Publications by authors named "Sanford Braver"

We applaud the effort to draw attention to generalizability concerns in twenty-first-century psychological research. Yet we do not feel that a pessimistic perspective is warranted. We outline a continuum of available methodological tools and perspectives, including incremental steps and meta-analytic approaches that can be readily and easily deployed by researchers to advance generalizability claims in a forward-looking manner.

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Drawing on five waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; mean age of wave 1 [Mage_W1] = 12.89, standard deviation [SD] = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.

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Petitions by custodial parents to relocate children away from non-custodial parents present difficult choices for family courts. In the current study, the sample (N = 81) was randomly recruited through the children's schools according to the following criteria: Children were 12 years old and at the time resided primarily with their mothers; mothers had been living with a male partner "acting in a father role" for at least the previous year. Thirty-eight children had been separated by more than an hour's drive from their biological fathers due to either their mothers or fathers relocating.

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The public health impact of evidence-based, preventive parenting interventions has been severely constrained by low rates of participation when interventions are delivered under natural conditions. It is critical that prevention scientists develop effective and feasible parent engagement methods. This study tested video-based methods for engaging parents into an evidence-based program for divorcing parents.

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We examined the mediational roles of multiple types of adolescents' emotional security in relations between multiple aspects of the interparental relationship and adolescents' mental health from ages 13 to 16 (N = 392). General marital quality, nonviolent parent conflict, and physical intimate partner violence independently predicted mental health. Security in the father-adolescent relationship, over and above security with the mother and security in regard to parent conflict, mediated the link from general marital quality to adolescents' mental health.

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We studied young adolescents' seeking out support to understand conflict with their co-resident fathers/stepfathers and the cognitive and affective implications of such support-seeking, phenomena we call guided cognitive reframing. Our sample included 392 adolescents ( = 12.5, 52.

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Little attention has been paid to how early adolescents make attributions for their fathers' behavior. Guided by symbolic interaction theory, we examined how adolescent gender, ethnicity, family structure, and depressive symptoms explained attributions for residential father behavior. 382 adolescents, grouped by ethnicity (European American, Mexican American) and family structure (intact, stepfamilies), reported attributions for their fathers' positive and negative behaviors.

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The current crisis in scientific psychology about whether our findings are irreproducible was presaged years ago by Tversky and Kahneman (1971), who noted that even sophisticated researchers believe in the fallacious Law of Small Numbers-erroneous intuitions about how imprecisely sample data reflect population phenomena. Combined with the low power of most current work, this often leads to the use of misleading criteria about whether an effect has replicated. Rosenthal (1990) suggested more appropriate criteria, here labeled the continuously cumulating meta-analytic (CCMA) approach.

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We evaluated maternal gatekeeping attitudes as a mediator of the relation between marital problems and father-child relationships in 3 waves when children were in Grades 7-10. We assessed each parent's contribution to the marital problems experienced by the couple. Findings from mediational and cross-lagged structural equation models revealed that increased marital problem behaviors on the part of mothers at Wave 1 predicted increased maternal gatekeeping attitudes at Wave 2, which in turn predicted decreased amounts of father-adolescent interaction at Wave 3.

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This article reports on the development of a brief 15-item parent-report risk index (Child Risk Index for Divorced or Separated Families; CRI-DS) to predict problem outcomes of children who have experienced parental divorce. A series of analyses using 3 data sets were conducted that identified and cross-validated a parsimonious set of items representing parent report of child behavior problems and family level risk and protective factors, each of which contributed to the predictive accuracy of the index. The index predicted child behavior outcomes and substance abuse problems up to 6 years later.

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The current study examined the associations between child mental health problems and the quality of maternal and paternal parenting, and how these associations were moderated by three contextual factors: quality of parenting by the other parent, interparental conflict, and the number of overnights parents had with the child. Data for the current study came from a sample of divorcing families who are in high legal conflict over developing or maintaining a parenting plan following divorce. Analyses revealed that the associations between child mental health problems and positive maternal and paternal parenting were moderated by the quality of parenting provided by the other parent and by the number of overnights children spent with parents, but not by the level of interparental conflict.

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Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty items were found to coalesce into four factors (principles).

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This paper describes 27 years of collaborative activities between a team of researchers at the Arizona State University Prevention Research Center (ASU PRC) and the Maricopa County Family Court Division of the Superior Court. The complementary goals and expertise of the family court and prevention science are described as providing the foundation in which the missions of each can be advanced through collaborative activities. Four kinds of collaborative activities are described, which are differentiated according to the initiator of the activity and the primary immediate beneficiary.

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Most parent education programs are designed to improve child well-being following divorce by changing some aspect of parenting. However, there has been relatively little discussion of what aspects of parenting are most critical and the effectiveness of programs to change different aspects of parenting. This paper addresses these issues by: 1.

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The current study investigated how fathering behaviors (acceptance, rejection, monitoring, consistent discipline, and involvement) are related to preadolescent adjustment in Mexican American and European American stepfamilies and intact families. Cross-sectional data from 393 7 graders, their schoolteachers, and parents were used to examine links between different dimensions of fathering and adolescent outcomes. Following an ecological multivariate model, family SES, marital satisfaction, and mothers' parenting were included as controls.

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This study examined the relations between perceptions of 133 early adolescents in stepfamilies concerning how much they mattered to their stepfathers and nonresidential biological fathers and adolescents' mental health problems. Mattering to nonresidential biological fathers significantly negatively predicted mother-, teacher-, and youth-reported internalizing problems. Mattering to stepfathers significantly negatively predicted youth-reported internalizing and stepfather- and youth- reported externalizing problems.

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Participation rates in parenting programs are typically low, severely limiting the public health significance of these interventions. We examined predictors of parenting program enrollment and retention in a sample of 325 divorced mothers. Predictors included intervention timing and maternal reports of child, parent, family, and sociocultural risk factors.

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This paper attempts to identify the factors that explain service provider readiness to fund and implement evidence-based programs for children from divorcing families. Representatives from 128 family courts in United States counties were surveyed about the programs currently being offered for families of divorce and plans for changes in the services provided. Path analyses provided evidence that readiness to adopt effective programming was predicted by (a) the presence of champions who could potentially advocate for adoption, (b) county size, and (c) community attitudes favorable to services for families of divorce.

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The ability of parents to forge harmonious coparenting relationships following divorce is an important predictor of their children's long-term well-being. However, there is no convincing evidence that this relationship can be modified through intervention. A preventive intervention that we developed, Dads for Life (DFL), which targeted noncustodial parents as participants, has previously been shown in a randomized field trial to favorably impact child well-being.

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Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that "in general, what is good for the custodial parent is good for the child" (p.

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The measurement of subjective pain intensity continues to be important to both researchers and clinicians. Although several scales are currently used to assess the intensity construct, it remains unclear which of these provides the most precise, replicable, and predictively valid measure. Five criteria for judging intensity scales have been considered in previous research: ease of administration of scoring; relative rates of incorrect responding; sensitivity as defined by the number of available response categories; sensitivity as defined by statistical power; and the magnitude of the relationship between each scale and a linear combination of pain intensity indices.

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