Research Interests
I have just completed my third year in the Penn State Human Development and Family Studies doctorate program. I successfully defended my Master's Thesis in the Spring, finished the bulk of my classwork, and transitioned to a new research project and advisor. It's been a full, challenging, and satisfying year.
My research focus is primarily on promoting adolescent ownership (i.e. agency) of personal development. More specifically, I am interested in understanding the motivational, cognitive, and behavioral domains of this sense of ownership. My master's thesis entailed the development and validation of a 15-item global measure of adolescent agency that taps into each of these domains. The pilot instrument performed very well with 7th and 8th grade students who were participating in an adaptation of TimeWise designed to promote physical activity during free-time. I will be working with Dr. Linda Caldwell over the summer to turn my thesis into a manuscript for publication.
This spring I transitioned to the advisorship of Dr. Doug Coatsworth and began working on his Strengthening Families in Pennsylvania Project. I have primarily been working on developing a recruitment/retention database that facilitates identifying recruitment process and efforts and outcomes of those efforts. I will be training as a youth facilitator for this project in late summer and look forward to conducting youth sessions in the Fall semester.
Academic Activities
This semester marks my first semester as a Prevention and Methodology Training (PAMT) fellow. I'm quite excited about the PAMT fellowship and growing as a researcher in both the prevention and methodology fields. I look forward to gaining and refining skills in person-specific methods (i.e. Latent Class Analysis) and in methods that examine intra-individual variability.This fellowship offers truly amazing opportunities to collaborate with faculty, gain a deeper understanding of grant mechanisms, and the intersection of prevention and methodology.
I am currently working on a paper with Dr. Ed Smith that examines the prevalence of sexual pressure behaviors in South African male youth, and the effects of the HealthWise South Africa intervention on this behavior. In collaboration with current and former lab members, we held a paper symposium at the annual Society for Prevention Research conference in June 2010 on risk and delinquency behaviors in the sample of youth in our study. This summer I will also focus on preparing this paper for publication, and look forward to continued work on this project.
This year I will be serving as two roles on the HDFS Graduate Student Steering Committee. In one role, I will serve as the Alumni rep. During the upcoming year I will be working on developing a formal online network on LinkedIn for graduates of our program. In the second role, I will be a social co-chair with Alexis Harris. We will be devising ways for grad students to get out, have some fun, and socialize. I look forward to continuing my participation in the committee this year.
I have just completed my third year in the Penn State Human Development and Family Studies doctorate program. I successfully defended my Master's Thesis in the Spring, finished the bulk of my classwork, and transitioned to a new research project and advisor. It's been a full, challenging, and satisfying year.
My research focus is primarily on promoting adolescent ownership (i.e. agency) of personal development. More specifically, I am interested in understanding the motivational, cognitive, and behavioral domains of this sense of ownership. My master's thesis entailed the development and validation of a 15-item global measure of adolescent agency that taps into each of these domains. The pilot instrument performed very well with 7th and 8th grade students who were participating in an adaptation of TimeWise designed to promote physical activity during free-time. I will be working with Dr. Linda Caldwell over the summer to turn my thesis into a manuscript for publication.
This spring I transitioned to the advisorship of Dr. Doug Coatsworth and began working on his Strengthening Families in Pennsylvania Project. I have primarily been working on developing a recruitment/retention database that facilitates identifying recruitment process and efforts and outcomes of those efforts. I will be training as a youth facilitator for this project in late summer and look forward to conducting youth sessions in the Fall semester.
Academic Activities
This semester marks my first semester as a Prevention and Methodology Training (PAMT) fellow. I'm quite excited about the PAMT fellowship and growing as a researcher in both the prevention and methodology fields. I look forward to gaining and refining skills in person-specific methods (i.e. Latent Class Analysis) and in methods that examine intra-individual variability.This fellowship offers truly amazing opportunities to collaborate with faculty, gain a deeper understanding of grant mechanisms, and the intersection of prevention and methodology.
I am currently working on a paper with Dr. Ed Smith that examines the prevalence of sexual pressure behaviors in South African male youth, and the effects of the HealthWise South Africa intervention on this behavior. In collaboration with current and former lab members, we held a paper symposium at the annual Society for Prevention Research conference in June 2010 on risk and delinquency behaviors in the sample of youth in our study. This summer I will also focus on preparing this paper for publication, and look forward to continued work on this project.
This year I will be serving as two roles on the HDFS Graduate Student Steering Committee. In one role, I will serve as the Alumni rep. During the upcoming year I will be working on developing a formal online network on LinkedIn for graduates of our program. In the second role, I will be a social co-chair with Alexis Harris. We will be devising ways for grad students to get out, have some fun, and socialize. I look forward to continuing my participation in the committee this year.