PEARLS screening tool

Aim 1 under the CARE Study seeks to advance the evidence base for the PEARLS tool, a California ACEs assessment screener. Upon adding a three-year follow-up point to the original PEARLS cohort, we will leverage our expertise to enhance scientific value by adding toxic stress biomarker data and will examine individual and contextual resilience-promoting factors in diverse, low-income, child-caregiver cohorts.  

Click the link below to view the PEARLS tool license agreement and request permission to download.

PEARLS screening tool license agreement 

The PEARLS tool is only licensed for non-commercial use by the Regents of the University of California. You must agree to the terms and conditions of use as specified in the license agreement above before you will be permitted to download the PEARLS tool. Copyright © 2016 - 2024 The Regents of the University of California. All Rights Reserved.

The resilience toolkit

Our third aim seeks to identify barriers and enablers to resilience-promoting interventions across the care continuum. Our team will create a comprehensive Resilience Toolkit, an implementation tool to support low-resource pediatric healthcare settings in PEARLS screening. Currently, the Toolkit is focused on developing introductory training, workflow adoptions for screening, and materials for providers’ use in clinic (e.g. posters) to create a welcoming environment, universal education on ACEs health and parenting, or sample scripts to introduce the screen itself. We will identify family preferences, system-level entry points, and obstacles to receiving and delivering resilience-promoting messaging and interventions through our partnerships with Futures without Violence and local communities.  

Across our three sites, we will conduct semi-structured interviews with front-line staff, nurses/clinicians, and health system leaders/administrators, as well as focus groups with caregivers of children 2-5 years old.  

Implementation outcomes

Together, these opportunities allow for the identification of access and resource barriers, knowledge of community experience with screening, and provision of feedback related to these interventions. Strategies identified by research staff from these meetings will be presented to caregivers, front-line staff, and providers at each site for preferences.