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Department of Psychology College of Arts and Sciences

David C. Schwebel

David C. Schwebel.

University Professor
Associate Vice President for Research Facilities and InfrastructureThis email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
AB 720A
(205) 934-8745

Research Interests: Understanding and preventing unintentional injuries in children, adolescents, and young adults

Office Hours: By appointment

Education:

  • B.A., Yale University, Psychology
  • M.A., University of Iowa, Clinical Psychology
  • Ph.D., University of Iowa, Clinical Psychology
  • Internship, University of Washington School of Medicine, Clinical Psychology

David C. Schwebel has published over 400 peer-reviewed manuscripts, most focusing on understanding and preventing unintentional injury in children, adolescents, and young adults. Specific risk factors of interest include temperament and personality, overestimation of physical ability and cognitive development, and adult supervision of children.

From a prevention perspective, Dr. Schwebel has developed and implemented injury prevention techniques for a range of situations, including pedestrian safety training in virtual reality environments, remote car seat installation using interactive virtual presence, drowning prevention through lifeguard training at public swimming pools, dog bite prevention in rural China and in the United States, and kerosene safety in low-income South Africa neighborhoods.

Dr. Schwebel is a Woodrow Wilson Scholar, a Fulbright Award winner, and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. His research has been funded by NIH, CDC, DOT, and several other federal, non-profit and industry groups.

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UAB Youth Safety Lab

Dr. Schwebel is the director of the UAB Youth Safety Lab, a research lab dedicated to youth safety, conducting research using a wide range of experimental strategies. The UAB Youth Safety Lab conducts various studies designed to understand and prevent injuries to children, adolescents, and young adults.

Families interested in participating in research may contact the lab at (205) 934-4068 or This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

 

  • Research Interests

    What many people call an accident is usually not accidental. If people had behaved differently, that accident may have been averted. Early research in the UAB Youth Safety Lab, which I direct, focused on understanding psychological and behavioral factors that place children, adolescents and young adults at increased risk for unintentional injuries. We considered cognitive development, temperament, adult supervision, and many other factors.

    Over time, my desire to apply our research findings to help children and families led me to translate our findings about risk for child injury into intervention and prevention programs. Currently, much of my research is focused on development, evaluation, and implementation of programs to reduce youth injury risk. Many of these prevention programs are based in technology — examples include using virtual reality to teach children to cross streets, multi-media internet training to improve teacher supervision at preschool playgrounds, and use of interactive augmented reality to help parents install car seats correctly. Other work is global — identifying ways to reduce kerosene poisoning in low-income South African communities, reducing risk of dog bites in rural China and pedestrian injury in urban China, and reducing suicide risk among young women in rural Iran. All of our research is closely grounded in psychological theory of child development, health-related behavior change, and ecological context. Our work is also applied, designed to improve public health through changes in how children and the adults who supervise them behave and think, or changes to the environment children and their supervisors engage within.

    Our laboratory’s ultimate goal is to use psychological science to understand risk for injury and then develop, evaluate, and disseminate effective programs to reduce injuries to children, adolescents, and young adults.

  • Graduate Students
    • Yixin Wang (current)
    • Casie Morgan, 2024
    • Jenni Rouse, 2022
    • Marissa Swanson, 2022
    • Jiabin Shen, 2015
    • Aaron L. Davis Fobian, 2012
    • Margaux Barnes, 2011
    • Katherine W. Byington, 2011
    • Despina Stavrinos, 2009 (co-chair)
    • Joanna Gaines, 2008 (MA thesis)
    • Elizabeth Bragg Bowling Lee, 2006
    • Benjamin K. Barton, 2005
  • Select Publications
    • Morgan, C. H., & Schwebel, D. C. (2024). Superhero pretense, superhero identification, and risk-taking in preschool-aged children. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 49, 234-243.
    • Schwebel, D. C. (2024). Ten tips to make difficult conversations easier. Dean & Provost, 25(7), 8.
    • Schwebel, D. C., Johnston, A., McDaniel, D., Severson, J., He, Y., & McClure, L. A. (2024). Teaching children pedestrian safety in virtual reality via smartphone: A non-inferiority randomized clinical trial. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 49, 405-412.
    • McCart, M., Glang, A., Kelley, K., Perez, A., Minor, D., Hitchcock, J. W., Miles, L., & Schwebel, D. C. (2023). Pilot evaluation of a virtual training program for child injury prevention. Health Education Research, 38, 268-275.
    • Morgan, C. H., Stager, L. M., Schwebel, D. C., & Shen, J. (2023). A systematic review and meta-analysis on the efficacy of virtual reality pedestrian interventions to teach children how to cross streets safely. Journal of Pediatric Psychology, 48, 1003-1020.
    • Schwebel, D. C. (2023). The Goldilocks of leadership: Finding the “just right” in workloads, budgets, and time management. Journal of Higher Education Management, 38, 66-68.
    • Schwebel, D. C., & McFarland, Jr., C. E. (2023). Applying Intro Psych lessons to university administration. Dean & Provost, 24(12), 1-4.
    • Schwebel, D. C., Ramos, W., Gilchrist, J., & Dixon, C. A. (2023). Expanding the concept of caregiver supervision to prevent child drowning. Pediatrics, 151, e2022060240.
    • Swanson, M. H., Morgan, C. H., Johnston, A., & Schwebel, D. C. (2023). Caregiver accounts of unintentional childhood injury events in rural Uganda. Journal of Safety Research, 85, 101-113.
    • Ning, P., Zong, H., Li, L., Cheng, P., Schwebel, D. C., Yang, Y., Yang, L., Wu, Y., Zhao, M., & Hu, G. (2022). Effectiveness of a helmet promotion campaign, China. Bulletin of the World Health Organization, 100, 329-336.
    • Schwebel, D. C. (2022). Teaching advanced science writing to advanced students: Mistakes and solutions. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching and Learning Journal, 14, 22-25.
    • Schwebel, D. C. (2022). Raising kids who choose safety: The TAMS method for child accident prevention. Chicago: Chicago Review Press/Parenting Press.
    • Schwebel, D. C. (2019). Why “accidents” are not accidental: Using psychological science to understand and prevent unintentional child injuries. American Psychologist, 74, 1137-1147.
  • Academic Distinctions and Professional Societies
    • Fellow, New York Academy of Medicine, elected 2024
    • Next Generation Indie Book Awards Finalist, Parenting/Family category, 2023
    • Board of Scientific Counselors, National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2017-2020
    • Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research, American Psychological Association, 2019
    • Dennis Drotar Distinguished Research Award in Pediatric Psychology, APA Division 54 (Society for Pediatric Psychology), 2017
    • Caroline P. and Charles W. Ireland Prize for Scholarly Distinction, University of Alabama at Birmingham, 2013
    • Fulbright Award (Senior Specialists Scholar Award to China), 2011
    • Fellow, American Psychological Association, elected 2009 (Division 54)
    • Routh Early Career Award in Pediatric Psychology, APA Division 54 (Society for Pediatric Psychology), 2006
    • Woodrow Wilson Fellow (Children’s Health), 1999