Therapist4Chnge said:
At first glance that sounds like a better fit for a Marriage and Family Ph.D. or related program
I have talked about this briefly in a previous thread and I took a look at some of these programs but I find them kind of not "scientific enough" (which is also in general my concern with Marriage and Family PhD prgrams, they appear to focus more on the applied aspect rather than the scientific even though they are PhD pograms.
standbyme said:
try deborah jones at unc-chapel hill. also i think there was a researcher at vanderbilt that studied maternal depression. patricia brennan and sherryl goodman at emory university. andrea chronis at umaryland. basically, just keep looking, there are definitely researchers in that field out there. you might also want to generalize to parent-child relationships and psychopathology outcomes, both child and parent.
Thanks, I looked at them but they also seem to focus more on the effect on young children/adolescents while I am more interested in the long term effects (hence when the children become adults, etc)
psychanon said:
That's a bit too specific. That's, like, a dissertation topic (and honestly, it sounds suspiciously like a "me-serach" topic). You might want something like effects of parental psychopathology on children (which there is a HUGE literature on) etc.
Well, actually, that lets me feel a bit better. So, you think that I am too specific? But then again, like mentioned above, yeah, it's quite easy to find professors who are interested in the effects on children but not so much adults.
You could always narrow your scope with your own research.
Can you do that if the professor you're working with in Grad school doesn't do research on, let's say, adults but children? I'm still kinda oblivious when it comes to all that grad school stuff
"nononora" said:
Instead of looking for professors at schools you'd like to go to, you could do a lit search (which you probably need to do at some point for your honors thesis) and Google the authors of papers on topics that interest you to find out where they do their research.
Thanks, that's an excellent idea.
Like t4c mentioned, it'd be helpful to specify the parental mental illness too, because the more severe ones are not conducive to marriage and raising a family.
Yeah, that's what I mean when I say that I'm not to find of the Marriage and Family Programs.
Also, what kind of effect are you looking for? Developmental delays? Susceptibility? If you can find papers on the topic, you've found your professors!
Since I'm "only" a junior now, I have about year to figure out exactly what I would like to do.
for the past year I've worked in a lab that dealt with child-parent- relationships and how transition into high school affects their relationship. So, yeah in a certain way, I am interested how the illness would affect the person throughout their life, socially (i.e. romantic relationships), mental development, susceptibility, etc.
Ollie123 said:
I think the problem is your topic is both too specific and too broad at the same time. You won't find anyone researching "just" that because its essentially covered under one longitudinal study, but the fact that you don't specify a disorder makes it even less likely to find someone. We're a specialist field so "General psychopathology" researchers are kind of rare. There ARE plenty of family researchers though, who study things similar to this. Keep in mind when people say they look for match, we are talking about someone who does work that is SIMILAR not someone who is already doing the research you want to do. Doing research someone else is doing is not good, you want research that COMPLEMENTS theirs, expands on it, etc.
I haven't thought about a specific disorder yet but I belive that should one of the smaller problems.
Also, it calms me down a little bit that "Match" doesn't have mean 100% same research interest. Based on what I read I always thought that the closer the interests the better the chance of being accepted.
