HUNG-PENG LIN

Hung-Peng Lin is a first-generation doctoral student at the School of Social Work, University of Washington, Seattle. His research, grounded in his practice experience, examines the intersection of adverse childhood experiences, child welfare system involvement, intra-generational health disparities, and prevention.

With a concentration in statistics from the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences (CSSS), his mixed-methods doctoral dissertation investigates patterns of living arrangements in informal kinship placements, the service utilization-delivery gap of kinship navigator programs (KNP) from the lived expert perspectives of informal kinship caregivers and KNP navigators, and the causal effect of KNP service utilization on the well-being of informal kinship caregivers, with a focus on the mediating effect of natural peer support. His dissertation employs thematic analysis, multilevel latent class analysis, and causal inference using the Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) approach. The data were collected through a community-engaged research approach (CEnR) in collaboration with Washington State Aging and Long-Term Services Administration (ALTSA), the Department of Children, Youth & Families (DCYF), and Dr. Angelique Day’s research team.

In addition to his dissertation project, Hung-Peng has analyzed large-scale datasets, such as Add Health and the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, to explore life-course health disparities in young adults with ACEs. He has also participated in P4C research projects advocating for racially, ethnically, and culturally relevant pre-service and in-service training materials for resource parents, as well as timely, accessible, and trauma-informed parenting materials for them.