Research
Current Projects
Parental Contributions to Adolescents' Use of Help-Seeking Behaviour The primary goal of this project is to examine how families shape teenagers' use of help seeking for a family problem or a school problem. We are interested in how parents' modeling and coaching of help seeking and the quality of the parent-adolescent relationship promote adolescents' use of this coping strategy, and whether these relationships differ by parent gender and adolescent gender. We will also evaluate whether discrepancies between parents' views and adolescents' views reduce the impact of parents' behaviour on their adolescent's behaviour. We are currently analyzing data from 120+ parent-adolescent dyads.
Adolescents' Experiences of Psychologically, Physically, and Sexually Aggressive Behaviours in their Dating Relationships. Using survey data from adolescents in Grades 7, 9, and 11, Dr. E. Sandra Byers (Psychology) and I are evaluating the proportion of youths who report having experienced one or more forms of aggressive behaviour from a dating partner, gender differences in these experiences, and factors that distinguish teenagers who were upset by these experiences from those who were not. We recently published two related papers, one on adolescents' use of multiple forms of dating violence and one on adolescents' ideas about physical and psychological violence in teenage dating relationships. The experiences data are being analyzed.
Parent-Adolescent Communication about Sexual Health Dr. E. Sandra Byers and I are also examining factors associated with parents' communication with their children about specific sexual health topics. In addition, we are assessing predictors of middle school students' evaluations of the sexual health education they have received at home, and relationships between high school students' experiences of sexual health education at home and at school and their sexual behaviour. These data are from four studies on sexual health education that we conducted in collaboration with the New Brunswick Department of Education with 4000+ parents, 1600+ high school students, 700+ middle school students, and 300+ teachers. We are applying for SSHRC funding to extend this work.
Reports describing these studies in more detail are available at: