Dr. McMillen leads a number of efforts to identify effective strategies to de-escalate upset people. Dr. McMillen, along with with Ph.D. alumna Jill Spielfogel and AM alumna Sav Felix, compiled menus of de-escalation strategies from the peer-reviewed literature and surveyed practitioners across several field (human services, criminal justice, retail). He has developed a set of digitized audio vignettes designed to elicit emotional response and is testing communications that can de-escalate these responses. He is especially interested in the potential of pairing validation communications and other communications such as invitations to problem solve and limit setting. Along with Dr. Andrea Doyle of West Viginia University Medical School, he recently reviewed the literature on clinical validation and proposed a number of mechanisms on how it may work.
Dr. McMillen is leading efforts to educate the social service sector on how to how to better monitor for and improve service quality.
Dr. McMillen has led four studies on performance management in U.S. child and family service agencies, including a nationally representative study of performance management professionals in these agencies. With Dr. Nathaniel Israel of Chapin Hall, he studied how child and family services agencies mature their performance measurement systems. With Dr. Israel, he recently published a paper on the different frameworks agencies can use to choose performance metrics.
Dr. McMillen has created a curriculum for foster youth and their caregivers called Handling Intense Emotions. It is a blended intervention that combines in-person facilitation with a digitzed curriculum. It educates youth and caregivers about the realities of intense emotions, why people have them, and how intense emotion episodes start and stop. And, it teaches young people and their caregivers a bunch of things to try to better handle intense emotions. The curriculum is being piloted at Lawrence Hall Youth Services in Chicago.
