Thomas S. Weisner, Ph. D.

Co-PI: Weisner, PI: Aletha Huston (University of Texas); add’l Co-PI’s: Greg Duncan (Northwestern University), Robert Granger (William T. Grant Foundation)

Funding: NIH/NICHD; William T. Grant Foundation; MacArthur Foundation, 1998 - 2005

New Hope (NH), a community-based experimental intervention intended to provide meaningful supports for working poor parents and children.  The intervention was based on this premise:  if parents work, even at low-wage jobs, families should not be poor and children should not be at further risk, and hopefully doing better. New Hope was a social contract support program: in return for full-time work, the program participants were eligible for a quite generous package of assistance.  New Hope was a work-based program in Wisconsin, offering rather substantial assistance (vouchers for child care, health care, income supplements and jobs if parents did not have work) if parents worked 30+ hours a week.

The impact of the NH intervention was assessed using a random-assignment experimental longitudinal design.  New Hope did increase overall earnings and employment hours by 10 – 15% compared to controls.  Adults, men and women, not working at baseline, increased earnings and work hours compared to control families.  NH families used formal childcare significantly more often (41% vs. 29% in controls), and boys are doing somewhat better in school. Although there were impacts, the pathways through which the program features affected families varied.  An extensive ethnographic study of 44 families, in both program and control groups, was an integral part of this project and the evidence from those families provided insights into the processes, mechanisms, and experiences of families in the study. 

Two books have resulted from this work.  One is co-authored with Greg Duncan and Aletha Huston:  Higher Ground: New Hope for working families and their children.  The other is an edited book with Hiro Yoshikawa and Edward Lowe:  Making It Work:  Low wage employment, family life, and child development.

PI: Weisner, Co-PI’s Ronald Gallimore, Barbara Keogh, Lucinda Bernheimer, Kazuo Nihira

Funding: NIH/NICHD, 1984 - 2005

Project Child was a collaborative longitudinal study of teens with disabilities at clear risk for developmental, school, or community troubles.  102 families with children with disabilities were recruited  when their children were ages 3-4 and followed for 17 years.  Data include child assessments, family questionnaires, and qualitative and ethnographic studies of families and children. This is the first such study to include data from the children when they reached 16 years of age to understand their experiences using interviews with them.  These data are linked to longitudinal developmental assessments, family adaptations, and parent reports.  Family adaptation is associated primarily with the ways the child impacts the family daily routine of life, rather than the cognitive ability of the child. More effective adaptation by families to delay is not primarily accounted for by parental socioeconomic status, nor by the assessed cognitive abilities of children, but rather is related to the values and goals of parents, to ecocultural opportunities and constraints, and the ability of parents to organize a meaningful, sustainable routine of everyday life that meets their goals.   Teens vary widely in how they think about their own disabilities, and most do have an at least partial explanatory model accounting for their disability.  Friendship patterns of teens are evaluated more positively by teens themselves than by parents or researchers, and teens with disabilities have their own definitions of friendship that focus largely on continuity of contact and familiarity.  School experiences show a similar pattern:  teens weigh school activities and acquaintances more positively than others weigh them on behalf of the teens.  Longitudinal assessments of teen outcomes (ages 3 – 17) show that cognitive assessments over time do not predict adolescent or parent subjective well being, but socioemotional and daily routine measures do.  Child assessments are stronger predictors of subsequent family accommodations than family accommodations are as predictors of later individual child measures.

Co-PI: Weisner; PI:  JoAnn Farver (University of Southern California); add’l Co-PI:  Chris Lonigan (Florida State University)

Funding: NSF, 2002-2007

Children and parents in Head Start are from working poor families and face many problems when making the transitions from Head Start to kindergarten and first grade.  Weisner participates in an NSF-funded study of a new curriculum and family support program for Head Start centers and families intended to enhance early literacy experiences for children and parents.  We have analyzed interviews and home visits to parents done before and after the curriculum and family visits are done.  What did parents believe and what did they practice with regard to home literacy?  What was their experience of this intervention and how did it affect their practices and beliefs, if it did?  Data from this experimental intervention, with both a curriculum and family arm, are currently being cleaned and analyzed.

PI or Co-PI:  Weisner

Funding:  MacArthur Foundation; William T. Grant Foundation; Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC); NICHD (Fieldwork Core); 2003 - 2010

Weisner edited Discovering successful pathways in children's development: New  methods in the study of childhood and family life which argues for the value of integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in human development for both basic research and for applied and policy work.  He has collaborated on funded mixed methods studies with MDRC and others, including directing a core facility in the MR Center here at UCLA.  He continues to work in the general field of culture and human development and has written papers on analyzing settings, on theory, and on methods in these fields.  

Also, see: Yoshikawa, H., Weisner, T. S., Kalil, A., & Way, N.  (2008).  Mixing qualitative and quantitative research in developmental science:  Uses and methodological choices. Developmental Psychology, 44(2): 344-354.

Co-PI: Weisner, PI’s:  Naihua Duan & Richard Kravitz

Funding: Pfizer, 2006 - 2008

With Naihua Duan, Richard Kravitz, and Saskia Subramanian, Weisner has collaborated on a study of how local knowledge might be brought together, and made readily available to practitioners for use in their clinical  practices.   This study launched in October 2006, and used use focus groups, in-depth qualitative informational conversations, and ethnography.  Analysis and publications are in progress.

PI: Fuligni; Co-PIs: Weisner, Gonzales (Arizona State University)

Funding: NICHD.  July 2009 – June 2011.

This study focuses on family obligation, responsibility, cooperation and assistance within Mexican immigrant families, which is a key aspect of family life among this population.  The nature and changes in family obligation and assistance across the adolescent years will be examined, as will the implications of these issues for the adolescents’ psychological, behavioral, and educational adjustment.  Both parents and adolescents in 540 families will complete daily checklists for two weeks across two years of high school in order to examine how parental experiences shape adolescents’ involvement in family assistance, and how adolescents balance their family obligations with other aspects of their lives.  In addition, a stratified, randomly selected 10% subset of these families will participate in annual in-depth, qualitative interviews that focus on the activities and routines of their everyday lives; Weisner primarily directs this qualitative portion of the full study.

Weisner, Director; Eli Lieber, Co-Director

Funding:  NICHD core facility (Mental Retardation Research Center, UCLA)

Weisner and Dr. Eli Lieber provide advice and services related to the collection, maintenance, and analysis of qualitative and mixed methods data.  Currently, the Lab actively works with nearly every project being undertaken in the Center for Culture & Health, including the following: methods and data analysis collaboration for Browner’s studies of clinical research; the use of EthnoNotes for the Edgerton/Tucker study of mid-life adults with (with Dr. Cathy Matheson); interview content for the recent Latino Schooling study led by Professor Ron Gallimore; and database support and analysis for Cameron Hay’s study of UCLA clinic encounters.  All of Weisner’s studies employ the EthnoNotes system for data analysis (e.g., New Hope, Early Literacy, and the Child study of disabled children).

The fieldwork lab is working in the area of methods development and implementation of EthnoNotes, a web-based database system for the preparation, storage, coding, analysis and output of qualitative and quantitative data.  This work includes making the EthnoNotes system widely available and accessible at low cost, consulting on the use of the system for a wide range of social science research studies, and disseminating information on its use.  The Lab currently is funded by NICHD as a core facility within the MRRC.

Weisner has ongoing collaborations across the Semel Institute with the Center for Health Services (Prof. Ken Wells, Director), and the Center for Community Health (Prof. Mary Jane Rotheram), and the The Center for Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities  (Fieldwork lab core facility). Weisner is affiliated with the Culture, Brain, and Development program (CBD) housed in Anthropology and  Psychology at UCLA (Clark Barrett, Director).

External to UCLA, Weisner is a member of the research advisory board of Public/Private Ventures, a policy research organization based in Philadelphia.  He also has participated as a member of the advisory group for several NIH-funded grants over the  past five years, such as studies of family adaptation to mental  health concerns in youth, effects  on  children and  parents  of moves out  of  poverty neighborhoods, immigrant cultural communities’ children in middle  schools in New York City, and a home visiting program in Milwaukee, WI.   He is on the advisory board of the NIFBE program through Osnabrueck University, Germany (Prof. Heidi Keller, Director).

He prepared a course on integrated qualitative and quantitative methods for the CDC, and presented this course there.  He is a Senior Program Advisor to the William T. Grant Foundation, and in that capacity works on grant reviews, program planning and Foundation initiatives, particularly in the areas of research on social settings and context, culture, and integrated mixed methods research.  He is past President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and as part of that role, is involved in the activities of the American Anthropological Association.   He is an elected member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD).  He is on the Board of ChildFund, International.