Academic publisher Elsevier has appointed NYU Silver Associate Professor Darcey Merritt as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Children and Youth Services Review (CYSR), the major research journal in child welfare, effective February 9, 2021. A CYSR Associate Editor since January 1, 2018, in her new position, Dr. Merritt and her co-editors Elizabeth Fernandez (University of New South Wales, Sydney, School of Social Sciences), Michelle Johnson-Motoyama (Ohio State University, College of Social Work), and Aron Shlonsky (Monash University, School of Primary and Allied Health Care), will revise the journal’s mission and visioning and will manage Associate Editor manuscript review assignments; editorial board oversight; strategic initiatives; special issues; continuous quality improvement; communication recruitment; conference presentations; and author related issues.
Dr. Merritt and her co-editors succeed CYSR’s founding editor, Dr. Duncan Lindsey, who has been a mentor to Dr. Merritt ever since she earned her MSW and PhD at UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where he has long been on the faculty. The new editors are committed to building on the high impact and standards Dr. Lindsey established during his more than 40 year tenure at the journal. Already, under the new editorial leadership, the journal has incorporated a justice statement, which reads “Submissions that acknowledge and engage with issues of racial equity and social justice in research design, intervention design, service delivery and outcomes are strongly encouraged.”
Dr. Merritt is internationally recognized for her expertise in child welfare. Her research interests include child maltreatment prevention; maltreatment type definitional issues; neighborhood structural impact on maltreatment; and the lived experiences of those served by public child welfare systems, particularly Black and Latinx families. Her recent work exposes the racism that pervades the child welfare system, elevates the voices of children and parents affected by it, and elicits the parental decision-making processes that result in behaviors typically deemed by child welfare service providers as neglectful in order to inform effective prevention.
In addition to her co-editorship of CYSR, Dr. Merritt is a member of the editorial board of Child Maltreatment and Associate Editor of the International Journal of Social Welfare. Other journals in which her work has been published include The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Journal of Child and Family Studies, Journal of Public Child Welfare, Child Abuse and Neglect, Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Substance Use and Misuse, Race and Social Problems, and Journal of Social Services Research. She is a member of the Board of Directors of both the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR) and the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA). She serves on the Child Maltreatment Prevention Committee of the American Professional Society on the Abuse of Children (APSAC), and was lead author of the chapter on “Effective Program Models for the Prevention of Child Maltreatment” in the APSAC Handbook on Child Maltreatment, Fourth Edition.
Established in 1978, CYSR provides an international and interdisciplinary forum for rigorous scholarship relevant to policies, interventions, programs and services intended to improve the well-being of children and youth. It invites original scholarly works including empirical research, methodological developments, theoretical perspectives, and practice and policy assessments related to services that address individual and societal factors that negatively affect the welfare of children, youth, and young adults ages 0 to 25 and their families. The journal has a particular focus on disadvantaged or otherwise vulnerable children and young people and the systems designed to support them.