Just got back from the Society for Research on Adolescence conference in Baltimore. I added another Pizzeria Uno to my national dining list (see earlier posting on my favorite Ann Arbor restaurants) and also took the tour at the Baltimore Orioles' baseball park at Camden Yards.
As I've alluded to previously in connection with the overlap between the social and personality psychology programs at Michigan and the joint psychology-social work programs, boundaries between intellectually kindred programs tend to be very permeable. This is also the case, to some extent, for the social and developmental psychology programs, with extensive research in social development.
I personally was a late comer to the social-developmental intersection, in fact not until my postdoctoral work at the Research Institute on Addictions in Buffalo from 1991-1997. It was there that I applied my social psychology training to the study of adolescent and young-adult drinking and really began incorporating literatures in adolescent development and family studies into my research. The first SRA conference I attended was in 1996, and this research track propelled me to a faculty position in Human Development and Family Studies at Texas Tech University.
Back when I was in grad school at Michigan from 1984-1989, I related to the developmental psychology students pretty much exclusively on a social/collegial basis. Now when we see each other, we talk about common research interests.
Jacque (pronounced Jackie) Eccles, who has spent most of her 30-year faculty career at Michigan, continues to lead an extensive program of studies involving numerous graduate students and postdocs under the rubric of the Gender & Achievement Research Program (GARP). Not only that, but Jacque served this past biennium as the President of SRA.
I ran into several current and former GARP researchers at the conference. The first person I always look for at SRA is Bonnie Barber, with whom I was friends not only during graduate school at Michigan, but also as undergraduates at UCLA (the Michigan-UCLA connection, of which Jacque Eccles is also a part, is a topic on which I plan to do a future entry). Bonnie has been at the University of Arizona for the last several years, and also remains an "affiliate" to GARP according to the aformentioned GARP web link. I also saw Jan Jacobs, now a Vice-Provost at Penn State and also a GARP affiliate.
Other GARP researchers and affiliates I saw (including some I met for the first time) included Oksana Malanchuk (who overlapped with me in the social psych grad program), Katie Jodl, Steve Peck, Robert Roeser, Mina Vida (web links for these individuals are available at the GARP site), and Pamela Frome.
I also had a chance to visit briefly with Christy Miller Buchanan, who was in the same course with me on socialization at UM (taught by Joe Veroff and Libby Douvan). Among Christy's numerous publications, she authored the following major one with Jacque Eccles that I use as lecture material in my Problems of Adolescence course at Texas Tech:
Buchanan, C. M., Eccles, J. S., & Becker, J. B. (1992). Are adolescents the victims of raging hormones?: Evidence for activational effects of hormones on moods and behavior at adolescence. Psychological Bulletin, 111, 62-107.
Another contemporary of mine from grad school days I saw was Liz Mazur. We entered the same year, so presumably took first-year proseminar and stats together.
Also, I saw two leading researchers who study longitudinal change in adolescent problem behaviors, Wayne Osgood (another UCLA-Michigan person), who was a Research Scientist in the UM's Institute for Social Research on Marty Gold's delinquency project in the 1980s and is now at Penn State, and John Schulenberg, who since 1991 has been with UM's Monitoring the Future study of high school drug use.
Lastly, to close out this maize-and-blue weekend, I met an interesting person sitting in the very next seat to me on the flight from Baltimore to Dallas-Ft. Worth (a leading connecting hub). He looked to be reading some academic-type papers, so I asked him if he indeed was an academic. The gentleman, named James Adams, turned out to be a political science professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara and a Michigan Ph.D. at that! He noted that he had taken a group behavior class from social psychologist Gene Burnstein while at UM.