TPS Age-Based Collaboratives &
Cross-cutting Scientific Committees

Healthy Pregnancy Collaborative
Early Childhood Collaborative
Early School-Age Collaborative
Adolescent Collaborative, Middle School
Adolescent Collaborative, High School

Health Services Committee, Community Vitality Collaborative
Healthy Environments Strong Bodies Committee
Healthy & Thriving Schools Collaborative
Policy and Place Committee
Data Accessibility Committee

The Pittsburgh Study develops and tests program interventions at different developmental stages by following children and families in Allegheny County from before birth through high school. We place great emphasis on inclusion, open communication and making sure children and family members are treated with respect by our trained staff. If you’re an Allegheny County parent participating in the research, you and your child will ideally follow a path that begins when your child enrolls and ends when they turn eighteen.

Through research and collaboration, thriving is the a key metric as we co-create program innovations and drive advocacy by sharing data to improve child health equity.

Each stage–pregnancy, early childhood, early school age, middle school, and adolescence–has its own kind of thriving. We focus on positive health outcomes (rather than disease and deficits). We promote health equity, inclusion, and accessibility.

Our cross-cutting committees examine how factors affecting all children and youth influence thriving and they approach their work informed by community goals, priorities, and barriers, and the need to focus on strengths.

Community-partnered research must lead towards action. Together, we can make the world in which we live better, healthier emotionally, socially, physically. This is the driving principle behind scientific data driving political action, outcomes informing institutional practices, and stories and experiences catalyzing change.

Our goal is to remake systems to intentionally work for young people so each of them has the skills and tools to match their wildest hopes and dreams.

The Pittsburgh Study focuses on integration. We collaborate across these different committees. We also make sure that we are integrating what we are learning (including data). The Statistics and Data Core helps us build databases that talk to each other.

We also ask children, youth, and families to participate in sharing updates with us about how they are doing on various thriving metrics over time.  We do this through the Longitudinal THRIVE study. 

THRIVE is a large community-partnered study, designed to follow development of young people as they grow, starting in the womb and progressing all the way through adolescence.  Through surveys about individual experiences, we can identify the neighborhood characteristics, environmental conditions, policies and practices that support families and children in Allegheny County.