About the Rommert Casimir Institute

Focus and aims of the research institute of Education and Child Studies.

• Focus
• Teaching
• Research

Focus

The Rommert Casimir Institute emphasizes the educa­tional study of normal and deviant developmental pathways as they vary across and within cultures and ethnic groups. In a culturally diverse environment, developmental psychopathology cannot be fruitfully studied without an explicit cultural perspective.

Main themes

1. Protective and risk factors in the interplay between the child and the environment; 
2. On interventions that might prevent or decrease the susceptibility to develop psychopathology.

Teaching

The Rommert Casimir Institute is embedded in the Leiden Graduate School of Social and Behavioural Sciences, and its principal aims consist of teaching and conducting research. The teaching components are included in the Research Master. Furthermore, extra courses for PhD candidates of the Rommert Casimir Institute are offered.

Research

The research components are selected from the four research programmes of the Institute of Education and Child Studies. The selection is based on several criteria:

• The research projects should be conducted within the domains of family, school (and other institutional socialization settings), or peer groups as they shape normal or deviant development in transaction with the children’s neurobiological propensities (the perspective of developmental psychopathology).
• Research should have direct or indirect relevance for uncovering the cultural dimension of development and learning, that is, they should either address one or more cross-cultural issues, or focus on comparisons of ethnic groups within a society, or facilitate such comparisons in future investigations (the cultural perspective).
• Research in the Rommert Casimir Institute should support parents, caregivers, teachers, and other professionals in their efforts to improve the children’s opportunities to learn and develop in optimal ways (the applied educational perspective). 
  
     

Each of the domains contains ongoing research projects at the Institute of Child and Educational Studies of Leiden University. See for further information the Research Section.