Thomas S Weisner

About

Thomas S. Weisner, PhD, is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus at UCLA, where he has taught since 1971. He served as the director of the Center for Culture and Health at UCLA through 2014. His research and teaching interests encompass culture and human development, sibling and nonparental care of children, ecocultural theory and methods, and medical, psychological, and cultural studies of families and children at risk. Weisner has conducted fieldwork with diverse populations including the Abaluyia of Western Kenya and Nairobi, native Hawaiians, countercultural U.S. families, California families with children with disabilities and mental illness, families and children with autism in India, youth with ADHD in the U.S., Mexican-American adolescents and parents in Los Angeles, and working poor families in the U.S. His academic background includes a BA from Reed College and a PhD from Harvard University in Social Relations & Anthropology. Weisner is a prolific author and editor, with over 160 publications, and is known for integrating qualitative and quantitative research methods, emphasizing culturally and contextually rich, policy-informed evidence. He is also the co-developer and co-founder of the software Dedoose, which supports mixed methods research. Throughout his career, Weisner has received numerous honors, including fellowships, awards, and leadership roles in professional societies, contributing significantly to the fields of psychological and medical…

Research topics

• Medicine
• Family medicine
• Intensive care medicine
• Emergency medicine
• Medical emergency
• Gynecology

Selected publications

• A Qualitative Analysis of Contextual Factors Relevant to Suspected Late-Onset ADHD

  Journal of Attention Disorders · 2019-04-01 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access

  Objective: Recent studies suggest attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may emerge post-childhood. We integrate qualitative methods to systematically characterize contextual factors that may (a) delay identification of ADHD in childhood and (b) inform why ADHD symptoms emerge post-childhood. Method: Suspected late-onset ADHD cases from the local normative comparison group of the Multimodal Treatment Study of ADHD completed a qualitative interview (14 young adults and 7 caregivers). Int…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Meaning and Methods in the Study and Assessment of Attachment

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2017-11-10 · 24 citations

  book-chapter

  As originally conceived and still practiced today, attachment theory is limited in its ability to recognize and understand cross-cultural variations in human attachment systems, and it is restrictive in its inclusion of cross-species comparisons. This chapter argues that attachment must be reconceived to account for and include cross-cultural and cross-species perspectives. To provide a foundation for rethinking attachment, two universal functions of attachment systems are proposed: they provide…

  PublisherDOI

• The Qualitative Interview Study of Persistent and Nonpersistent Substance Use in the MTA: Sample Characteristics, Frequent Use, and Reasons for Use

  Journal of Attention Disorders · 2017-11-01 · 13 citations

  articleOpen access

  OBJECTIVE: To evaluate participants' perceptions about frequent use and reasons for substance use (SU) in the qualitative interview study, an add-on to the multimodal treatment study of ADHD (MTA). METHOD: Using the longitudinal MTA database, 39 ADHD cases and 19 peers with Persistent SU, and 86 ADHD cases and 39 peers without Persistent SU were identified and recruited. In adulthood, an open-ended interview was administered, and SU excerpts were indexed and classified to create subtopics (frequ…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Mixed Methods for Studies that Address Broad and Enduring Issues in Education Research

  Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2019-10-01 · 12 citations

  article

  Author(s): Weis, Lois; Eisenhart, Margaret; Duncan, Greg J; Albro, Elizabeth; Bueschel, Andrea Conklin; Cobb, Paul; Eccles, Jacquelynne; Mendenhall, Ruby; Moss, Pamela; Penuel, William; Ream, Robert K; Rumbaut, Rubén G; Sloane, Finbarr; Weisner, Thomas S; Wilson, James

  PublisherDOI

• Comparative Socialization Practices in Traditional and Alternative Families*

  2020-10-07 · 5 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Paternal grandparents of our alternative families were divorced more often than were the paternal grandparents of the traditional married families. Furthermore, the income of the traditional family increased slowly over time, and with a regularity that was absent in alternative families, even though in these, too, income increased with child age. However, exploration of the standard of living and finances of the participants revealed that the income equivalent of communal living group families w…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R01MH024947

  NIH · $66k · 1987

• NIH Grant P30HD004612

  NIH · $46.7M · 2015

• NIH Grant P01HD011944

  NIH · $13.6M · 2005

Frequent coauthors

• Richard L. Kravitz

  University of California, Davis

  30 shared

• M. Cameron Hay

  29 shared

• Saskia Subramanian

  28 shared

• Naihua Duan

  28 shared

• Edmund J. Niedzinski

  American River College

  26 shared

• Ronald Gallimore

  13 shared

• Peter S. Jensen

  13 shared

• Edward D. Lowe

  13 shared

Awards & honors

• Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sc…
• Member of the MacArthur Foundation research network on succe…
• President and Distinguished Research Award, Society for Psyc…
• 2017 interdisciplinary research award from the Society for R…

Similar researchers at University of California, Los Angeles

• Elinor Ochsh-63
• P. Jeffrey Brantinghamh-59
• Philippe Bourgoish-55