Penn State Family Relationships Project: Project Members

Principal Investigators

Nan Crouter, Ph.D.
image of Nan Crouter
Nan is a professor in Penn State's Department of Human Development and Family Studies and also the Raymond E. and Erin Stuart Schultz Dean of the College of Health and Human Development. Nan is interested in the implications of parents' work situations for ongoing family processes, such as housework, parental monitoring, and parent-child involvement, and in turn child and adolescent development.
ac1@psu.edu

Susan McHale, Ph.D.
Susan is a professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies also the director of Social Science Research Institute and the Children, Youth, and Families Consortium. She has focused on issues pertaining to siblings in families including the non-shared family experiences of siblings and their implications for children's and adolescents' development, sibling relationships, and siblings as influences on development.
x2u@psu.edu
 
Wayne Osgood, Ph.D.
Wayne is a professor in Penn State's Department of Sociology Crime, Law, and Justice. Wayne does research on a broad range of topics concerning delinquency and other problem behaviors during adolescence and early adulthood. He is also this project's resident methodologist.
dwo1@psu.edu

Linda Burton, Ph.D.
Linda is a James B. Duke professor in the Sociology Department at Duke University (http://www.soc.duke.edu/). Her research interests include adulthood and aging, intergenerational family development, minority families, poverty and the life course, and the neighborhood as a social context.
lburton@soc.duke.edu

Graduate Research Assistants

Megan Baril, M.S.
Megan is a fifth-year graduate student. Her research orientation lies broadly in the family ecology of parent adolescent relationships and adolescent well-being. Her dissertation research focuses on the family ecology of parental knowledge, with the goal of better understanding the processes that give rise to parental knowledge in diverse families and contexts.
mew237@psu.edu
 
Michelle Blocklin, B.A.
Michelle is a second-year graduate student. She is interested in adolescent development, including risk and resilience as well as the family’s effect on the development of adolescents.
mkb201@psu.edu

Kelly Davis, M.S.
Kelly is a sixth-year graduate student. Her interests focus on the implications of work conditions for health, well-being, and family relationships. She is particularly interested in the link between nonstandard work schedules (i.e., night, afternoon, rotating, weekend shifts) and stress and family processes. Additionally, she is interested in the work experiences of minorities, particularly discrimination in the workplace, and the implications these experiences have for individual and family well-being.
kdavis@psu.edu

 

Allison Groenendyk, B.A.
Allison Groenendyk is a second year graduate student. Her research interests focus on the study of sibling relationships within a family context. She is particularly interested in how the relationships between siblings foster positive youth development during childhood and adolescence.
aeg186@psu.edu
 
Laura Wray-Lake, M.S.
Laura Wray is a fourth-year graduate student. She is interested in value development across the lifespan. One focus of her research involves studying family processes, and specifically how parents and adolescents communicate about values and how these themes are transmitted within the family. A second focus is the relationship between values and civic participation.
ldw134@psu.edu
 
Ian C. B. Lam, B.A.
Ian is a first year graduate student. His research orientation lies broadly in gender and sexuality-related issues. He is also interested in the develpment and adjustment of individuals in risky or stressful environments.
cxl445@psu.edu
 
Ashleigh L. May, M.S.
Ashleigh is a fifth-year graduate student who has general research interests in the area of health disparities among youth. Her research interests are focused on the development of overweight and overweight concerns among children and adolescents. Ashleigh's disseration will focus on the development of such disorders amont African American youth with a primary focus on the links between overweight and overweight concerns and sociocultural, family and individual level factors.
alm429@psu.edu

Beth Riina, B.A.
Beth is a third-year graduate student. Her research interests include family processes in middle childhood and adolescence. Specifically, Beth is interested in shared and non-shared experiences of siblings, and how they relate to sibling differences, and the overall development of the family system.
emr191@psu.edu

Anna Soli, B.A.
Anna is a second-year graduate student. Her research interests include sibling relationships, the role that the home environment plays in the development of individual family members, and family intervention programs.
ars293@psu.edu
 

Recent Project Alumni

Aryn Dotterer, Ph.D.
Aryn is a postdoctoral scholar at the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. Aryn is interested in the transition to adolescence and parents' socialization of their children and adolescents in minority and low-income families.
dotterer@mail.fpg.unc.edu

Melissa Fortner, Ph.D.
Melissa graduated from Penn State with a degree in Human Development and Family Studies in 2004. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Transylvania University. Broadly, she is interested in adolescent development and parent-adolescent relationships.
mfortner@transy.edu
 
Marni Kan, Ph.D.
Marni Kan graduated from Penn State in 2007 and is currently a Research Psychologist at RTI International in Research Triangle Park, NC. Her interests focus on the family context of romantic relationships during adolescence and adulthood, including parent involvement in adolescent dating and links between parents' relationship quality and their parenting experiences. She is also interested in prevention and evaluation research related to families and romantic relationships, including adolescent sexual risk prevention and couple violence prevention.
mkan@rti.org
 
Ji-Yeon Kim, Ph.D.
Ji-Yeon is an assistant specialist at University of Hawaii-Manoa. She is interested in family systems, especially focusing on changes in youth well-being and adjustment during middle childhood and adolescence, including cultural effects on family processes, specifically in terms of gender socialization. Her focus is also on methodology with a focus on longitudinal designs.
jiyeonk@hawaii.edu

Lilly Shanahan, Ph.D.
Lilly graduated from Penn State with a doctoral degree in Human Development and Family Studies in 2004. After completing postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for Developmental Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (http://www.cds.unc.edu/), she joined the Psychology department at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (http://www.uncg.edu/psy/). Lilly's research interests focus on the development of family systems and youth psychopathology. First, how are siblings' experiences within and outside of the family similar and/or different, how do such shared and nonshared experiences develop over time, and how are they associated with youth well-being? Second, how are child-, family-, and community-level risk factors and their timing related to the deveopmental course of psychopathology? Third, how does childhood depression develop, and what is its influence on the larger family system? Interests in gender differences and longitudinal, family-based research methods permeate all of her work.
lilly_shanahan@uncg.edu
 
Cindy Shearer, Ph.D.
Cindy graduated with a degree in Human Development and Family Studies in 2007. The focus on her doctoral work was on gender socialization during adolescence and emerging adulthood and its implications for psychosocial well being. She is also interested in linkages between gender development and behavioral health outcomes, such as safer sex practices. Cindy is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Atlantic Health Promotion Research Centre at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada.
cindy.shearer@dal.ca

Shawn Whiteman, Ph.D.
Shawn graduated from Penn State with a degree in Human Development and Family Studies in 2004. He is currently an assistant professor at Purdue University. His research interests focus on family socialization processes and their connection to youths' social and emotional development during middle childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. Currently, his research examines how siblings directly and indirectly act as sources of social influence and social comparison within families and how their family experiences foster similarities and differences in their relationship qualities, attributes, and adjustment. A related, secondary research interest is the exploration of different research methodologies for studying families.
sdwhitem@purdue.edu