Postdoctoral Research Associate
Contact:
246 Flanner Hall
shoegler@nd.edu
Biography
Sarah (Hoegler) Dennis received her PhD in developmental science, with a concentration in advanced quantitative methods, from the University of Notre Dame. She is a developmental psychologist whose research focuses on the mechanisms through which family relationships impact children’s development, as well as the role of exposure to stressors such as violence and trauma. Her prior work has focused on translational efforts toward designing, implementing, and evaluating preventive interventions for at-risk families, including an emphasis on supporting marital and father-child relationships. One of her main research interests is in understanding both the unique characteristics of fathers and the interactive effects of fathers and mothers and their parenting. She is also interested in how the characteristics and effects of fathering change over development and across cultures.
Toward understanding cross-cultural differences, she has helped develop a mixed methods study examining family and community security in youth in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. Sarah has served as data analyst on this project, which additionally focuses on the impacts of community and gang violence on youth development. She is especially interested in the ways that family relationships may buffer children from the effects of contexts of violence. To this end, her research has further expanded toward understanding positive developmental outcomes in youth exposed to sectarian violence and political tension in Belfast, with a particular focus on the role of father presence and youth religiosity. In this work, she hopes to identify youth- and family-level protective factors that can be leveraged in future interventions with violence-exposed youth. She has continued to broaden the cultural contexts of her research, collaborating with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health to explore the effects of divorce on fathers and the father-child relationship. She also consults on a mixed methods research project examining the experiences of stigmatized ethnic and religious minorities in Istanbul, Turkey. Sarah loves to cultivate experience and expertise in advanced quantitative data analyses, which has resulted in collaborations with quantitative psychology faculty and graduate students on projects involving Dynamic Structural Equation Modeling, Mixture Modeling, and other approaches.
As a postdoctoral researcher at Notre Dame, Sarah continues to pursue her interests in understanding the protective effects of parents on their children’s development, particularly in stressful and high-risk contexts, by working with Dr. Lee Gettler on a collaborative project with the Beacon NICU (with funding from the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society’s Health Equity Data Lab and the Berthiaume Institute for Precision Health at Notre Dame). This project focuses on examining the experiences of families and their babies, focusing on parental mental well-being, social support, and physiology. She likewise has continued to examine the father-child relationship across cultural contexts by working with Dr. Gettler on data from a multi-generational study of fathers from Cebu City, Philippines. Additionally, Sarah is investigating the effects of the marital relationship and interactive effects of fathers and mothers through collaboration with both Dr. Gettler and Dr. Mark Cummings; this strand of work particularly focuses on the role of fathers’ and mothers’ autonomy supportive parenting in youth emotion regulation and well-being. Sarah is also excited to continue to pursue her research interests – which lie at the intersection of applied longitudinal data analyses, developmental science, and promotion of mental and physical health outcomes in children and families – through collaboration with scholars from the Lucy Family Institute for Data & Society.
Department:
Advisor:
Lee Gettler, Department Chair and Professor for the Department of Anthropology