Category: Past News

 

Owens Institute for Behavioral Research Fellow, Catherine O’Neal spends her time studying how people—especially couples and families—relate to each other and how they can do it better. She began training as a marriage and family therapist but fell in love with the research while earning her Ph.D. from UGA’s Department of Human Development and Family Science.

“I want to understand how people connect and engage with each other,” said O’Neal, now an associate research scientist in that department within the College of Family and Consumer Sciences. “A lot of my research comes from my own questions about why relationships matter and my desire to facilitate healthy relationships as a way to improve individuals’ well-being.”

The stability of strain

Looking at how relationships endure over time is a strong focus of O’Neal’s work. One recent study displayed the stability of marital conflict over long periods. Using a sample of 250 Midwestern couples in lasting heterosexual marriages (some for 40 years or more), she found that those who had high levels of conflict early in midlife were also at risk for high levels of conflict 15 years later, when they were older adults.

“In general, conflict was consistent over time,” she said. “The other thing this study demonstrated was that, at least in this sample of couples, even relationships with high amounts of conflict can be stable. That is, not everyone who experiences marital conflict gets a divorce.”

Currently O’Neal is looking at the consequences of social relationships, like mental and physical health, to see what happens over time and how these aspects relate to each other: How do shifts in physical health relate to the quality of mental health, and how does an improvement in social relationships correlate with physical health?

One type of strain that particularly interests her is financial stress. How do couples experience financial strain, and what implications does it have for other areas of their lives, including interactions with loved ones and physical and mental health? Is the stress relieved when finances improve or do its detrimental effects stick around?

“Our hypothesis,” O’Neal said, “is that financial stress often initiates what we refer to as a ‘chain of insults,’ where it triggers life events, such as changing jobs, and other stresses like depression, poor physical health and conflictual interactions. Moreover, we are examining whether financial stress amplifies the impact of such life events.

“Decades later, we’re seeing that the effects of financial stress tend to stay with you, even when the finances are no longer shaky.”

O’Neal is leveraging her work on financial stress to help look for intervention and prevention solutions. For instance, she is working with the U.S. Air Force to measure the effectiveness of financial training modules to help personnel manage their finances and well-being at important life “touchpoints,” such as the birth of a child, relocation or retirement. Aiming to provide “just in time” financial knowledge may lead to better financial decisions and, ultimately, well-being, she said.

Working with colleagues in engineering, journalism and mass communications, and sociology, Catie O’Neal is testing a new way to keep military families connected when a member is on deployment. This virtual reality environment allows family members to interact in settings more typical of home life, such as backyards, living rooms and basketball courts. “The idea,” she said, “is that military family members not only get to talk to each other, but the family room allows them to engage in activities together—much like they do at home.” (Image courtesy of UGA Virtual Experiences Laboratory, College of Engineering)

Little things mean a lot

In another example of how risk can result in resilience, O’Neal is working to help military families stay connected when they are geographically separated. In collaboration with OIBR Fellow  Sun Joo “Grace” Ahn in the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, Kyle Johnsen in the College of Engineering, and OIBR Fellow Dawn Robinson in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, she and the team use virtual reality headsets to help families engage in activities that are not usually possible when a family member goes on deployment.

“We have a virtual family room where there is a basketball hoop, checkers and a backyard where you can throw the ball back and forth,” O’Neal explained. “The idea is that military family members not only get to talk to each other, but the family room allows them to engage in activities together—much like they do at home.”

As the COVID-19 pandemic has shown, these fleeting moments of connection in family life can take on much greater importance when they’re suddenly gone.

“You know, before COVID, my research coordinator and I would go to lunch, where we would talk about work but also talk about so many other little things that come up in conversation,” O’Neal said. “I miss those small connecting moments, and I believe that we as a society are missing out on these small but meaningful social connections during the pandemic.”

In particular, the extreme amount of stress that nurses and other medical professionals are going through during the pandemic occupies her mind a lot these days.

“What are the long-term consequences,” she asked, “of being under this severe strain for an extended number of hours every day and then having to come home and shift roles from caring for patients to taking care of a family, without having any significant amount of time to process the events you’ve just experienced at the hospital?”

She also wonders about the emotional toll on families who have lost a loved one to COVID.

“Research with military families has examined ambiguous loss, where loss occurs without closure or clear understanding. Families who have experienced the death of a loved one during COVID have often received no or limited information on what happened and have had little time to say goodbye. It’s possible these scenarios may also create ambiguous loss and even experiences of post-traumatic stress,” she said.

One part of her work she especially enjoys is interpreting others’ research to make it accessible and meaningful to broader audiences. Drafting reports for the Department of Defense on topics relevant to the military and policymaking means she must write for a vastly different audience than the peers who read her research papers. While one style calls for nearly every potentiality to be covered, the other demands efficiency of words and time. Writing for both audiences has made her better at communicating her own research.

“As a social scientist whose work started in marriage and family therapy, the thing that I believe most strongly is that relationships matter,” she said. “The quality of the different types of relationships—including parent-child, between spouses, members of extended families, colleagues—they all help make life what it is.”

 

This article was written by David Terraso for the UGA Office of Research.

 

Owens Institute for Behavioral Research Fellows Katherine Ehrlich, Psychology, and Bradley Phillips, Clinical & Administrative Pharmacy, along with Ted Ross, Infectious Diseases at UGA, were recently awarded the Presidents’ Award of Distinction for Team Science by the Georgia CTSA. This honor is bestowed upon their multi-disciplinary research team in recognition for their innovative, high-functioning teamwork and synergy. Together they have built a diverse, multidisciplinary team of collaborators, each contributing to their success. Since 2017, their team has done amazing work to develop new tools and processes for quality-driven research focused on immune responses to influenza vaccination.

The Presidents’ Award of Distinction for Team Science, conferred by the Presidents of the academic institutions of the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance (Georgia CTSA), including Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Morehouse School of Medicine and University of Georgia, recognizes and promotes excellence in multi-disciplinary research teams within the Georgia CTSA. This award is presented to an outstanding multi-disciplinary research team in recognition of its innovative and impactful research that has, or will likely, advance clinical and translational science and positively impact human health. 

This year’s winning team of the President’s Award of Distinction for Team Science will receive $5,000 towards their team science research program and were recognized at the 2021 Southeast Regional Clinical and Translational Conference (March 4-5, 2021).

Read more here.

American Psychological Association has awarded the Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology award to OIBR Fellow, Katie Ehrlich.

Since 1974, the APA Early Career Awards have been given to recognize the large number of excellent, early career psychologists. Recipients of this award may not have held a doctoral degree for more than nine years. The 2020 recipients of the APA Scientific Contribution Awards were recognized by the 2019 Board of Scientific Affairs and selected by the 2019 Committee on Scientific Awards.

For purposes of this award, psychology has been divided into 10 areas, with five considered each year. The areas considered in 2020 were animal learning and behavior, comparative; developmental; health; cognition/ human learning; and psychopathology.

Katie was recognized for outstanding research that elucidates how children’s social relationships affect their physical health. Her  innovative research brings together insights from multiple subareas of psychology, including health, developmental, and social, to address questions of great importance for public health and human development. Her studies are characterized by sophisticated theory, rigorous methodology, and impressive creativity. Dr. Ehrlich’s theoretical and empirical work is already leaving a substantial mark on the field and paving the way for an integrative biosocial science of human development.

Katie is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia and the director of the Health and Development Laboratory. To learn more about her research, go here.

 

Traditional gendered patterns of child care persisted during the COVID-19 shutdown, with more than a third of couples relying on women to provide most or all of it, according to a study from OIBR Fellow and University of Georgia researcher Kristen Shockley.

Some previous research has found that typical familial patterns may get upended during crises, but that’s not what Shockley and her colleagues found in the early months of the COVID-19 shutdown.

“Most people have never undergone anything like this before, where all of a sudden they can’t rely on their normal child care, and most people’s work situation has changed too,” said Shockley, associate professor of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. “We thought this would be a chance for men to step in and partake equally in child care, but for many couples we didn’t see that happen.”

In mid-March, as schools and day cares closed and many shifted to remote work, Shockley and her colleagues quickly created a survey targeting dual-earner couples with at least one child under age 6.

“When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple.” — Kristen Shockley

“My son was 15 months old when this all started, and I know firsthand that you can’t just plop younger kids in front of a TV or expect them to do their schoolwork,” she said. “We were particularly interested in people who really had to provide active child care.”

The team initially surveyed 274 couples, conducting a follow-up survey with 133 of the same couples in May. The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, assessed marital tension, health and job performance in addition to child care strategies.

“When the wife does it all, not surprisingly, the outcomes are bad for the couple,” Shockley said. “It’s not just bad for the wife, it’s also bad for the husband, including in terms of job performance although his work role presumably hasn’t changed. When one person’s doing it all, there’s a lot of tension in the relationship, and it’s probably spilling over into the husband’s ability to focus at work.”

Though 36.6% of couples relied on the wife to provide most or all child care, 44.5% used more egalitarian strategies, and 18.9% used strategies that were not clearly gendered or egalitarian.

Egalitarian strategies included alternating work days, planning daily mini shifts that included both work and child care for husband and wife, and alternating shifts that changed day to day based on the couple’s work needs.

“When you look at the more egalitarian strategies, we found the best outcomes for people who were able to alternate working days,” Shockley said. “The boundaries are clear. When you’re working, you can really focus on work, and when you’re taking care of the kids, you can really focus on the kids. But not everybody has jobs amenable to that.”

When both people were working at home, planned mini shifts and needs-based alternation had similar well-being outcomes for the couple, but job performance was higher for couples who used needs-based alternation, according to Shockley.

“I think that’s due to the communication that comes with it, and the flexibility within your dyad at home,” she said. “For couples who are continuing to work remotely, I would say needs-based alternation with night-before communication about work needs is probably better than having fixed shifts.”

Although the paper doesn’t include qualitative quotes, Shockley remembers the participants’ comments quite clearly.

“People were saying, ‘I’m at my breaking point,’ and this was just two weeks in. A lot of people said, ‘I’m just not sleeping.’ You could feel people’s struggle, and there was a lot of resentment, particularly when the wife was doing it all,” she said.

“This really highlights some infrastructure issues we have with the way we think about child care in this country. The default becomes, ‘Oh well, the wife is going to pick up the slack.’ It’s not a long-term solution.”

Shockley also noted that the couples surveyed have relatively high incomes.

“Compared to the country, the household income of our study is pretty high,” she said. “This might look different in lower-income samples. We might see totally different strategies emerging, particularly if there’s less possibility for remote work.”

Co-authors include OIBR Affiliate, Malissa A. Clark and Hope Dodd at UGA and Eden B. King at Rice University.

Article written by: Allyson Mann
Source: UGA Today

The University’s newest Regents Professor is OIBR’s past Director, Steven R.H. Beach, Distinguished Research Professor in the department of psychology in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences. This honor is bestowed by the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia for faculty whose scholarship or creative activity is recognized both nationally and internationally as innovative and pace-setting.

Beach’s scholarship focuses on the way that community, family and marital process affect mental and physical health.  His pioneering work and collaborations have shown that strengthening close relationships, including marriage and parenting relationships, can play a critical role in reducing depression and physical health problems, and can buffer the impact of stress from economic and social factors. Beach also serves as co-director of the Center for Family Research Clinical Program in the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research at UGA.

He has over 250 peer-reviewed articles in leading journals, as well as multiple books and book chapters. He has received over $60 million in grant funding from organizations including the National Cancer Institute and numerous other divisions within the National Institutes of Health. Among other notable work, Beach recently initiated a program of research with African American families living in rural communities in Georgia, implementing the Promoting Strong African American Families. This program focuses on strengthening marital, co-parenting and parent-child relationships to help foster resilience to economic hardship and experiences of discrimination.

Beach has received numerous awards, including the Family Psychologist of the Year Award from Division 43 of the American Psychological Association, the President’s Award of Distinction for Team Science by the Georgia Clinical and Translational Science Alliance, and the Best Family Economics Paper of the Year by the National Council on Family Relations.

Beach is the former director of the Owens Institute for Behavioral Research, serving from 2003 to 2013. He is currently a Fellow of the institute and a member of the OIBR Executive committee.

The Regents Professor appointment was recently approved by the board of regents and is effective July 1, 2021.

For four decades, OIBR Fellow and Terry College of Business management professor Robert Vandenberg has found new ways to accurately assess the attitudes, feelings and behaviors that employees experience in the workplace.

Vandenberg, who serves as head of the Department of Management and the Robert O. Arnold Professor of Business, was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of Management.

“Bob’s work has laid the groundwork for organizational behavior and health care researchers to better understand how employees relate to their employers,” said Mike Pfarrer, associate dean for research and graduate programs at the Terry College of Business. “In addition, Bob is an internationally recognized methodologist, making his research accessible across disciplines.”

“His induction into the Academy of Management Fellows Group not only shines a light on the far-reaching impact of his work but also on the quality of research being conducted every day at the Terry College of Business.”

Induction as an AOM Fellow distinguishes those who have made enduring contributions to the science and practice of management. Vandenberg has spent his career using an organizational behavior lens to investigate what impacts employee motivation and dedication to an organization and how workers’ attitudes towards their employers impact productivity. Over time, his work has been cited by other scholars more than 20,000 times.

In the 1990s, Vandenberg started investigating the barriers that emerge when researchers try to compare workers from different cultures. Cultural norms and biases of the researchers can be a concern, but Vandenberg also looked at the cultural norms of the people being studied.

People from different cultures often interpret survey questions differently, he found. Researchers needed to account for this phenomenon, which came to be known as measurement invariance, in their analyses.

The culmination of this work was a seminal paper published in 2000 in the journal Organizational Research Methods, which set out the best practices and tactics for management researchers to correct for measurement invariance in their work. Ever since, the paper has provided part of the bedrock for the methodology now used by social scientists to account for differences in cultural attitudes in survey data. It’s been cited by more than 6,000 researchers as a guide for undertaking their own studies.

Vandenberg also introduced new methods of statistical analysis and better ways to measure change in employee’s attitudes and performance over time. He has extensively studied workplace health and safety, high-involvement work practices and employee commitment, and his research methods have contributed to more than $12 million in grant funding for studies into various management topics.

“Bob has emerged as one of the leading experts on research methods in the entire field of management,” Herman Aguinis wrote in his nomination of Vandenberg. Aguinis is the Avram Tucker Distinguished Scholar at George Washington University. “This means that his contributions are even more impactful compared to those of us who focus on a particular substantive domain. The reason is that contributions to methodology influence many, if not all, substantive domains across management subfields ranging from micro to macro.”

Article written by: Merritt Melancon
Source: Terry News