Interpersonal violence is a major social, health, and mental health problem in our society. The training of more researchers is sorely needed to further understand the causes of violence and to discover effective solutions. This training program responds to several needs of our nation's research agenda on interpersonal violence. Research efforts have suffered because they tend to be fragmented. Divisions often exist across disciplines, types of violence (e.g. sexual assault, battering), different age groups (children, adults, elderly), and family vs. non-family violence. The training program builds upon the accomplishments of the Interdisciplinary Research Program on Violence Across the Lifespan established in 1994 to bridge these divisions. This Program is recognized nationally for its unique emphases on community-based research, testing the effectiveness of prevention and intervention programs, and cross-cultural and cross-national research.
Through mentoring and coursework, the predoctoral trainees will further develop their skills in these areas. In addition, predoctoral students will complete doctoral training that includes basic knowledge and research skills in the social and behavioral sciences. Trainees will attend a lecture series of nationally known researchers from our Program and other universities. They will attend a seminar titled "Interdisciplinary Approaches to Violence and Mental Health" that applies conceptual frameworks and diverse methods and an "Interdisciplinary Research Seminar on Violence Across the Lifespan." Trainees will also attend a research responsibility seminar that covers a comprehensive set of ethical issues. In their second and third years, trainees will attend a lecture series, be part of a Community of Scholars, and be mentored by two accomplished violence researchers from different disciplines and professional schools. These researchers will impart their expertise in epidemiological and community-based research and prevention/intervention program evaluation within a nested ecological framework.
The purpose of the proposed training is to give each trainee a firm grounding in the principles and methods associated with state-of-the-art research on interpersonal violence across the lifespan. The objectives of the proposed training program will build upon the strengths of our existing research collaborative. Specifically, predoctoral trainees will:
1) Develop knowledge of the relationship among the various types of violence across the lifespan, including the connections between family and non-family violence;
2) Develop knowledge of theoretical perspectives that explain the causes and consequences of violence using theories from different disciplines linked together under broad frameworks (e.g., nested ecological framework);
3) Develop skills in applied research methods that focus on violence prevention and intervention programs in community and clinical settings;
4) Develop research skills on the relationship between violence and its mental health sequelae, coping responses, and resiliency effects;
5) Develop culturally competent research skills, including culturally sensitive measurement development, problem formulation, data collection procedures, and research dissemination.
Potential Areas of Study
Students will be actively involved in ongoing research projects of the primary mentoring faculty. Our projects can be combined into several major categories. These categories are likely to be used as themes in the training seminar. The following are some examples of major themes and the projects related to them. These projects cover different levels of the social ecology, draw from the knowledge base of different social sciences, and often represent direct application of knowledge to practice innovations.
1) Impact of Violence on Children and Youth
a) impact of media violence on children's long-term development (Huesmann & Eron)
b) impact of dating violence on adolescent's emotional well-being and physical health (Saunders, Tolman, Zimmerman)
c) the effects of community, family, and television violence on preschool-age children's emotional and social adjustment (Graham-Bermann, Bermann, & Huesmann)
2) Cultural Studies on Violence and Victimization
a) defining neighborhood and family violence in culturally diverse communities (Gutierrez)
b) South African victims of torture and political repression (Williams)
c) the culture of honor, rural culture, and aggression (Nisbett)
d) comparisons of beliefs about dating and domestic violence across cultures and nations (Saunders)
3) Violence and The Welfare System
a) knowledge of domestic violence and its effects on caseworkers' reactions to battered women and their children (Saunders, Tolman)
b) impact of multidisciplinary/multi-professional training on mental health, substance abuse, and domestic violence for intervening with complex child welfare cases (Faller, Saunders)
c) domestic violence as a barrier to fulfilling work requirements under welfare reform (Tolman)
4) Evaluating Intervention and Prevention Programs
a) group interventions for the children of battered women and abused women (Graham-Bermann)
b) cognitive/ecological prevention program for treating aggression in high risk youth (Eron, Huesmann)
c) leader style and group cohesion as predictors of recidivism in men who batter (Saunders, Tolman)
d) evaluation of child abuse prevention programs (Meezan)
e) neighborhood-based violence prevention collaborative (Zimmerman)
The final selection of themes for the seminars will be guided by faculty members' current research projects and student needs and interests. All trainees will have the opportunity to work closely with an interdisciplinary group of world-renowned researchers in the field of interpersonal violence. The program requires all students to attend the lecture series, to complete the interdisciplinary research seminars, to elect advanced seminars in areas related to interpersonal violence, to receive training specific to the responsible conduct of research, and to undertake a dissertation in the area of interpersonal violence across the lifespan that is co-chaired by two program faculty members. These requirements are described more specifically below.
In addition, all trainees are expected to have or to acquire a basic foundation in behavioral science research. All doctoral graduate student trainees have disciplinary program requirements that include, but are not limited to, graduate-level courses in statistics and research methodology, theory, and other professional development courses. Thus, all students develop basic competence in their respective fields that prepares them for specialization in interpersonal violence research. Senior mentors/researchers in the Program are currently engaged in such research and will mentor the students on relevant projects focused on topics initiated by faculty or trainees.
The interdisciplinary focus of the program allows students to work with a number of outstanding research faculty from related but distinct fields of study. Trainees acquire ways of developing new knowledge from multiple perspectives and learn to extend the paradigms of their home disciplines to include interdisciplinary formulations of research questions. This unique capacity is built into every aspect of the program, from the selection of trainees, to mentor matching, to required coursework, conferences, and presentations or written products that are expected to result from such interdisciplinary learning.
Special Seminars
Trainees will be required to take two special seminars:
1. Interdisciplinary Approaches to Violence and Mental Health Research (First Term)
Trainees will complete this three-credit seminar in their first term. It will include: a panel of faculty and students from related training programs (e.g., Gender & Mental Health) explaining the process of inter-disciplinary scholarship and frameworks they have found useful; presentations by our faculty and advanced students of their research that exemplify interdisciplinary scholarship; the strengths and limitations of broad frameworks for understanding violence; methods used by different research traditions to understand violence; common ethical and practical dilemmas in violence research; and examples of culturally competent research. The nested ecological framework will be the primary organizing framework. Trainees and faculty will describe the research traditions most closely aligned with their professions and disciplines and begin the process of comparing and contrasting different paradigms, research traditions, and general theories. Qualitative and quantitative methods will be covered and examples will be given of their integration in faculty research projects.
The ecological framework will help students move beyond the research traditions of their own disciplines and the specific theories and methods tied to these traditions. For example, as we cover risk markers for violence such as alcohol, personality disorders, jealousy, peer pressure, and media violence exposure, we illustrate how they can each be explained with theories from multiple levels of the social ecology. Students will place the theory with which they are most familiar in the ecological framework and begin to entertain other perspectives. Because of its breadth, the ecological framework helps trainees to consider other perspectives-from specific ways to alter a principle of their main theoretical orientation, to integrating parts of it with other theories, considering a wholly different perspective, or re-interpreting theories through a macro theory (e.g., feminist theory, empowerment theory, etc). As an outcome, when developing their own research studies, trainees are better equipped to test competing hypotheses from different levels, to include variables from different ecological levels in their design, and to think about alternative explanations. Synthesis sometimes occurs through the use of a general theory like general systems theory or the theory of planned behavior.
2. Interdisciplinary Research Seminar on Violence Across the Lifespan (Second Term)
This is a three-credit graduate level course designed to present an overview of current research in the field of interpersonal violence from a number of disciplinary perspectives. Because this seminar will follow the one described above, trainees will be exposed to some general integrative frameworks, in particular the ecological model. We will integrate a speaker series with this seminar. However, the seminar will meet without a speaker every other week in order to spend time comparing and contrasting theories and findings from readings and presentations. We will continue to help students think critically in order to: consider theories of different levels of generality and their fit or lack of fit with each other; see how some theories fit well for family and non-family violence and others do not; and how some theories fit well across the lifespan and others do not. During the semester, our discussions will encourage students to synthesize and/or critique findings and theories from different theoretical perspectives, stimulating them in particular to go beyond the boundaries of the research traditions most closely linked to their disciplines
The course takes a lifespan developmental approach as studied in a number of fields, and addresses research on child physical, sexual, and emotional abuse, adolescent dating and peer violence, domestic violence, and elder abuse. Attention is paid to issues of race, class, culture, and gender throughout the course. Presentations highlight the connections between intimate violence and violence at the neighborhood and community level. Studies of both perpetrators and victims are included. Intervention outcome studies and a review of legal issues are also included. For some of the sessions, in the first hour outside speakers and faculty from the Interdisciplinary Family Violence Research Program present their latest work, followed by discussion of the research and assigned readings. Readings are assigned from the fields of psychology, social work, law, education, sociology, anthropology, and public health to allow students to develop an appreciation of the similarities and differences in these fields and help them develop more complex theoretical models. Each student comes prepared to discuss questions on the readings that are assigned in advance of each class. Discussion is facilitated by an interdisciplinary team of faculty.
We will require an integrative paper that must include one theoretical application from a theory within a research tradition of their discipline/profession and one theory from a discipline that draws primarily from a different level of the ecological framework. Trainees will also present their own work and will be guided by the instructors in giving constructive feedback to each other.
Lecture Series
Prior to attending presentations, students will read the work of the invited speaker and will be able to arrange individual or group meetings with the speakers for research consultation. In this way, trainees will have input from faculty outside of the Primary Faculty. For the second term seminar on violence across the lifespan, trainees will attend the lecture as part of the seminar. The lecture will be public and as in the past students and faculty from a variety of disciplines/professions are expected to attend; as in the past we expect that these students and faculty will raise questions and make comments that add to the diversity of perspectives of our students. The speaker will join the seminar for further presentation and discussion. The lecture series will continue in the second and third years of the traineeship.
As in the past, speakers will include experts on violence across the lifespan, for example, child physical abuse, child sexual abuse, dating violence, domestic abuse, lesbian battering, and elder abuse. We will continue to ask speakers to address issues of culture and diversity, either as the sole focus of their research or as a significant consideration in their methods. Both qualitative and quantitative methods will be covered. Some speakers will also emphasize the interplay between violence in the home and violence in the community.
Community of Scholars & Individual Mentoring (Years 2 & 3).
Trainees will attend a speaker series and meet monthly in a Community of Scholars facilitated by an advanced student and by different faculty members. In the Community of Scholars they will continue to discuss diverse disciplinary perspectives and analyses from different levels of the social ecology. With guidance from mentors, trainees will engage in directed readings, grant writing, dissertation research, and present at brown bags. Products of their work will include research proposals and conference papers that stress interdisciplinary and inter-professional approaches. Throughout all of these activities, trainees will act as consultants for each other.
Recommended Advanced Seminars
In consultation with their Primary Research Mentors, all trainees will choose at least two advanced graduate level seminars that are relevant to their research training plan. The list of courses will be approved by the Steering Committee as appropriate to advancing the trainee's program of research. These courses include, but are not limited to: Interdisciplinary Seminar on Child Abuse and Neglect (Social Work/Psychology/ Law), Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Issues in Intervention (Social Work), Seminar in Development, Psychopathology, and Mental Health (Psychology), Advanced Methods in Clinical Research (Social Work), Causal Modeling in the Social Sciences (Psychology), Poverty, Risk and Mental Health (Social Work), Research and Development for Human Service Innovation (Social Work), Lifespan Development (Psychology), Trauma: Meaning, Repression and Healing (Psychology/Women's Studies), Violence (Sociology), Psychosocial Factors in Health-Related Behavior (Public Health), Developing Mental Health Intervention Programs (Health), Approaches to Feminist Scholarship in the Social Sciences (Women's Studies), Approaches to Feminist Scholarship on Women of Color (Women's Studies), Health Promotion Intervention Research (Nursing), Domestic Violence Seminar (Law) and Criminal Law of Rape (Law School). Several of the Primary Mentoring Faculty of the proposed program offer such advanced seminars on a regular basis, with new courses under development
Co-Mentoring
Each trainee is matched with two mentors who serve as co-Chairs or Chair and member of the trainee's dissertation committee. In this way, the mentors work together with the trainee, actively modeling the integration of differing perspectives in one project. The trainee can elect to work on an existing research project or can launch his or her own independent study as a dissertation with the help of the two mentors. Students work closely with both mentors in conceptualizing and then implementing the research study, in analyzing data, and in writing the dissertation itself. Thus, the input of both faculty members is obtained at each step of the research process. This close mentoring will bring with it the opportunity for collaboration, as students often present their work at scholarly conferences and publish work with their faculty mentor. Students are matched with faculty based on mutual interest. In order to prepare students for their dissertation study, additional coursework may be recommended by program faculty.
Affiliated Research Centers
Faculty in the training program have affiliations with a number of research centers at the University of Michigan. These include the Institute for Social Research, the School of Social Work's Center for Poverty, Risk and Mental Health, and the African American Mental Health Research Center. Activities provided by these research institutes and centers will be available to program trainees through public lectures, courses, and the opportunity to work with the program faculty's research in the form of existing datasets, readily available research populations, and research materials.
Eligibility
Research trainees will be currently enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Michigan in Social Work, Psychology (including Clinical, Developmental, and Personality Psychology areas), Sociology, Nursing, and Public Health (Health Behavior and Health Education). We have elected to restrict application to the training program to predoctoral students who have completed their second year of graduate study. This was done to ensure that all students entering the training program would have completed most of their required course of study in their major area and would have sufficient time and base of knowledge to fully participate in the training program's courses and activities. In this way, students in psychology would have obtained their Masters' Degree, have passed their preliminary qualifying exams, and would be ready to work on dissertation level research projects. However, in almost all cases we expect that students will begin a mentoring relationship with a program faculty member soon after starting their doctoral studies.
All students will receive three years of training and be funded year round. All students will be funded during their dissertations and work with two program mentors who will serve as co-chairs of the student's dissertation committee. In this way, the cohorts of students who pass through the training program will have comparable experiences and support. They will be available to meet in groups and to take courses and attend lectures and presentations together. A Sub-Committee of the Steering Committee will aid in selecting students into the program based on how well their interests fit program mentor expertise, the availability of mentors, the quality of the student's past performance, and the student's potential for a career in interpersonal violence research.
Trainee Biographical Sketches, Cohort 2002-2005
Amy Hammock is a doctoral student in the Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science (Sociology). She is interested in studying intervention programs that use arts and cultural programming (particularly theater) to address issues of intimate partner violence. She recently worked on the development of a theatre piece with Matrix Theatre and the LA VIDA domestic violence prevention program in Southwest Detroit. She is also interested in studying the changes in structure and policies of feminist organizations (generally) and battered women's shelters (more specifically) over time, and the effect of these changes on direct service delivery. She is particularly interested in theorizing about the relationship between gender, hierarchy, and power within traditionally feminist organizations.
Marisela Huerta is a doctoral student in Clinical Psychology who conducts research on interpersonal and community violence. For her master's thesis she examined the contextual risk factors affecting the psychological well-being of poor, inner-city mothers. She plans to further this work by investigating the impact that the experience of violence may have on the parenting strategies used by these mothers. Ms. Huerta is also interested in research on interpersonal violence such as harassment and incivility. Her work in this area includes the study of race as a risk factor for sexual harassment. She is currently investigating sexual harassment from a power perspective and is particularly interested in the intersection of racial and sexual harassment.
Diane Lynn Miller, a doctoral candidate in the Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science (Psychology), is a feminist scholar whose research primarily concerns the sexually abusive behavior of male and female adolescents. She approaches this topic using both positivist and idiographic methods. For her master's thesis she studied the characteristics of sexual abuse in the backgrounds of male adolescents who have sexually offended. Her dissertation is a qualitative project involving event history interviews with adolescent female sexual offenders. This project seeks to explore the way in which these young women understand their behavior and the meaning it holds within the overall context of their lives. Other areas of interest include epistemology and models of knowledge development for social work, such as the use of emancipatory research practices. Her commitment to feminist scholarship and practice led her to earn a Certificate in Women's Studies, awarded in 2001.
Suzanne Perkins-Hart received a M.Ed. from Harvard University in 1991 and taught special education to adolescents with emotional and behavioral disorders in Western Massachusetts for eight years before returning to graduate school. She is a doctoral candidate in the Combined Program in Education and Psychology and completed her M.S. in psychology in 2002. She studies typologies of problem behaviors in adolescents and the continuity and discontinuity within these typologies across time. She also studies the relationship between child maltreatment and the development of learning and behavioral disorders.
Trainee Biographical Sketches, Cohort 2005-2007
Wendy D'Andrea-Merrins is a doctoral student in the Clinical Psychology program. Her scholarly interests are in the areas of abuse and complex trauma, gendered violence, psychophysiology, attachment, and treatment of psychological traumas. As a master's student, she explored the physiological manifestation of dissociation in a sample of traumatized undergraduates. She is continuing a related area of research in her dissertation by examining the effectiveness of therapy for interpersonal violence in women as assessed by cognitive, emotional, physiological and interpersonal functioning using laboratory-based assessment techniques.
Michelle Gross is a joint doctoral student in Clinical Psychology and Women's Studies. As a masters student, she studied risk factors for developing posttraumatic stress following intimate partner violence. She found that the factors that predict posttraumatic stress following IPV differ for Caucasian and African American women. She is interested in exploring further how these differences may be a function of the measures used to assess posttraumatic stress, as well as a reflection of differences in the way that violence is talked about, conceptualized and recovered from in different ethnic groups. She recently published a book review in the journal Violence Against Women that offered a critical reading of the edited volume Gender and PTSD. Ms. Gross is committed to feminist scholarship and therapies that emphasize empowerment and resilience.
Sarah Jirek is a doctoral student in the Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science (Sociology) and has a masters degree in social work. Her main research interests include domestic violence, criminology, trauma, the criminal justice system, and qualitative research methods. Ms. Jirek is currently studying vicarious traumatization, particularly the physical, emotional, and psychological effects of working with survivors of physical and sexual violence. She is also examining the organizational risk and protective factors that affect the well-being of helping professionals. In addition, Ms. Jirek is exploring the consequences of jail overcrowding upon sentencing outcomes, early release from jail, and the likelihood of recidivism for various types of offenders.
Katherine Luke is a doctoral student in the Joint Program in Social Work and Social Science (Sociology) and the graduate certificate program in Women's Studies. She has a masters degrees in social work and public policy. She has worked as an advocate for battered women and their children and was research coordinator at a court monitoring organization that monitored cases of domestic violence, sexual assault and child abuse and neglect. Ms. Luke is currently using qualitative methods to explore the relationships among gender, alcohol/drug use, sexual violence, and identity. She is also interested in research on girls' use of violence and the experience of women and girls who are affected by interpersonal violence within the criminal justice system.
Co-Directors
Leadership for the training program is provided by Co-Directors Dr. Daniel Saunders and Dr. Sandra Graham-Bermann. The educational backgrounds of these Co-Directors (psychology, social work, and counseling) provide a strong interdisciplinary framework. As Co-Directors of the Interdisciplinary Research Program on Violence Across the Lifespan since 1994, they have provided leadership for the Program, helped obtain funding for pilot projects, co-taught a doctoral seminar on violence across the lifespan, co-mentored students on their preliminary examinations and dissertation work, and obtained funding for a Distinguished Faculty and Graduate Student Seminar. Both Co-Directors have extensive clinical and program development experience in the field of interpersonal violence and have integrated their research projects with their clinical and community work. They routinely involve undergraduate, masters, and doctoral students on their research projects. In addition, they regularly mentor junior faculty and have helped them to become productive members of the Program. The research and practice interests of the Co-Directors are described below.
Primary Program Faculty
Cleopatra Howard Caldwell, Ph.D., Psychology; MA, Human Development, is the Associate Director of the Program for Research on Black Americans and an Associate Professor in the School of Public Health. She has received funding from the Center for Disease Control to study interventions aimed at reducing violence and substance use in African American fathers and sons; to strengthen father-son relationships in order to improve health among African Americans; and to address stress, adaptation, help-seeking and mental illness in African Americans. She has also served as a Co-Principal Investigator on NIMH-funded national studies of African American mental health. Much of her research is aimed at exploring the ways in which stress and violence in African American communities leads to outcomes such as school dropout, early childbearing, and mental health issues.
Lilia M. Cortina, Ph.D., Clinical-Community Psychology, is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, and an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Women's Studies. Dr. Cortina's research has focused on racial, sexual and heterosexist harassment in workplace and educational settings to understand the effects of interpersonal violence. She has also studied the role of gender and cumulative risk of violence in the development of PTSD. Her research takes on both a lifespan and ecological perspective in which organizational and individual factors are examined as a means for understanding the use of and effects of violence.
Kathleen Coulborn Faller, Ph.D., MSW, Social Work/Psychology, specializes in the area of child sexual abuse, including various subcategories of sexual abuse, such as female perpetration, sexual abuse in divorce, and sexual abuse in daycare contexts. Dr. Faller is a Professor of Social Work, the Faculty Director of the Civitas Child and Family Programs, which trains students as specialists in child welfare, Director of the Family Assessment Clinic, a multidisciplinary team, and Principal Investigator of the Interdisciplinary Child Welfare Training Program. She is the author of 5 books on child maltreatment and sexual abuse as well as more than 35 research and practice-based articles on child abuse and neglect.
Elizabeth T. Gershoff, Ph.D., Child Development, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Research Assistant Professor at the Center for Human Growth and Development. Her research focuses on the roles of poverty, violence, family and community in the mental health of children and adolescents. Dr, Gershoff has been the recipient of several grants funded by NIMH and the Center for Disease Control, which examined the impacts of families, schools, home neighborhoods, and school neighborhoods on the violence exposure and mental health of urban low-income adolescents, as well as conducting a longitudinal follow-up study of adolescents who had been exposed to a violence prevention curriculum while in elementary school. Dr. Gershoff's current funding is to study the impact of changes in families' income and material disadvantage on children's cognitive and social-emotional development.
Sandra A. Graham-Bermann, Ph.D., Psychology, is Associate Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies. Her research focuses on identifying protective and risk factors for children exposed to multiple forms of violence, including domestic violence. Dr. Graham-Bermann has identified types of Post-Traumatic Stress symptoms for children and has created new measures of children's interpersonal anxiety and family role stereotypes. Her intervention studies, funded by the National Injury Prevention Centers, Center for Disease Control, are designed to test the efficacy of several interventions aimed at empowering battered women and enhancing adjustment in the children. A longitudinal study of the multiple violence experiences in the lives of preschoolers is currently underway.
Andrew Grogan-Kaylor, Ph.D., Social Welfare, M.S.S.W., Social Work, M.A., Religion and Social Ethics, is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work and a Faculty Associate at the NIMH Center for Research on Poverty, Risk, and Mental Health. His research has focused on the relationship between corporal punishment and antisocial behavior in children, as well as on childhood maltreatment and adult criminal behavior. He has collaborated on projects that examine factors such as childhood maltreatment, race and ethnicity, and mental health, and is the Principal Investigator on a project that examines the path from childhood maltreatment to juvenile delinquency.
Lorraine M. Gutierrez, Ph.D., MSW, Social Work/Psychology, focuses her research on multicultural issues in communities and organizations. She has received external funding for her work on identifying methods for multicultural organizational development and community practice, defining elements of culturally competent mental health practice, and identifying the linkages between gender ideology, violence against women and attitudes toward race and racism. Dr. Gutierrez has a joint appointment with the Department of Psychology and School of Social Work, and is a faculty associate in American Culture. She also is affiliated with the Women's Studies Program. With her multicultural perspective and joint appointment status she provides an excellent model of integrating disciplines.
L. Rowell Huesmann, Ph.D., Psychology & Computer Science, is Professor in the Department of Communications Studies and Professor of Psychology. For the past 25 years he has been working on understanding and explaining the psychological processes through which the mass media socialize children and create lasting influences on their social behavior, specifically aggressive and violent behavior. He is currently conducting a laboratory study of the relations between individual differences in aggression and individual differences in emotional responsivity to scenes of violence, as well as his 40-year follow-up of subjects first interviewed in 1960. A third project is a field experiment, spanning 8 years to date, studying the prevention of violence in urban children in Chicago. Much of his research is aimed at determining the extent to which early childhood exposure to media violence influences young adult behavior.
Richard Nisbett, Ph.D., Social Psychology, is the Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute for Social Research. Currently Co-Director of the Culture and Cognition Program in the Department of Psychology, he has studied the links between culture and cognition. In one acclaimed study he related the northern European ancestry of Americans to the "culture of honor" in explaining their aggression. He is nationally renowned scholar in the field of social psychology and has received numerous national awards and considerable external funding for his work.
Nnamdi Pole, Ph.D., Clinical Psychology, is an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology. His research focuses on the development and treatment of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) following violence exposure, on factors influencing PTSD and mental health in ethnic minorities, and on ways in which trauma symptoms and physiological arousal interact. Dr. Pole has received funding from NIMH to study psychophysiology and emotion expression in marriages where one partner has PTSD, and to study how emotion and physiology facilitate the psychotherapy process. Currently, he is studying traumatic stress in police officers through prospective studies of academy recruits and through retrospective studies of retired officers. Dr. Pole uses multiple methods to approach his research, including physiological assessment and interviewing.
Beth Glover Reed, Ph.D., Community and Clinical Psychology, is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Work and Women's Studies. Dr. Reed's work has emphasized issues related to substance abuse in the lives of women who have experienced domestic violence. In particular, she has authored and presented self-help guides for women with comorbid diagnoses, focusing on trauma sequelae and substance abuse. Dr. Reed has received funding to study the types of collaborations that develop between substance abuse prevention agencies and domestic violence agencies and has studied ways of improving interventions with women who experience violence.
Daniel G. Saunders, Ph.D., M.S.W., Counseling & Social Work, is Professor in the School of Social Work. He established one of the country's first intervention programs for men who batter and helped to establish crisis and advocacy programs for battered women. He is Co-Director of the University's Interdisciplinary Research Program on Violence Across the Lifespan and he Co-Chaired the University's Task Force on Violence Against Women. He has consulted for the Department of Defense, the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Institute of Mental Health. His research, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and other agencies, focuses on offender program evaluation, the traumatic effects of victimization, and the responses of professionals and the public to dating and domestic violence
Julia S. Seng, Ph.D., Women's Health Nursing, M.S., Nurse Midwifery, is a Research Associate Professor in the School of Nursing and the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, as well as a Research Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine Department of Obstetrics. Her research focuses on maternity care for women with a history of violence, particularly childhood sexual abuse. Dr. Seng has conducted research on improving the care among women with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder and comorbid physical illness. She is currently funded by the NIMH to research how PTSD adversely affects childbearing outcomes, and has investigated PTSD as a psychobiological cause of hyperemesis, or extreme vomiting during pregnancy. Dr. Seng's research questions integrate biological, psychological and social factors.
Richard M. Tolman, Ph.D., Social Welfare, Professor in the School of Social Work, and is currently researching the ways in which welfare reform legislation is experienced by women in abusive relationships. Dr. Tolman developed the Psychological Maltreatment of Women Inventory, a widely used measure of non-physical abuse of women. He has received major funding from NIMH and foundations for the study of welfare and domestic violence. Furthermore, he has served as a domestic violence expert on national panels, including the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Justice, the National Research Council, and the National Women's Resource Center.
Mieko Yoshihama, Ph.D. (Social Welfare), MSW, Associate Professor, School of Social Work, conducts research on violence against women of color, with a particular focus on Asian Pacific Islander American communities. She conducted an NIMH-funded face-to-face interview survey of the prevalence, socio-cultural contexts, and mental health consequences of domestic violence against women of Japanese descent in Los Angeles. She recently developed a measure to enhance the respondents' recall of lifetime experiences of domestic violence. In Japan, Dr. Yoshihama conducted the first nationwide survey of domestic violence in that country. More recently, she conducted a population-based study of Japanese women's health and domestic violence in collaboration with the World Health Organization.
Marc A. Zimmerman, Ph.D.,Psychology, Masters in Interdisciplinary Studies, is Professor in the School of Public Health. He is Director of the CDC funded Prevention Research Center of Michigan and Director of the CDC funded Youth Violence Prevention Center. His nationally funded work with adolescent populations includes the study of HIV and risky behavior (e.g., delinquency), school dropout, violence, and substance use, as well as an evaluation study of an AIDS prevention project. He has worked extensively with community partnerships in developing applied and intervention evaluation studies.
For more information, contact Sandra Graham-Bermann (763-3159/ sandragb@umich.edu) or Dan Saunders at (763-6415/ saunddan@umich.edu).