Darcey Merritt
Assistant Professor of Social Work
Curriculum Vitae
MSW, PhD
darcey.merritt@nyu.edu | (212) 998-9186
bio
Darcey Merritt is an assistant professor at the NYU Silver School of Social Work. She has extensive experience as a practitioner in the private and public child welfare systems, specializing in child and family assessments for appropriate foster and adoptive placements. Dr. Merritt received a BA degree from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, with a concentration in psychology and sociology. She received both her MSW (2003) and PhD (2006) in social welfare from the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Public Affairs Department of Social Welfare. Her dissertation was awarded an honorable mention for the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the Society for Social Work Research in 2007.
Dr. Merritt's research interests include evaluating the public child welfare systems, correlates of child maltreatment, challenges to parenting and the strength of relationships between children and their caregivers, characteristics of abusive and neglectful parents, the neighborhood structural impact on parenting, family violence, poverty and educational attainment, social policy analysis, economic sustainability of vulnerable populations, and racially coded messages in the media regarding poor and abusive parents. Dr. Merritt has published work in Child Maltreatment, Children and Youth Services Review, and the Journal of Social Services Research. Her published work primarily focuses on children’s preferences and expectations for permanency, while living in temporary care and the relationship between parental potential to abuse and child abuse rates in communities.
Dr. Merritt has experience teaching the History of Social Welfare Policy, Social Policy Analysis, Research Methods, Family Violence, Grant Writing, as well as workshops on cluster and factor analyses and hierarchical linear modeling. She has previously served on the faculty of Rutgers University, School of Social Welfare between 2006 and 2010, where she taught Social Welfare Policy Analysis and Violence and Abuse in Adulthood. She joined the faculty of the Silver School of Social Work in 2010 where she teaches Social Welfare Programs and Policies. Maintaining a commitment to community development and revitalization, while in New Jersey she served as a member of the Board of Directors of Essex County Urban League in Newark, NJ. Additionally, she has certifications in domestic violence training and adoption clinical training.
Selected Publications
Postmus, J. and Merritt, D.H. (2010).When Child Abuse Overlaps with Domestic Violence: The Factors that Influence Child Protection Workers’ Beliefs. Children andYouth Services Review,Vol.32, No.3, 309-317.
Merritt, D.H.and Franke, T.M. (2010). Should I Stay or Should I Go? Children’s Placement Preferences: Longitudinally. Journal of Social Service Research, Vol.36, No.1, 46-67.
Merritt, D. H. (2009).Child Abuse Potential: Correlates with Child Maltreatment Rates and Structural Measures of Neighborhoods. Children and Youth Services Review, Vol.31, No.8, 927-934.
Merritt, D.H. (2008). Placement Preferences among Children Living in Foster or Kinship Care: A Cluster Analysis. Children and Youth Services Review, Vol.30, 1336-1344.
Freisthler, B., Merritt, D.H. & LaScala, E. (2006). Understanding the
Ecology of Child Maltreatment: A Review of the Literature and Directions for
Future Research. Child Maltreatment, Vol. 11, No. 3, 263-280.
