Alison Miller
University of Michigan, MI·Public Health & Epidemiology
Firearm injuries have become the leading cause of death among children in the United States, and children under five are hit disproportionately hard by unintentional shootings. Roughly a third of gun deaths in that youngest group are unintentional, compared with under two percent among adults over twenty.
- Fields
Public Health & Epidemiology
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
firearm safety
firearm injury prevention
safe storage
- Grants
- 1 known grant, last ended Sep 2026
What they work on
- Document how parents of children aged 0–5 understand firearm risk and safe storage and where that diverges from expert recommendations, using focus groups, expert interviews and a national survey.
- Refine a theory-informed conceptual model of parent firearm safety practices and identify modifiable factors, applying decision science and behavioral economics concepts.
- Translate the findings into intervention messages and materials addressing early-childhood barriers to safe storage and to communication with other adults around the child.
- Pilot a parent-empowerment intervention delivered by trained parent peer messengers, evaluating message receptivity and process and outcome measures with a case-control design.
More about the research
This project argues that prevention efforts miss the mark for three reasons: parents' own mental models of firearm risk often diverge from what experts recommend, the early-childhood period brings its own barriers to safe storage, and families need messages tailored to their situation and delivered by someone they trust.
Why it matters
Unsafe storage drives most firearm deaths among children under five, yet little is known about how to persuade parents of very young children to store guns safely. This work could supply tested messages and a peer-delivered model that community organizations and clinicians use to encourage safe storage and family conversations, potentially reducing unintentional shootings in early childhood.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Bindi Naik-Mathuria
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Public Health & Epidemiology
Develop a youth-informed video series on conflict resolution, avoiding retaliation, and safe social media posting, co-created by youth ambassadors, violence interrupters and content experts in Houston and Memphis, and refined through community feedback.
Lauren Magee
Indiana University-Purdue University-Indianapolis, IN·Public Health & Epidemiology
Build trauma networks of everyone present at a shooting (victims and witnesses in police records) plus family members of firearm injury victims identified through Medicaid, using individually linked healthcare and police records from 2016–2022.
Nicholas Thomson
Virginia Commonwealth University, VA·Psychology
Test whether Elevate VR, a brief hospital-based virtual reality program teaching de-escalation, emotion regulation and gun safety, reduces firearm violence, re-injury and death in a randomized controlled trial of 360 violently injured youth and their caregivers.
The school
University of Michigan: 124 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 963 research doctorates a year.
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