Thomas S. Weisner

PROFESSOR IN RESIDENCE

B.A., Reed College, 1965; Ph.D., Harvard 1973

Personal Homepage

Class Websites

Office: C8-678 NPI, 760 Westwood Plaza, Dept of Psychiatry
Phone: 310-794-3632
Fax: 310-794-6297
E-mail: tweisner@ucla.edu

Mailing Address:

Research Interests

Culture, human development and the family; children & families at risk; mixed methods; evidence-informed policy; Africa, United States.

Selected Publications

Duncan, G., Huston, A., & Weisner, T. (2007). Higher Ground: New Hope for working families and their children. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Yoshikawa, H., Weisner, T. S., & Lowe, E. (Eds.). (2006). Making it work: Low-wage employment, family life and child development. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Skinner, Debra, & Thomas S. Weisner. 2007. Sociocultural Studies of Families of Children with Intellectual Disabilities. Mental Retardation and Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews 13: 302 - 312

Yoshikawa, H., Weisner, T.S., Kalil, A., Way, N. 2008. Mixing Qualitative and Quantitative Research in Developmental Science: Uses and Methodological Choices. Developmental Psychology44(2):344-354.

East, Patricia L., Thomas S. Weisner, & Barbara Reyes. (2006). Youths’ caretaking of their adolescent sisters’ children. Its costs and benefits for youths’ development. Applied Developmental Science, 10:2, 86-95.

Matheson, C., Olson, R., & Weisner, T.S. 2007. A good friend is hard to find: Friendship among adolescents with disabilities. American Journal of Mental Retardation

Weisner, Thomas S., & Lowe, Edward. 2005. Globalization and the Psychological Anthropology of Childhood and Adolescence. In Conerly Casey & Robert Edgerton, eds. A companion to psychological anthropology: modernity and psychocultural change. Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, U.K. Pp. 315 – 336.

Bernheimer, Lucinda B., and Thomas S. Weisner. In press, 2007. “Let me just tell you what I do all day…”: The family story at the center of intervention research and practice. Infants & Young Children Issue 20:3, July.

Lowe, E. Weisner, T., Geis, S. & Huston, A. Child Care Instability and the Effort to Sustain a Working Daily Routine: Evidence from the New Hope Ethnographic Study of Low-Income Families. 2005. IN C. Cooper, C. Garcia-Coll, T. Bartko, H. Davis, C. Chatman, Eds. Hills of Gold: Diverse Pathways Through Middle Childhood. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Pp. 121 – 144.

Weisner, Thomas S., Ed. 2005. Discovering successful pathways in children's development: New methods in the study of childhood and family life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weisner, T.S. 2005. Attachment as a cultural and ecological problem with pluralistic solutions. Human Development 48 (1-2), pp. 89 – 94.

Weisner, T. S., Matheson, C., Coots, J, and Bernheimer, L. 2005. Sustainability of daily routines as a family outcome. In Ashley Maynard and Mary Martini, Eds. The Psychology of Learning in Cultural Context. New York: Kluwer/Plenum. Pp. 41 – 73.

Weisner, T.S., C. Bradley, and P. Kilbride (eds.). 1997. African Families and the Crisis of Social Change. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.

Bernheimer, L., Weisner, T. S., & Lowe, E. D. (2003). Impacts of children with troubles on working poor families: Experimental and mixed-method evidence. Mental Retardation, 41(6), 403-419.

Lowe, E., & Weisner, T. S. (2004). "You have to push it -- who's gonna raise your kids?": Situating child care in the daily routines of low-income families. Children and Youth Services Review, 26, 143-171.

Okami, P., Weisner, T. S., and Olmstead, R. (2002). Outcome correlates of parent-child bedsharing: An 18-year longitudinal study. Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics Vol. 23 (4), pp. 244 - 253.

Weisner, T.S. (2001). The American dependency conflict: Continuities and discontinuities in behavior and values of
countercultural parents and their children. Ethos. 29 (3): 271 - 295

Weisner, T. S. (2001). Anthropological aspects of childhood. In International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Vol 3 (pp. 1697 - 1701). N. J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes (editors).
Pergamon, Oxford.

Daley, Tamara, & Weisner, Thomas S. (2003). "I Speak a Different Dialect": Teen Explanatory Models of Difference and Disability. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 17 (1): 25 - 48.

Weisner, T.S. (2002). Ecocultural understanding of children's developmental pathways. Human Development 45 (4): 275-281.

Lieber, Eli, Weisner, Thomas S., & Presley, Matthew. 2003.. EthnoNotes: An Internet-Based Fieldnote Management Tool. Field Methods 15 (4: 405 – 425.

Grants

FELLOWSHIPS AND RESEARCH GRANTS RECEIVED – CURRENT (2003 – 2007)

1 R01 HD36038 (A.C. Huston PI, TSW co-PI)
04/01/03-03/31/07 10%

$422,116 (Total Direct Costs)

$90,867 (Current Year Direct Costs)

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Income and Employment Effects on Children and Families This proposal is assessing the impact on family functioning and child well-being of the New Hope Project, a 3-year random-assignment experiment designed to test the effectiveness of a multifaceted employment-based anti-poverty program for families who are economically poor. Weisner heads up the collection of data and analyses for the ethnographic component.

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5 P30 HD004612 (T.S. Weisner core co-PI)
08/01/05-07/31/10 10%

$63,232 (Current Year Direct Costs)

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development

Core: Field Work Training and Qualitative Data
This core grant provides training and data analysis assistance for studies using integrated and mixed research methods.

Role: PI on core support.

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068835 (J. Farver/C. Lonigan/T.S. Weisner, CO-PI'S)
10/01/01-09/30/07 5%
NSF $619,962 (Total Direct Costs)

$90,592 (Current Year Direct Costs)

Enhancing Literary Outcomes for Young Children

To study school and home-based interventions in enhancing the literacy outcomes of high-risk, pre-school children in Head Start programs. Qualitative data collected from parents.

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The Local Knowledge/Evidence Farming Study 11/06 – 10/08

Co-PI: Weisner, PI’s: Naihua Duan & Richard Kravitz
Funding: Pfizer Corp. $100,000

With Naihua Duan, Richard Kravitz, and Saskia Subramanian, Weisner is collaborating in a study of how local knowledge might be brought together, and made readily available to practitioners for use in their clinical practices. This study, which has just been launched (October 2006), will use focus groups, in-depth qualitative informational conversations, and ethnography.

Awards

President, Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2005 - 2007

Lester Prize, Princeton University, for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations & Labor Economics, 2007

Grad Students

Nat Kendall-Taylor, Eleanor Carter (chair); Megan Mulet; Joe Park; Xialei Wu (member)

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