Current Studies
Understanding Parental Involvement Today (UPIT) Study: What does it mean to be an involved parent in today's world? Is all support good support? Parents and teens sometimes struggle to figure out how parents can best stay involved and provide support in their children's lives while giving them room to grow. This project will use multiple methods to examine mother-adolescent interactions among middle school, high school, and college age adolescents to try to answer these questions. It has three aims: A) to validate observational methods of assessing parental involvement in adolescents and emerging adults, B) to compare these observations with mothers' and teens own perspectives, and to C) examine the role of emotion regulation capacity in these processes, as assessed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
*** Want to participate in UPIT? Fill out this INTEREST FORM! ***
POPS: The goal of the "Perceptions of Parenting" study is to examine how college-aged students' perceived motives for their parents’ helicopter parenting impact their development as emerging adults. To accomplish this, researchers primarily focus on the associations that exist between a student experiencing helicopter parenting behaviors and the negative outcomes that they experience in emerging adulthood.
*** We are currently organizing the data for this study and are no longer accepting additional participants. ***
Recent Studies
KidVax: Officially named the "Covid-19 Vaccine Family Decision Making" Study, this is an online study designed to better understand how U.S. families decide whether their children (ages 10 – 22) should be vaccinated against Covid-19. We were particularly interested in how parents and adolescents work together to make this decision and the extent to which different factors (e.g., child age, SES, race/ethnicity, parent beliefs, etc.) influence the process.
Adolescent Coping During COVID-19: Fully known as the "Adolescent Coping During COVID-19: The Role of Close Relationship Partners", this project is a multi-wave study that analyzes the trajectories of adolescent adjustment during the Covid-19 pandemic via aiming its focus on how close relationships in their family (e.g. parents, siblings) and social (e.g., close friends, romantic partners) lives may minimize an adolescent's risk of maladjusting behaviorally and emotionally during Covid-19. This study also evaluates how such relationships can increase the speed of an adolescent's recovery from such problems following the pandemic.
COPE: The "Creating Optimal Parenting Experiences: Over-parenting of College Students with Disabilities" is a multi-site, longitudinal investigation that examines both the prevalence and overlap of over-parenting practices of parents of starting college students, and the health-centric assistance practices committed by these parents that are connected with negative student adjustment. It also analyzes the patterns of parental and student characteristics (such as socio-emotional coping and perfectionism) in order to investigate possible motivations for over-parenting and the discrepancies of parent-child reports of these practices. Overall, COPE aims to observe these populations and evaluate the impact that over-parenting has on determining student self-determination and efficacy, personal adjustment, and long-term academic, social, and health outcomes.
HP Motivation Study: The "Helicopter Parenting (HP) Motivations" study investigates whether young adults' perceptions of their parents' motives for helicopter parenting behaviors may play a differential role in the relationship between experienced HP, relational functioning, and behavioral and psychological adjustment outcomes. During this investigation, researchers have suggested that the effect of helicopter-parenting might be less aversive to young adults when its perceived as being positively motivated.
Individual Differences in Attention to Guilt Inductive Statement: This study focuses on a parent's use of guilt induction via the analyzing of their adult child's internalization of symptoms, externalization of problems, and past relationships in order to understand how guilt influences their attention and understanding of its use in parent-child discourse. This is achieved by using eye tracking technology that measures the pupil dilation and gaze fixation of college students as they read several scenarios surrounding shame, self-efficacy and guilt to discern the possible role attention has during the internalization process. Additionally, researchers will use this data to compare each subject's gaze fixation times and locations with their depressive symptoms, self-reported problem behaviors, and relationship history.
PAPI: The "Promoting Adaptive Parenting Involvement for High School Youth Across Cultures" study is a cross-cultural collaborative investigation that analyzes patterns of helicopter parenting amongst parents of adolescents and young adults in both the Eastern and Western cultures. PAPI researchers wish to examine the parental motivations on promoting child dependency versus those of child achievement and figure out how each motive impacts child development. From this, researchers hope to study the factors that promote these forms of parenting, provide parents and educators with information concerning adaptive and maladaptive parenting approaches for high school students, explain how these student's adjustment may vary across cultures, and evaluate the general cross-cultural psychometric equivalence (reliability, factor structure, validity) of the over-parenting construct.