Those examining lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) sexual identity development have largely shifted away from testing stage models of the past (Cass, 1979; Coleman, 1982; Troiden, 1989) to understanding differences in the age and order of milestone occurrence and issues of timing. Examination of milestone attainment was more prevalent at the turn of the 21st century and thus less is known about milestone attainment among current cohorts of LGB identified young people. The goals of this dissertation were to 1) describe milestone attainment among a recent cohort of LGB identified young people, examining group differences, 2) examine the connection between age of milestone attainment and indicators of mental health and substance use, focusing on bias-based victimization as a potential moderator, 3) explore racism as a mediator to explain differences in age of milestone attainment among LGB young people of color. Three papers were produced using data from a three-site longitudinal panel study of risk and protective factors for suicide among LGB, transgender, and queer/questioning youth. Results indicated that age of milestone attainment for first label as LGB, first disclosure to another person, and first same-sex sexual experience were younger in this contemporary cohort of young people compared to results found in previous studies. However, few group differences were found. Additionally, associations were found between younger age of milestone attainment and more reports of substance use. Implications for health promotion and prevention programs as well as future research directions are discussed.

Service-dominant logic views a customer as a proactive entity who co-creates value through collaboration with other entities in a value creation network. Working from that perspective, the current study investigated antecedents and consequences of customer organizational citizenship behaviors (COCBs), which refers to voluntary and discretionary behaviors that help marketers such as service organizations. Employing social exchange theory and personality concepts, this study set out to explain factors that lead customers to perform COCBs for their service organizations. In addition, this study conceptualized COCB motivation as an antecedent of COCB. Simultaneously, customer co-creation value, satisfaction, and behavioral intentions were proposed as consequences of COCBs in the theoretical model. With an effort to fill the research gap pertaining to lack of scale items that measure COCBs, COCB motivation, and customer co-creation value, the present study employed a mixed methods approach based on both qualitative and quantitative research design. For the COCB and customer co-creation value construct, this study not only confirmed the measurability of the existing scale items but also found additional items, especially focusing on the offline service context. Additionally, scale items that measure COCB motivation, a construct that is newly proposed here, were developed and were categorized into four dimensions that represent COCB motivation - Self-enhancement, Personal principles, Desire to support the service organization, and Perceptions of the service organization's past performance. Data for hypotheses testing were collected via a web-based self-administered survey. Three versions of a questionnaire, based on three types of service organization, were used to elicit consumers' responses from a variety of service types. A total of 692 general U.S. consumers, who had had face-to-face interaction with service organizations in the prior six months, responded to the survey. The proposed hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling. In addition, to confirm whether there were differences in the relationships between proposed constructs among three types of service organizations, post-hoc analysis was conducted through multi-group analyses. The results of this study demonstrated the positive relationship between COCB motivation and COCBs. The results also provided support to the view that social exchange-based antecedents have strong positive impact on COCB motivation, and prosocial personality and proactive personality are important personality traits that stimulate customers to voluntarily participate in activities and/or tasks of the service organization. In addition, this study found that even though customers who participate in COCBs can perceive three types of co-creation value - economic co-creation value, individual co-creation value, and social co-creation value, they may be satisfied with service outcome and frontline employees only when they perceive individual co-creation value and social co-creation value. Furthermore, the findings of this study confirmed the spillover effect of transaction-specific satisfaction on overall satisfaction, which positively influences behavioral intentions such as intention to continue the relationship with the service organization and intention to recommend to other customers. Finally, the results of the post-hoc analysis revealed that there are no differences in most parts of the theoretical model across the three types of service organization except for four relationships - the impact of COCBs on social co-creation value, the impact of satisfaction with service outcome on satisfaction with service organization, the impact of satisfaction with frontline employees on satisfaction with service organization, and the impact of satisfaction with service organization on intention to recommend to other customers. Theoretical implications and managerial implications are discussed.

Infancy and toddlerhood is an important time for the development of emotion regulation, with interactions between parents and children critical to these processes. Negative parenting behaviors can have a deleterious impact on this development; however, for infants and toddlers in child care, the classroom environment, including teacher-child interactions, provides an important setting for emotional development and may serve as a protective factor when parenting risk at home is high. The aim of the three papers presented in this dissertation was to explore the potential for child care to act as a protective factor for infants and toddlers experiencing different dimensions of parenting risk that threaten emotion regulation development: minimal sensitivity and support, harsh and intrusive behaviors, and physical abuse and neglect. Results confirmed the negative impact of unsupportive, harsh, and intrusive parenting behaviors on emotion regulation, but child care was either insignificant in mitigating these effects or operated as a buffer for certain children only. Additionally, a review of the extant literature suggested that understanding the optimal caregiving experiences in child care that meet the unique regulatory needs of maltreated infants and toddlers is limited. Collectively, implications of these findings include the need to ensure measurement validity when assessing children’s experiences within child care, the importance of considering the interactive nature of child, parent, and child care factors, and the pressing need for more research regarding child care teachers' roles in facilitating emotional experiences in the classroom that meet the unique regulatory needs infants and toddlers facing risk at home.

Romantic relationship qualities are important for individuals' psychosocial adjustment. This dissertation focuses on how young adults' committed romantic relationships are related to experience of parental divorce and relationships with parents during adolescence. Also, how this relationship may be different by four dyads of parents and children - father/daughter, father/son, mother/daughter, and mother/son - is examined.The conceptual paper proposes parent-child relationships as a main family process affecting children's romantic relationships. Social learning theoretical perspectives is used as a guide that children observe, model, learn, and then apply the behaviors or patterns of relationships with parents to their own romantic relationships. Two potential roles of parent-child relationships are addressed in the dynamics among parental divorce, parent-child relationships, and children's romantic relationships. The first role of parent-child relationships is a mediation role between parental divorce and children's romantic relationships. The second role of parent-child relationships is a moderation role between parental divorce and children's romantic relationships. How one variable, parent-child relationships, can be a mediator as well as moderator is addressed in the conceptual paper. Also, the need to examine four dyads of parents and children in these models is addressed.Two empirical studies examine a potential mediation and a moderation model respectively. The data for these studies were taken from Wave 6 (high school senior) and Wave 8 (age 24) of the Michigan Study of Adolescent Life Transitions (MSALT). The mediation model is tested using a multi-group mediation model using SEM. The results suggest that there is indirect effect of parental divorce on children's romantic relationships, specifically for father-daughter dyads. The moderation model is tested using hierarchical regression analyses and the results show that there is interaction between parental divorce and relationships with parents. For example, relationships with fathers in always-married families are significantly related to children's satisfaction in their romantic relationships.In the conclusion chapter, implications of the findings, limitations and contribution of the studies, and direction for future research are addressed.

Relationship research on Mexican origin women often focuses on their ethnicity while ignoring other aspects of their lives. Mexican origin women are diverse and as researchers we need to study this diversity. Informed by Chicana Feminism, this dissertation examines the experiences of Mexican origin women in intimate relationship in the form of three manuscripts. My goal is to make Mexican origin women's voices more wholly heard in relationship research.The first manuscript is a conceptual one, in which I examine the shortcomings of relationship research on heterosexual Mexican origin women. Some scholars have regarded Mexican origin women as a "triple minority" (see Arellano & Ayala-Alcantar, 2004) due to their disadvantaged social locations in terms of gender, ethnicity, and social class. I argue that in order to fully understand the experiences of Mexican origin women, it is necessary to study the intersections in which they are situated. This manuscript critically examines how the intersection of gender, ethnicity, and class affects women's experiences in heterosexual intimate relationships.In the second manuscript, I examine Mexican origin women's perceptions of the division of childcare and how these perceptions influence evaluations of their romantic and parenting relationships. Results reveal women's perceptions of the division of childcare impact both their romantic and parenting relationship. The moderating effects of gender role attitudes are also investigated. Results demonstrate the diversity of Mexican origin women's experiences within families.Lastly, in the third manuscript, I explore the impact of structural, behavioral, and attitudinal familism on relationship conflict. Participants were 64 cohabiting or married couples of Mexican origin. Actor and partner effects of structural, behavioral, and attitudinal familism on relationship conflict were examined with a series of structural equation models using the Actor-Partner Interdependence Model (Kashy & Kenny, 2000; Kenny & Cook, 1999). Results reveal that higher levels of men's behavioral familism is associated with lower levels of relationship conflict. Furthermore, higher levels of men's structural and behavioral familism are also associated with lower levels of their partner's relationship conflict. Results suggest that structural and behavioral familism for men may promote healthy relationships, as evidenced by lower relationship conflict.

In two-parent families, the ability of parents to negotiate their roles as parents, reaching agreement in childrearing, and being cooperative in sharing parenting (i.e. coparenting), leads to positive family climate, which in turn, impacts positively on children´s social competence. Studies have shown these variables to be relevant for European-American parents. The role of parent's cultural values has received scarce attention in predicting coparental and familial functioning. Additionally, couple's similarity has been found to help explain coparental and familial functioning; however further exploration is needed. Using series of hierarchical multiple regressions as an exploratory form of path analysis, this study tested the connections among the cultural values of familism/respeto, and simpatia, with parental agreement in childrearing and cooperative coparenting (i.e. coparental functioning), and family climate (i.e. familial functioning) in explaining children social competence in a sample of Mexican immigrant parents. Analyses found that the cultural values of familism/respeto and simpatia impact positively coparental functioning within this ethnic group; although the impact is different for mothers and fathers. While simpatia predicted cooperative coparenting for mothers; familism/respeto predicted parental agreement for fathers at the trend level. Whereas parental agreement did predict coparenting for mothers, it was not predictive for fathers. Couples' similarity in culture values proved to have a minimal impact over coparental and familial functioning with a small, trend level effect from similarity in simpatia to cooperative coparenting. Regression analysis for mothers, fathers, and couples failed to predict children social competence. Mexican values of familism/respeto and simpatia play a role in explaining coparental functioning with Mexicans, albeit a different role for mothers and fathers. For mothers, endorsement of harmony and avoidance of conflict (i.e. simpatia) influences coparenting, over and above the effect of agreement on coparenting. Mothers' agreement leads to reports of cooperative coparenting. For fathers, it is endorsement of values proscribing to the value of familism/respeto that impacts fathers' parental agreement. But for fathers, reaching agreement does not necessarily lead to cooperative coparenting. These findings suggest interplay between values endorsement and parental roles. There is also evidence that the shared an endorsement of the value of simpatia leads to coparenting.

The factor structure of the newly created Enacted Defending Scale (EDS) was investigated to better understand what strategies of defending children and adolescents enact to defend their peers from peer victimization. This investigation resulted in a 5-factor model, representative of assertive, overt aggressive, relationally aggressive, and two non-confrontational strategies of defending, telling an adult and comforting the victim. Aggressive forms of defending could be differentiated; whether the defending strategy was enacted in response to overt or relational victimization could not be differentiated. In general, aggressive strategies were associated with dependent variables indicative of poorer adjustment, while assertive and non-confrontational strategies were either related to positive dependent variables or unrelated to the psychosocial adjustment outcomes. Only one of the associations varied by age. The results suggest, first, that attention must be given to multiple forms of defending and that not all defending of peer victimization may have a prosocial effect, and second, that there is a need to carefully consider the potential consequences of defending for defenders themselves.

The school environment is one of the most critical developmental contexts for adolescents, as it informs both academic and occupational trajectories during the first 20 years of life (Russell & McGuire 2008). Given that LGBT youth may experience more negative academic outcomes than the general population (Kosciw 2010), there is a need to better understand the support needs of sexual minority young people. This research project aims to enhance our understanding of school climate for LGBT students and their heterosexual allies by examining how victimization may mediate the relationship between school connections and academic outcomes as well as how social support may moderate the relationship between victimization and academic outcomes. The study uses data from the Preventing School Harassment (PSH) survey, which included 2,559 middle and high school students in the state of California. The data was collected in 2003, 2004, and 2005 from school GSAs. Results illustrate that verbal victimization-direct and indirect- were significant mediators for LGBT students, whereas physical victimization and LGBT specific victimization was a significant mediator for both LGBT and straight populations. For both populations, the link between victimization and both outcomes was stronger aspirations than GPA. It was only for straight students for whom direct verbal and physical victimization was associated with GPA. For the moderation analyzes, the results show that esteem support and emotional support are the strongest buffers between victimization and academics for LGBT students. For straight students, the findings are more varied. Esteem, emotional, and informational support are a useful buffer for each kind of victimization--LGBT victimization, verbal, and physical. However, none of the social support dimensions buffered the negative effect for direct verbal victimization.

Social relationships affect a range of health outcomes, including even mortality risk. However, important questions remain concerning the precise mechanisms through which close relationships exert their influence. The present research focuses specifically on immunological and interpersonal emotion processes that may link social relationships and health. The specific aims of this study were to: (1) determine: a) how long it takes for adults' inflammatory levels to recover after an interpersonal laboratory stressor, and b) whether there are associations between allostatic load indicators of cardiovascular functioning and lipid/fat metabolism and immune recovery; (2) determine whether partners' immune patterns are linked, above and beyond the expected diurnal rhythm; and (3) examine the moderating effects of interpersonal emotion regulation patterns on partners' immune functioning. A final goal of the present study was to test the feasibility of conducting such a study in a naturalistic setting with multiple ambulatory immune measures per day, across multiple days. Twenty-four committed heterosexual couples collected their own salivary immune samples 4 times each day (upon waking, mid-morning, later afternoon, and before bed) for 5 consecutive days, including 2 days before a laboratory dyadic stressor (discussing an area of disagreement in the relationship), the day of, and 2 days after, to capture normative baseline diurnal variability and immune recovery post-stressor. Four additional saliva samples were collected on the lab stressor day at baseline, immediately after the disagreement conversation, 30-min. post-conversation, and 90-min. post conversation, for a total of 8 samples collected on the lab stressor day. Salivary samples were assayed for interleukin(IL)-6 using ELISAs (Salimetrics, LLC). As predicted, after the interpersonal laboratory stressor, immune recovery occurred within 48 hours of the stressor, and in fact recovered as early as the evening of the stressor. However, on the day of the lab stressor, IL-6 levels appeared to still be elevated at the later afternoon time point, approximately 3 hours after the stressor had ended. Contrary to my hypothesis, allostatic load indicators of cardiovascular functioning and lipid/fat metabolism did not moderate immune recovery. Secondly, as expected, partners displayed physiological (immune) linkage; specifically, couples showed "anti-phase" physiological linkage on the day of the lab stressor, and "in-phase" linkage on all other days, pooled together, suggesting that couples may have engaged in more of a regulatory effort on the day of the lab stressor, whereas on all other days, there was a relaxation of regulation and enhanced emotional connection. Third, couples' interpersonal emotion dynamics moderated the diurnal pattern of IL-6 such that couples who exhibited disconnected negative emotions, disconnected positive emotions, and displayed indeterminate patterns in their positive emotions, showed dysregulated diurnal IL-6 slopes. Lastly, the methodology of the present study proved to be feasible, and the study was accomplished without unforeseen problems. Ultimately, studying these immune and emotion processes as they occur in every-day life may help to uncover patterns in couples' biology and emotions that may accumulate over time to set people on different health trajectories.

In this dissertation, I focus on associations between relational sacrifices and commitment (e.g., daily commitment and tripartite dimensions of commitment). This collection of empirically and conceptually related studies are guided by interdependence and commitment theories. First, in Paper 1, actor-partner interdependence models (APIMs) are used to examine individuals' and partners' self-reported perceptions of relational sacrifices in association with actors' daily relational satisfaction and commitment. Here, actor and partner reports of frequency, ease and partner awareness of sacrifices were independent variables and daily satisfaction and commitment were dependent variables. For the sample of unmarried, expectant cohabitors (N = 140 individuals; 70 couples), higher perceived ease of daily sacrifices by both actors and partners was associated with individuals' higher daily satisfaction and higher daily commitment. Relational sacrifices are again independent variables for papers 2 and 3, but tripartite dimensions of commitment (i.e., personal, moral and structural commitment) are specified as dependent variables. In paper 2, data from a subset of the sample of unmarried, expectant cohabitors from Paper 1 who completed qualitative interviews about their commitment (N = 82; 41 couples) are used. Here, associations between sacrifices and commitment were primarily patterned around moral commitment. Specifically, individuals' reports of more frequent and less easy sacrifices, and partners' reports of higher perceived partner awareness of sacrifice, were associated with individuals' higher moral commitment. In contrast, partners' reports of more frequent sacrifices were associated with individuals' lower moral commitment. Beyond moral commitment, individuals' reports of higher perceived partner awareness of sacrifice were associated with their own higher structural commitment, but no significant associations were found with personal commitment. In Paper 3, associations between frequency of and satisfaction with relational sacrifices and tripartite commitment dimensions are examined in a sample of 731 individuals currently involved in romantic relationships. Unlike the sample from Papers 1 and 2 (unmarried, expectant cohabitors), the sample here consisted of individuals across varied relationships statuses (e.g., casual dating, serious dating, married). With this broader range of relationships represented, more frequent sacrifices were associated with higher structural and moral commitment, whereas higher satisfaction with sacrifices was associated with higher personal commitment. Despite a lack of patterned results across this collection of studies, the variation of findings across the samples suggests that the relationship between sacrifices and commitment may be different for different populations. For instance, results from papers 1 suggest that unmarried, expectant cohabitors may be wise to focus on making easier sacrifices given associations with more positive daily satisfaction and commitment. Moreover, results from paper 2 suggest that personal commitment may not be salient for these individuals as patterned findings were specific to the relationship between sacrifices and (mostly) moral commitment. Nevertheless, with a broader population represented (paper 3), associations were found across tripartite commitment dimensions. Thus although sacrifices may not have been relevant to personal commitment for unmarried, expectant cohabitors, it is for others. Taken together, these studies demonstrate the diverse ways in which individuals experience sacrifices relative to daily experiences, and various forms, of commitment. This knowledge can be used to inform individuals how they may choose to function in relationships, practitioners how they may design relational intervention and improvement strategies, and researchers how to apply theory and approach studying commitment across diverse populations.