Current Projects:

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Networks of Family Stress and Support: Patterns and Parallels with Parent Narratives

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Families with young children experience many stressors, from financial stress, unreliable childcare, unsteady employment, daily parenting challenges, and mental health. Families are often identified and targeted for extra support according to their level of need in one of more of these categories. However, both stressors and supports interact in intricate ways and fluctuate for families over time. Alongside colleagues with the RAPID team at Stanford University, I will explore stressors and supports among a large national sample of children and families using network analysis. This longitudinal data will allow us to uniquely identify the most influential stressors and supports for families over time, highlighting subgroups of families in need of the most resources. I will also utilize mixed methods to allow parent narratives of their daily life stressors and supports align with the findings from our network analysis. 

Current Projects:

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Indigenous Theories and Frameworks of Human Development: A Scoping Review and Conceptual Synthesis

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Bronfenbrenner. Ainsworth. Piaget. Vygotsky. Skinner. Sound familiar? These seminal Western theorists are among the group of widely cited theories of human development that graduate students and academics alike are expected to use to ground their research in human development or developmental psychology. Meanwhile, Indigenous theories and frameworks of how humans develop over time are largely missing from the literature. Alongside colleagues from Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health, we are working to synthesize and summarize current Indigenous theories and frameworks of human development accessible in published academic literature, setting a foundation for future theory development.

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Reimagining Human Development Through Indigenous Cyclical Theories: Implications for Mental Health Processes and Practice in Indigenous Communities

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This qualitative study will engage Indigenous scientists, community members, and leaders in focus groups and interviews to elucidate traditional understandings of human development as cyclical or seasonal. Core teachings will be integrated to inform the development of a Cyclical Theory of Human Development, which will then be applied to an exemplar practice domain critical for intervention in Indigenous and other marginalized communities: mental health and wellbeing.​

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Weaving Together Understandings of Ethnic-Racial and Cultural Identity and Socialization

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Diverse, yet often overlapping, terminology has been used to describe the building blocks of ethnic, racial, ethnic-racial, and cultural identity development as well as relevant socialization processes for children. For the first aim of this paper, we will conduct a mini scoping review of social sciences literature to summarize and synthesize common terminology regarding ethnic, racial, ethnic-racial, and cultural identity and the socialization processes associated with these concepts. The second aim of this paper is to weave together these concepts into a model that reflects the unity and diversity among these terms for research and teaching in the social sciences: The Ethnocultural Quilt. 

This is an emerging line of research focused on understanding how educational systems and educator wellbeing shape early childhood mental and behavioral health. Stay tuned for more information on planned work in this area.