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School of Social Work Ph.D. student spotlight (Spenser Radtke)

by Chris Hilburn-Trenkle

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work made history when it established its doctoral program in the fall of 1993, becoming the first doctoral social work program in the state. Since that time, the program’s impact has grown immeasurably to position itself and its students at the forefront of cutting-edge research.

To celebrate our students, we are spotlighting each of our doctoral students set to graduate in 2025, highlighting their areas of research, providing a link to their resume and more.


Spenser Radtke

CV: https://go.unc.edu/c8L4R 

Research Interests: Resilience; Measurement of resilience; Violence against youth; Youth mental health; Youth violence prevention and intervention development; Youth resiliency and protective factors from violence and victimization

Spenser R. Radtke is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work. Her research focuses on the process of resilience and how it is achieved after youth victimization experiences. Her approaches aim to take into account the cumulative effects of multiple forms of both victimizations and protective factors over time and address conceptualization, operationalization, and measurement issues in the field of youth victimization and resilience research. Moreover, she seeks to unearth understudied protective factors, especially those that might be most impactful for persons of color affected by youth victimization. To this end, her dissertation focuses on identifying the various conceptualizations of resilience-related outcomes and highlighting how patterns and trends in quantitative analyses differ based on different selections of resilience-related outcomes. She is also collecting primary data through the life history calendar method to explore characteristics and patterns of victimization and protective factors during youth with a sample of young adults who identify as a racial and/or ethnic minority. She earned her bachelor’s and MSW degrees from UNC in 2010 and 2018, respectively, and has her clinical licensure (LCSW) in the state of North Carolina.  


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