undergraduate degree in political science at Marist College, Dineen had the opportunity to work in the college survey center and gain experience in data collection. This experience sparked her initial interest in survey methodology and was a major factor in her decision to continue her education. Dineen received both her master’s degree and PhD in political science from UConn, where she was heavily involved in both the UConn Center for Survey Research and Analysis and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research.

Dineen began her work in school settings after her husband, who is a school principal and special education teacher, introduced her to Sandra Chafouleas, Co-Director of CSCH. Chafouleas was coincidentally looking for a survey methodologist for a project for which she was writing a grant. Dineen joined Chafouleas on the project and gained a strong interest in how to better understand how we assess children’s mental health, how schools service children, and what the research tells us about both.

After the incident at Sandy Hook Elementary School, there were a lot of conversations happening regarding the topic of gun safety, especially in schools. This ultimately led Dineen to dig deeper into the relationship between firearm injuries among children in schools. “The more I learned about firearm injury, the more I realized that children were not most at risk while at school, but rather at their home or others due to accidental injury,” she says. After this realization, Dineen shifted her focus to ensuring that we prevent children from accessing firearms.

Dineen has always had a keen interest in the research aspect of her profession. “As a survey methodologist I view surveys, focus groups, interviews, etc. as the equivalent of a lab for social sciences as it still involves collecting data,” she says.

Involvement with CSCH

After Dineen began working with Sandra Chafouleas, she became a founding Steering Committee member of the Collaboratory. Once CSCH was started, she met many other affiliates and quickly gained interest in their work. Dineen appreciates the Collaboratory’s efforts to bring people together from different disciplines and facilitate research that takes a multidisciplinary approach to looking at problems in schools. Her personal work goes hand-in-hand with that of CSCH, as it involves providing children with a safe, healthy, and secure environment and ensuring the safety of all individuals within a home.

You can learn more about Dineen and her work through the UConn ARMS website and UConn InCHIP website.

Fun Facts

Dineen drove a car in the 1993 presidential motorcade for the inauguration of former president Bill Clinton.

Undergraduate Researcher Elena Roberts interviewed Jennifer Dineen and wrote this profile.