Human beings are inherently social creatures. Familial relationships set a foundation and provide a context for emotional, social, and cognitive achievements. Departmental research considers how parents, siblings, friends, in-laws, stepparents or children, and other social partners influence each other's well-being and development. Our research covers the life-span from infancy to old age, looking at individuals and families.

The department's Individual, Couple, and Family Therapy Clinic is part of the doctoral training program in marriage and family therapy. The clinic offers services to individuals, couples, and families having personal or family-related problems, and is staffed by supervised graduate student therapists specializing in marriage and family therapy.

Faculty Research

• Aryn Dotterer 
  Dr. Dotterer studies parent-child relationships from early childhood through late adolescence. She examines race and SES differences in parenting beliefs and parent-child interactions and their links to school readiness. She also examines parent-child relationships in adolescence including changes in relationship quality during adolescence and socialization practices (race and achievement). Dr. Dotterer is interested in the links between parent-child relationships and adolescent academic achievement and school engagement.
  
• James Elicker
  Dr. Elicker is investigating the nature and developmental influences of teacher-caregiver relationships with infants and toddlers in early childhood programs. (Early Head Start; Tuning In)
• Karen Fingerman
  Adults of all ages place a high value on their interpersonal relationships, but few studies focus on relationships in late life. Dr. Fingerman's research examines ties between adults and their parents (one of the most important relationships of late life) as well as friendships, romantic ties, and the host of other social ties of old age.
• Leah Hibel
  Mothers play a critical role in facilitating the development of biobehavioral regulation in the child. Dr. Hibel examines how mothers regulate child physiology, and how other family relationships (i.e., marital) may affect her physiology, and her ability to sensitively respond to her child. (the Mother-Child Physiology Project)
  
• Shelley MacDermid Wadsworth
  Many marriages are affected by events that occur in the partners' workplaces. Workers' experiences affect not only their own well-being, but reverberate within the marital relationship. Dr. MacDermid's recent research considers the impact of deployment on marital dynamics.
• Judy Myers-Walls
  Dr. Myers-Walls' work has focused on the parent-child relationship and how parents talk with children about difficult topics, especially war and peace. Numerous publications have explored processes and alternatives in delivering parenting education to parents, prospective parents, and professionals.
• Germán Posada
  Dr. Posada's research focuses on the development of child-parent attachment relationships in infancy and early childhood. It includes both behavioral and representational issues, as well as contextual influences in the development of such relationships. Longitudinal observational methodologies in naturalistic settings are emphasized.
• Seung-Hee Son
  Dr. Son's research includes longitudinal examination of parenting and home learning environment during early childhood, the extent and impact of parenting changes, bidirectional relations between child development and parenting, and measures of parenting that best predict children's language and literacy development.
• Doug Sprenkle
  Dr. Sprenkle's work focuses on the key ingredients in therapeutic change that cut across competing models of change-called "common factors" in the change process. These include factors like therapist competence, the therapeutic alliance between therapist and client, and the allegiance of the therapist and researcher to his/her model vis a vis the alternative treatment. These common factors contribute more to the variance in outcome than specific treatment effects.
• Shawn Whiteman
  Dr. Whiteman's research examines the direct and indirect ways siblings influence family relationships and individual adjustment. A related interest, secondary interest is the application of different research methodologies to the study of family relationships.