BRANCH Study

Ages 6.5-9

Building Resiliency and Nurturing Children’s Health

We want to work with rural families to understand how your community promotes strength and resilience to protect young children from the ways that stress influences the risk for addictive behaviors.

Click below to take our eligibility survey.

Common Questions

  • If you are interested in participating in our study, you can fill out our eligibility survey here. Then, we will set up a time to call you to go over the study details and schedule your visits.

  • Part 1: The first part of the study includes a home visit. Our team will come to your house and you and your child will play games and complete surveys. Next, we will invite you to our imaging center on UGA’s campus for a brain scan.

    Part 2: Eighteen months later, we will reach out to schedule another brain scan on campus.

    Part 3: We will send you and your child surveys to fill out at home.

  • Your family can earn up to $390 for completing the study. There is an incentive for each part of the study.

  • We gladly accept referrals! We offer $50 incentives for every successfully enrolled referral.

Learn more about MRIs!

We love to learn more about all of the cool things the brain can do. To do this, we take pictures using an MRI machine. MRIs are one of the safest ways to take pictures of the body. The machine uses magnets to get precise pictures of the brain, so no radiation is used.

The MRI can be very loud, but we provide earplugs to children and their caregivers during the scan to help!

Here is a tour of our facility and a brief summary of what a visit to the imaging center looks like!

Here are some examples of what an MRI sounds like.

YDI researchers and a participant around MRI Scanner

Hope for Henry provides MRI gameboards for every participant in the study. These gameboards allow children to celebrate each step they take and it ends with a prize!

Supportive Organizations

Using the Child Life on Call app, we can share resources for MRI preparation and study information with all of our families.

Our virtual reality headset allows kids to practice with an MRI simulator before their scan. This allows them to practice holding still and hear the noises an MRI can make.