studies & articles

The Blog

One of the many pleasures of being a professor was feeling the need to stay on top of the research in psychology. When I first learned about the half-life of knowledge, the literature typically said it was 3-5 years in technical fields. As a retired professor, I am still a member of the American Psychological Association and subscribe to a service that delivers abstracts and open-source articles from a large number of journals. As an alumna of Harvard, I also get information from them and I have the time to peruse multiple sources. This is a pleasure most professionals don’t have, especially if they value
work-life balance.

I still love research and, when I was asked to write the blog, I enthusiastically agreed. I try to select articles based on their relevance to practitioners, but also to capture both emerging themes and important corrections. I am hopeful that, moving forward, we will have ways to enable readers to easily engage in conversations with me and each other.

-Dr. Karen Nelson

Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Two studies of parenting efficacy

Today, I am presenting two studies of parenting. The first a positive approach and the second focused on predictors of harsh parenting and recommended interventions. First, Resnik, Garbacz, Stormshak & McIntyre (2023) published “Family-centered Prevention to Enhance Proactive Parenting and Parental Self-Efficacy During Early Elementary School” in Journal of Family Psychology. Here’s the abstract:

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Karen Nelson Karen Nelson

Strengthening Parental Self-efficacy and Resilience

I am presenting here an edited version of an article that I think is important to anyone dealing with immigrant clients. Eltanamly, Leijten, van Roekel, Mouton, Pluess & Overbeek (2002) published “Strengthening Parental Self-efficacy and Resilience: A within-subject experimental study with refugee parents of adolescents” in Child Development. It is longer than usual but may be helpful:

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