Overview
My graduate training was in developmental psychology and social psychology with a focus in both subfields on theoretical issues, research design, and measurement strategies. I also minored in educational psychology and sociology. During my graduate training and as a faculty member I have sought out opportunities to design research and service efforts in the schools. Together, these training opportunities and experiences contributed to my long-term research interests that center on social development in childhood, early adolescence, and the college years, with a focus on the conceptualization and assessment of social competence in peer relationships and the effects of peer experiences on well-being. My research methods have included observations of children in both naturalistic and analog/experimentally contrived settings, and have employed cross-sectional, longitudinal, and experimental designs in our studies of social development. The great majority of my published research is with doctoral students who made major contributions to the research and who have developed their own important research programs as faculty members and in university research positions.