Research Area of Specialization: Family Development
The family is central to HDFS. The family is a primary context in which individual socialization and development take place. It is, perhaps, the principal medium through which culture, society, and social change affect the individual. And it is a social fact in itself that feeds back and can accelerate or mitigate changes occurring in the broader society. Graduate study at Penn State offers students a unique opportunity to develop the substantive, methodological, and theoretical skills necessary to study human families.
- David Almeida
- Daily stress processes; adult development; family factors in mental health; work and family linkages; fatherhood; statistical techniques for measuring change.
- Chalandra Bryant
- Marital and premarital relationships, particularly among African American couples; the role social networks play in influencing partners' satisfaction with and commitment to their significant others.
- Douglas Coatsworth
- Prevention research and theory; design and evaluation of family-based interventions to promote development and to prevent mental health and behavioral problems in children and adolescents; resilience.
- Ann Crouter
- Interrelationships of parents' employment situations, family processes, and children's and adolescent's social development; gender socialization in middle childhood and adolescence.
- David Eggebeen
- Social demography of children; intergenerational support over the lifecourse; fatherhood.
- Denis Gerstorf
- Multivariate approach to study heterogeneity and differential aging; cross-domain interface of cognition, well-being, and health; terminal decline, intraindividual variability; dyadic interdependencies in development; statistical techniques for measuring change.
- Daphne Hernandez
- Father involvement; Adolescent delinquency and risk-taking behaviors; Effects of antipoverty policies on children and family well-being.
- Kathryn Hynes
- Child and family policy topics including welfare reform, child care, after-school programs, and maternity leave; parents' work-family strategies; social and economic contexts influencing the transition to fatherhood.
- Rukmalie Jayakody
- The impacts of poverty and social policies on families and children: welfare reform and barriers to self-sufficiency; family structure and child outcomes; living arrangements and family transitions.
- Eva Lefkowitz
- Parent-child communication, from adolescence through adulthood; emotional displays between family members; differences between self-report and observed behaviors.
- Lynn Martire
- Family relationships and management of chronic illness in adulthood; couple-oriented interventions; chronic pain; late-life depression.
- Susan McHale
- Family relationships and family roles (particularly gender roles) in childhood and adolescence; differential socialization of siblings.
- Emilie Smith
- Home, school, and community partnerships in development and prevention; afterschool settings and positive youth development; the role of identity, race, ethnicity, and sociocultural factors in child, adolescent, and family development.
- Doug Teti
- Socioemotional development in infancy and early childhood, parenting, and intervention strategies designed to promote early development and parent-child relations.