People Formerly Involved with Kid's World

Alumni

Lara Embry

Bio: I am a child clinical graduate student interested in resilience. I want to understand what behaviors or traits help children cope with stressful life circumstances and do well in spite of them. As a first step in this research I am trying to explore what it means for a child to "do well" or to be "well adjusted," how we define that concept.

Research: What is resilience? In my research, I have found that figuring out which children are resilient, or "doing well," is not straightforward. There are several kinds of functioning, and children who are doing well in one area aren't necessarily doing well in another area. For instance, children who are socially or academically competent don't necessarily have a positive sense of themselves or their lives. Because of this, when choosing which kids to label as resilient it is important to consider multiple areas of their behaviors and feelings.

Erica Kovacs

Bio: I am a 5th year Ph.D. student in the child clinical graduate program at the UW. In the past, most parenting research has focused on mothers and not on fathers. I am interested in understanding how fathers play a role in their children's lives, and particularly in how fathers and mothers simultaneously contribute to their children's adjustment. I am also interested in understanding individual differences among children in response to parenting, including both quality and quantity of parenting, in response to their parents' marital satisfaction or problems, and in response to stressful life experiences in general.

Research: What about fathers? In trying to understand how fathers play a role in children’s lives, a first step in my research has been examining why some fathers participate in research studies and some do not. What I have found is that there are no real differences according to what their children and their children’s mothers say about them. In our study, over 62% of the fathers asked agreed to participate. The results of my study suggest that researchers need to make more of an effort to involve fathers in research because asking them about the role they play in their children’s lives is important. A second step in my research is to understand how mothers' and fathers' parenting style simultaneously affect children. I am currently working on finishing several studies to try to begin to answer this complex question. I am also working on several other studies, including understanding the different ways we think about and measure children's adjustment; understanding children's response to their parents' marital problems; and understanding how the amount of time parents spend with kids is related to quality of the relationship between parents and kids.

Interviewers

Our interviewers are trained, undergraduate or volunteer research assistants. Interviewers must complete 40 hours of training and most have completed coursework in psychology.

2000 Interviewers

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