As early as preschool, children develop friendships with peers that provide companionship, support, validation, and a range of other social provisions. These relationships play a distinct role for well-being throughout childhood and into adulthood, such as buffering against loneliness and strengthening belonging and engagement in school. In my research program, I am interested in the many facets of friendship, including how thoughts and beliefs about friendship affect friendship behaviors and how people’s friendship profiles—the combination of close friendships a person has and the quality of each—influence well-being. My experience as a teacher has also led to a focus on the role of friendships in the classroom. My research to date with preschoolers through young adults has addressed these larger goals and has implications for how to support peer relationships and well-being throughout development.
Below are brief descriptions of my primary research projects:
In on-going work with undergraduate researchers, we are exploring preschoolers’ friendships and how these friendships influence children's behaviors, including children's sharing behavior.
My work on high school friendship beliefs and well-being is part of two research collaborations with school administrators at local high schools. This project examines numerous aspects of social life in high school, including friendship beliefs (e.g., do friendships take hard work, do friendships last), friendship quality, and sources of support and how these aspects of high schoolers’ social lives relate to well-being and academic outcomes. We have recently expanded to consider the effects of COVID-19 and the spotlight on systemic racism for student well-being with collaborators at NC State. This research was in part funded by a grant from the American Educational Research Association. The ultimate goal of this work is to identify avenues for supporting the social and academic needs of all students, but especially those from minoritized and low-income backgrounds.
My dissertation work examined college students’ three closest friendships (rather a single close friendship as is done in the majority of published research) and integrates friendship quality and quantity information to better understand the social and emotional lives of college students. This project provided the opportunity to look closely at college students’ friendships in relation to their beliefs about friendship and their experiences of loneliness and belonging in college. I am currently revising this work for publications and planning next steps in examining multiple close friendships, including expanding this work to consider multiple friendships in the context of friend groups (where everyone in the group is friends with each other).
This study is collaboration with Dr. Bridgette Martin Hard and Jing Liu (a former Duke undergraduate and now PhD student at Columbia). This project combines my research interests in social relationships with my commitment to undergraduate teaching and mentoring. It explores social relationships in the college classroom and their connection to belonging and academic engagement in class, as well as the implications of belonging and academic engagement for students' course grades and future interest in psychology courses and research. This work is published in the journal Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology. We plan to follow this work up with a longitudinal look at these students' academic careers beyond Intro Psych and additional follow up studies that will focus on further detailing the classroom environment effects.
This research considers the contribution of social provisions (e.g., companionship, help) from all classmates, not just friends, and the provision richness of the classroom (i.e., the classroom average of provisions exchanged among peers) to elementary-age children’s feelings of loneliness in school. Not only to provisions from all peers matter for explaining loneliness, but the provision richness of the classroom moderates this association such that in classrooms that are higher in provision richness, individual receipt of social provisions from peers is less strongly tied to children’s feelings of loneliness. This research is published in the Journal of School Psychology.
This work is a continuation of my undergraduate thesis work with Dr. Tracy Gleason at Wellesley College. We trace the trajectories of unilateral and reciprocal friendships in preschool across a school year and examine the individual and dyadic predictors of friendship formation and maintenance in preschool. My thesis work was supported by a Jerome A. Schiff Fellowship, learn more here.