Jennifer Lansford

About

Jennifer Lansford is the S. Malcolm Gillis Distinguished Research Professor of Public Policy and a Research Professor in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. She has been conducting in-depth research on children and families in nine countries around the world. During the pandemic, her research focus expanded to explore how COVID-19 relates to young people and their parents' mental health. She is also the Director of the Center for Child and Family Policy and an affiliate of the Duke Global Health Institute and the Center for Child and Family Policy.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Political Science
• Clinical psychology
• Medicine
• Social psychology
• Social Science
• Sociology
• Psychiatry
• Internal medicine

Selected publications

• Annual Research Review: Cross‐cultural similarities and differences in parenting

  Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry · 2021 · 283 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  This article reviews contemporary research on cross-cultural similarities and differences in parenting. The article begins by providing a definition of culture and how both parenting and culture can change over historical time. The article then presents some classic theoretical frameworks for understanding culture and parenting before considering why parenting may be similar across cultures and why parenting may be different across cultures. The article next turns to a review of cross-cultural s…

  DOI

• Effects of Parental Warmth and Behavioral Control on Adolescent Externalizing and Internalizing Trajectories Across Cultures

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2020 · 105 citations

  We investigated the effects of parental warmth and behavioral control on externalizing and internalizing symptom trajectories from ages 8 to 14 in 1,298 adolescents from 12 cultural groups. We did not find that single universal trajectories characterized adolescent externalizing and internalizing symptoms across cultures, but instead found significant heterogeneity in starting points and rates of change in both externalizing and internalizing symptoms across cultures. Some similarities did emerg…

  DOI

• Adolescence Amid a Pandemic: Short‐ and Long‐Term Implications

  Journal of Research on Adolescence · 2021 · 70 citations

  Members of the Society for Research on Adolescents COVID-19 Response Team offer this commentary to accompany this special issue of the Journal of Research on Adolescence regarding the impact of the pandemic on adolescents' social, emotional, and academic functioning. In addition to outlining the critical need for scholarly collaboration to address the global impact of this crisis on adolescent development, we argue that a broad investigative lens is needed to guide research and recovery efforts…

  DOI

• Cross-Cultural Examination of Links between Parent–Adolescent Communication and Adolescent Psychological Problems in 12 Cultural Groups

  Journal of Youth and Adolescence · 2020 · 70 citations

  Internalizing and externalizing problems increase during adolescence. However, these problems may be mitigated by adequate parenting, including effective parent-adolescent communication. The ways in which parent-driven (i.e., parent behavior control and solicitation) and adolescent-driven (i.e., disclosure and secrecy) communication efforts are linked to adolescent psychological problems universally and cross-culturally is a question that needs more empirical investigation. The current study use…

  DOI

• Longitudinal associations between mothers’ and fathers’ anger/irritability expressiveness, harsh parenting, and adolescents’ socioemotional functioning in nine countries.

  Developmental Psychology · 2020 · 70 citations

  The present study examines parents' self-efficacy about anger regulation and irritability as predictors of harsh parenting and adolescent children's irritability (i.e., mediators), which in turn were examined as predictors of adolescents' externalizing and internalizing problems. Mothers, fathers, and adolescents (N = 1,298 families) from 12 cultural groups in 9 countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and United States) were interviewed when children were…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Childhood, Adolescence, and Covid-Related Risk and Protective Factors in the Development of Adjustment in Early Adulthood Across Cultures

  NIH · $13.8M · 2007–2027

• NIH Grant R03TW008141

  NIH · $113k · 2012

Frequent coauthors

• Kenneth A. Dodge

  Center for Child and Family Health

  442 shared

• Marc H. Bornstein

  Institute for Fiscal Studies

  277 shared

• Ann T. Skinner

  Duke University

  226 shared

• Laurence Steinberg

  172 shared

• Suha M. Al‐Hassan

  Emirates College for Advanced Education

  168 shared

• Kirby Deater‐Deckard

  University of Massachusetts Amherst

  163 shared

• Dario Bacchini

  University of Naples Federico II

  162 shared

• Concetta Pastorelli

  Sapienza University of Rome

  157 shared

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Helen F. Laddh-69
• Garry S. Mitchellh-45
• Lisa A. Gennetianh-41