Dear Colleagues:
Rick Kosterman, PhD, who served as principal investigator for multiple studies at the Social Development Research Group, retired in February 2022. After finishing a doctorate in political psychology at UCLA, Rick worked on some high-profile political campaigns before joining SDRG in 1993. Rick vividly remembers the day: “After the campaigns, I’d decided to return to academia. I was in Red Square on the University of Washington campus when I picked up a copy of the UW Daily and found a job posting in the classifieds section for a research analyst. I was interviewed by David [SDRG co-founder J. David Hawkins, PhD] and was offered a temporary position. Several months later, David and Rico [SDRG co-founder Richard F. Catalano, Jr., PhD] offered me a permanent position.”
Rick’s early work was on the Seattle Social Development Project (SSDP), which began as a longitudinal test of an intervention for reducing childhood risk factors among elementary school students in eight Seattle public schools. In those years, SSDP’s focus was on preventing school failure, substance misuse, and delinquency. Late in the 1990s and the early years of this century, as the students in the sample grew older, the focus expanded to young adulthood and incorporated mental health outcomes, including depression and anxiety. It was a heady time, with a tremendous opportunity for learning across a wide range of disciplines. When the study’s participants moved into their 30s, the focus expanded again, this time incorporating physical health and the built environment, with a new set of learning experiences, leading to where SSDP stands today. All the while, the study continued to examine long-term effects of the early intervention, with Rick as lead analyst collaborating closely with Hawkins. Findings showed that the childhood intervention was associated with significantly better overall adult health and success through the 30s, decades after the intervention ended. SSDP is one of very few intervention studies to demonstrate these kinds of long-term results.
Rick’s favorite memories and proud accomplishments include:
- Getting new funding for the SSDP study to add measures of neighborhood built environments and to model and test their role in the mental and physical health of people in their 30s.
- Being the lead analysist on multiple tests of the social development intervention and examining its effectiveness over time (with Hawkins), bolstering the promise of childhood interventions for long-term beneficial effects, even into the 30s.
- Helping (with Catalano) to reconfigure the graphic representation of the Social Development Model—which is the unifying theory behind SDRG’s work—to better display key concepts and pathways.
- Complementing SDRG’s work on preventing problem behaviors by seeking to understand positive (prosocial) outcomes as more than the absence of problems, leading to published papers on positive adult functioning (e.g., civic engagement, healthy relationships).
- Traveling with the Project Family team and testing the Guiding Good Choices intervention in rural communities in Iowa.
- Being so indelibly linked to SDRG’s body of work with over 90 SDRG publications, and reaching 100 publications in all as an author.
Rick was as much a part of SDRG’s day-to-day life as its work. He devoted lengthy service as chair of SDRG’s Executive Committee and is known for his work on the Healthy Organization Committee, which promotes social interaction across teams and seeks to bring the concepts of the Social Development Model to life throughout SDRG. He was also the force behind SDRG’s softball team, Banal Fowl, which participated in the Ballard Co-rec City League for more than 15 years.
Nearly 30 years after that fateful day in Red Square, Kosterman is now mostly retired. He plans to devote a small portion of his time to the Midlife Project (the latest iteration of SSDP), but much of his remaining time will be spent on long-distance cycling and enjoying friendships, with trips to Amsterdam to visit his nephew Brett, Brett’s partner Linda, and their daughter Neve. He hopes to also get involved with political campaigns again. Whatever he chooses to do, we sincerely wish him the greatest possible joy and fulfillment in his retirement.
Margaret R. Kuklinski, Ph.D.
Director, Social Development Research Group
School of Social Work
University of Washington
