Wenjing Huang

Wenjing Huang
Behavioral and Social Scientist
Santa Monica Office

Education

Ph.D. in quantitative psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; M.A. in quantitative psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; B.A. in education, Soochow University, Suzhou, China

Overview

Wenjing Huang is a psychometrician at the RAND Corporation. She specializes in developing standardized assessment tools for measuring mental health, substance use, skills, knowledge and aptitudes related issues in health, education, and workplace settings.

Huang's work at RAND covers a diverse range from health research funded by the National Institute of Health (NIH) to Worker Well-Being funded by Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC NIOSH). More recently, Huang worked on creating standard measures for evaluating national and international policies in the COVID-19 pandemic for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Huang co-led a high-profile report on Asia Drug Policy and also works in mental health issues of youth in the Middle East experiencing war trauma and civil unrest.

Before joining RAND, Huang interned at the World Health Organization (WHO). She started her quantitative psychology training with Patrick Curran in the Ph.D. program at L.L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory (UNC, Chapel Hill). She received her Ph.D. at UCLA working with Peter Bentler on estimation algorithms for Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).

Recent Projects

  • A Comparison of National and International Approaches to COVID-19-Related Measures
  • Development of the NIOSH Worker Well-Being Questionnaire (WellBQ).
  • Contemporary Asian drug policy: insights and opportunities for change
  • Development and Maintenance of Post-Acute Care Cross-Setting Standardized Patient Assessment Data
  • Health Risk Behaviors Among Palestinian Youth

Selected Publications

Towe, V., May, L.W., Huang, W., Martin, L.T., Carman, K., Miller, C.E. & Chandra, A, "Drivers of differential views of health equity in the U.S.: Is the U.S. ready to make progress? Results from the 2018 National Survey of Health Attitudes. ," BMC Public Health, 2021 (forthcoming)

Pardo, B.A., Kilmer, B. & Huang, W. , Contemporary Asian drug policy: insights and opportunities for change, RAND Corporation, Santa Monica, CA (RR-RR-2733-RC), 2019 (forthcoming)

Acosta, Joie D., Wenjing Huang, Maria Orlando Edelen, Jennifer L. Cerully, Sarah Lovell, and Anita Chandra, Measuring Barriers to Mental Health Care in the Military: The RAND Barriers and Facilitators to Care Item Banks, RAND Corporation (RR-1762-OSD), 2018

Harrington, L. M., Lee, C., Evans, S.K., Mann, S., Acheson-Field, H.J., Bennett, B., Huang, W. & Barlow, K. , Success in a Joint Environment Identifying Attributes for Air Force Accessions, RAND Project AIR FORCE/Manpower, Personnel, and Training, 2019 (forthcoming)

Bentler, P., & Huang, W., "On components, latent variables, PLS and simple methods: reactions to Ridgon’s rethinking of PLS.," Long Range Planning, 47(3), 2014

Huang, W., Stucky, B.D., Edelen, M.O., Tucker, J. S., Shadel, W.G., Hansen, M., & Cai, L., "Calibration of the Spanish PROMIS® smoking item banks," Nicotine & Tobacco Research, 18(7), 2016

Huang, W., Hunter, S. B., Ayer, L., Han, B., Slaughter, M. E., Garner, B. R. & Godley, S. H., "Measuring Sustainment of an Evidence Based Treatment for Adolescent Substance Use," Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment, 83, 2017

Huang, W., Rose, A.J., Bayliss, E., Baseman, L., Butcher, E., Garcia, R.E. & Edelen, M.O., "Adapting summary scores for the PROMIS-29 v2.0 for use among older adults with multiple chronic conditions," Quality of Life Research, 28(1), 2019

Languages

Chinese

Publications