Research Spotlight: Dr. Emily Weiss

An Interview with Emily Weiss, Assistant Professor of Educational Evaluation, Statistics and Measurement, Educational Psychology

Can you tell us about a new research project you are working on?

I’m excited to work with some external colleagues to think about how the home psychosocial environment shapes children’s well-being and school-related outcomes in rural Northern Ghana.  In some ways, it’s a follow-up to a study we just concluded on children’s behavioral adjustment with the same sample. We have parents’ reports on a number of constructs relating to their mental health, parenting beliefs and expectations, and interactions with their children.  It will be interesting to see how these dynamics play out in this relatively understudied population.   

What kind of methodological and theoretical approaches do you use? 

I primarily work with latent variable models, especially person-oriented approaches, which, to some extent, can be considered both a collection of methods and a theoretical orientation. Most of my work centers on conceptualizing and measuring psychological constructs for which we have no obvious measuring tape while digging into the complexity of interindividual and intraindividual differences in how those constructs manifest. I’m also very influenced by bioecological and cultural-ecological frameworks for understanding human development in context. 

What’s next for you in terms of research or this project?

We need to decide on an analytic strategy! Much of what I do is descriptive and exploratory, informed by theory but not designed to explicitly test the theory, and this project is no exception.  I have a few ideas of competing approaches, and we’ll see which one makes the most theoretical and empirical sense.