My Research
Because my training is in child clinical psychology,
the research I do is different than the research carried out by other members
of the Psychology Department. Whereas many of my colleagues are able to utilize
undergraduates as participants in their research, the three samples of
participants I use in my research are: children with autism, children who have
been exposed to domestic violence, and children who
have been abused. I have been actively involved in research at Willamette since 1992, the year I joined the faculty, and have
both published and presented my work regularly.
I conduct research that complements and enlivens my teaching. Whenever possible, I try to involve students
in my research and have been fortunate to have involved a number of great
students over the years. I also take great pride in supervising students' own
original research in areas related to child clinical psychology.
For a complete overview of my research, please click
on the link to my Vita on the home page.
Below I will summarize some of the research I have conducted in each of
my three main areas of research.
Autism Research
My interest in autism research began when I was
asked by my husband, Steve, to assess the intelligence of children with autism
in association with work he was doing through his research center, the Center
for the Study of Autism. Often, parents
would ask Steve about who could assess their child with autism. Steve would
refer the families to me. I used to conduct
thorough assessments of the children and discovered a very interesting finding:
my assessments of the intelligence of the children with autism did not
necessarily coincide with the results of prior assessments; my assessments
often revealed that the child was more intelligent than had previously been
determined. This led me to think about
the differences in how I approached the intellectual assessment of a child with
autism in relation to how other evaluators had.
The first thing I noticed was that most evaluations of children with
autism relied on verbally-based or timed measures of intelligence. Children with autism often have communication
and attention impairments that make reliance on these measures inappropriate. The measures I used were nonverbal and untimed, and it seemed that this was accounting for the
differences in the assessment outcomes.
While I discontinued assessing children with autism clinically after the
birth of my second child in 1995 (one only has so much time in the day!), I
continued investigating issues in the assessment of intelligence in individuals
with autism.
Two papers I published assessed the appropriateness
of using the Test of Nonverbal Intelligence (TONI) in individuals with
autism. The first paper was published in
1998 in Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities and
presents data from a study in which we assessed the intelligence of over 250
individuals with autism. The results indicated that the average score on the
TONI was approximately 90 (in the low average range of intelligence). We found that approximately 20% of our sample
scored in the mentally retarded range; this was considerably lower than reports
from other studies using more verbally-based or timed measures of
intelligence. For this study, we
attempted to assess nearly 400 individuals–thus, the data collection process
spanned many years from 1992-1997.
However, we were lucky enough to piggyback on the data collection
process of another study. This is why we
were able to obtain such a large sample in a relatively short period of
time. Early reports from this study were
presented in 1992 and 1994 at the Western Psychological Association conference.
The second paper, also published in Focus on
Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities in 1998, reports a replication
study using a sample of autistic individuals from Taiwan. We created
subsets from the U.S. data that matched a sample of Taiwanese
participants and compared the two samples to see if we could replicate our
findings from the first study. Our
results indicated striking consistency across the two studies, despite the fact
that the sample from Taiwan was significantly less verbal than the U.S. sample In addition to an assessment of the utility
of the TONI for individuals with autism, both TONI studies investigated the
variables that predicted scores on the TONI including verbal ability,
attention, and level of autism. We found
that as verbal ability and attention increased, so did intelligence
scores. Somewhat paradoxically, moderate
levels of autism predicted higher intelligence scores whereas low or severe
levels of autism predicted lower scores.
I have continued my research regarding the
relationship between autism and intelligence.
I recently completed a research project in which I investigated whether
real-world knowledge deficits affect the determination of intelligence in
individuals with autism. The short
answer is: yes! This research is in press at Focus on Autism and Other Developmental Disabilities. Another study, under review at Focus, investigated the claims in the
literature that the majority of individuals with autism are also mentally
retarded. This research was archival in nature and involved reading hundreds of
journal articles, chapters in edited books, and books to find any that made
claims about the prevalence rate of mental retardation in persons with autism
and then to evaluate the evidence in support of those claims.
MHK Project
A second line of research in which I am involved is the
Moms Helping Kids (MHK) project, an intervention developed by my colleague at San Diego State University, Audrey Hokoda, Ph.D. and
myself in 1994. The goal of MHK is to
educate nonabusive moms on how to best help their
children deal with the effects of domestic violence. The program is a 12-week educational program
for the mothers and their children.
Prior to the program, moms and children complete multiple questionnaires
assessing behaviors and feelings in response to domestic violence. These measures are again completed at the
conclusion of the 12-week program and again 12 weeks after that. The MHK program itself couches the effects of
domestic violence in the framework of a response to trauma. Mothers are taught to recognize signs of
trauma in their children as well as to address specific behaviors that result
from this (such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem).
Dr. Hokoda and I have
submitted the MHK curriculum for publication consideration to Haworth Press, Inc.
We also have a paper in press at the Journal
of Family Violence that examines the differences in responses to domestic
violence between Latina and non-Latina women. Our findings indicated that Latina women have greater difficulties following domestic
violence than do non-Latina women when both groups were matched for the
severity of the violence to which they were exposed and time away from their
abuser. Currently, we are continuing to
work on manuscripts that report on the efficacy of the MHK program. One manuscript is nearly completed and is a report of
the evaluation of the MHK program in Mexico City. We will
also be writing a report of our findings with a larger sample of women and
children both in the U.S. and in Mexico. We have presented our MHK research previously at
the 4th International Conference on Children Exposed to Family
Violence in 1998, at the 2nd
biannual conference on Domestic Violence, Washington County, OR in 1996
(an invited talk), and at the 21st annual Feminist Psychology Conference
of the Association for Women in Psychology also in 1996.
Research on Abused Children
The third strand of my research agenda involves
studies related to the abuse of children. Debbie Joa,
intake coordinator at Liberty House, a child abuse assessment center, and I
recently completed a study evaluating the outcomes of children seen at Liberty House. Our study compared children seen at Liberty House to a control group of children obtained from
the Marion County District Attorney’s Office database. The children were matched on age of child and
the relationship of the child to the offender.
We also matched on sex of child where possible. Our key findings were that more cases were
filed with the DA if the child was seen at Liberty House; when cases were
filed, more counts were charged if the child was seen at Liberty House; for
filed cases, more perpetrators were found or pled guilty if the child was seen
at Liberty House; more cases were filed for 4-6 year olds and 12+ year olds if
the child was seen at Liberty House; and more counts were charged for biodads and stepdads if the child
was seen at Liberty House. This research has been recently published in Child Maltreatment, and Debbie and I are
planning on starting a study replicating and expanding this research soon. We have also presented the results of this
line of research at the Western Psychological Association conference and at the
APSAC Colloquium.