RESEARCH INTERESTS

My research is concentrated on process of personal change and identity development. I am intrigued by how people develop new understandings of how to live in the world, how these understandings are consolidated into new identities, and how these processes are influenced by interpersonal and cultural systems. My research on these processes can best be categorized within three main areas: the study of psychotherapeutic change, the construction of gender, and domestic violence.

My longstanding program of research has been the study of personal change and related cognitive, emotional and philosophical processes within a psychotherapeutic context. I embarked on this line of research interested in the functions of silence in psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is one of the few venues where people in our culture can comfortably come together and share contemplative silences. The structuring of silence in psychotherapy can be thought to hold similarities to the silences within meditation, art, or prayer in that it provides a supportive space for introspection -- potentially leading to increased wisdom and personal insight.

Using a variety of methods, I have examined how clients and therapists co-construct changes in clients’ functioning. Particularly, I am interested in the study of factors common across psychotherapy orientations. I have conducted research on such varied processes as the influences of silences, narrative, metaphor, meaning-making, cognitive reflexivity, curiosity, introspection, emotion, and insight. Through analyses of interviews of therapists' and clients' and of therapeutic discourse, I seek to identify principles of therapeutic change that are sensitive to the interpersonal context of therapy. In pursuing this work, I have co-authored two psychotherapy process measures, both of which have been used independently in universities in Europe and North America. Most recently, my research team and I have been conducting effectiveness research, looking at the role of silence in psychotherapy, funded by a $10,000 grant from The University of Memphis, and studying the role of emotion as a form of meaning in the process of change.

In another area of research, I study the gendered experience of self and the influences that gender has upon the construction of identity. I began this research interested in the affect of the media upon gender construction and presentation in relation to the popularization of eating disorders. More recently, I have begun to study how gender is constructed within gay and lesbian subcultures - specifically, the ways gender can unfold even within communities of a single sex. This work sheds light on the social processes that generate and maintain gender identities and how gender identities and performances can be subject to change in interaction with both cultural and internal forces.

My research on the interaction of domestic violence and faith began when I became a principal investigator on a $400,000 grant from LeBonheur Health Systems. I was a principle investigator on a systems-level project that consisted of three interview-based studies, with religious leaders, victims and perpetrators within Shelby County. Analyses of these findings generated items for a large-scale telephone survey study, on which I was a co-principle investigator, investigating issues of domestic violence, sexism, health and faith, collected from a random sample of 3000 women in Memphis. Researchers at the University of Tennessee, at the University of Memphis counseling and psychology departments, and in private practice joined together in this multi-level multi-methods study. This research has pointed out ways in which faith beliefs and institutions can both relieve and exacerbate the problem of intimate partner violence.

Within my research endeavors, I regularly utilize both quantitative and qualitative methodologies. I am intrigued with models of research design and analysis and enjoy using a plurality of methodological approaches within these two broad rubrics. As well, I have a strong and abiding interest in the philosophy of human science and enjoy teaching and writing on this subject. In my approach to research, I tend to initiate my inquiries with a qualitative project to develop hypotheses and models grounded in specific populations, and then test these models using quantitative models of analyses.

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