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.