Qualitative phenomenological methodology was used to explore the lived experiences of African American women diagnosed with breast cancer. Phenomenology focuses on the meaning of the lived experiences of individuals experiencing a concept, structure, or phenomenon (Creswell, 2007). The purpose of phenomenological research is to identify phenomena as perceived by the individual. Utilizing an existential perspective, the focus of this study was to uncover meaning which defined the essence of the participants’ experiences. Seven African American women diagnosed with breast cancer participated in this study. The participants’ ages ranged from 33-63 years. A semi-structured interview process with open-ended questions was utilized to gain an understanding of the participants’ personal experiences related to the phenomenon. Data was analyzed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (Smith, 2004) to ascertain emergent themes and to interpret the meaning of the participants’ breast cancer experience. Seven common themes emerged from the cases. Those themes included: spirituality; support systems; self-care; resiliency; existential meaning; education; and perception of counseling. These seven themes will help to provide insight into how counselors can help to facilitate emotional wellness within this particular population. Implications and recommendations for counselor educators, counselors, and counselors-in-training with this population are also addressed.

This study examined the lived experiences of adult children of mid-later life parental divorce. It was designed and conducted to address the gap in the current literature regarding this phenomenon. The experiences of 5 Adult Children of Divorce (ACD) ages 25 to 45, who experienced mid-later life parental divorce, were examined using in-depth semi-structured interviews. The researcher employed an interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA) of which the findings illustrated various outcomes for adults experiencing their parents’ mid-later life divorce. The results of this study showed that parents’ waiting until the children are “grown” does not mitigate potentially detrimental outcomes for these “adult children.” Some of these concerns shared by the ACDs interviewed included: dealing with the shock of the divorce, the acrimonious parental relationships post divorce, feeling the need to choose sides, effects of the divorce on the ACDs' children, among others. Future studies and implications for the field of marriage and family therapy were offered.

College students’ perceptions of filial obligation can differ across individual, familial, and cultural contexts. However, comparative and empirical studies on this issue are scarce. To address the gap in literature, we examined how American and Korean cultural contexts differently affect the association between two types of parent-child relationship quality (mother-child dyad and father-child dyad) and two types of filial obligation (instrumental support and emotional support). In addition, we examined how children’s gender moderates the above associations. We collected a sample of 500 college students, ages 18 to 25 years, from private universities in the United States (n = 224) and South Korea (n = 276). Regarding American college students, results showed that mother-child relationship quality was positively associated with emotional support of filial obligation. In terms of Korean college students, however, mother-child relationship quality was positively associated with two types of filial obligation respectively. These results indicate that Korean college students consider both instrumental and emotional support as important values of filial obligation, whereas American college students consider emotional support as the more important value of filial obligation compared to instrumental support. Regarding the moderating effect, we found that children’s gender moderated the associations between father-child relationship quality and two types of filial obligation in Korean college students. We suggest that Korean cultural contexts based on the tradition of patriarchy and gender socialization affect the association between father-child relationship quality and filial obligation.

The process of forming a committed, romantic relationship is described as a developmental phenomenon that cannot be accurately viewed without the context of prior relationship experiences because the social competencies that facilitate successful navigation of the tasks of relationship formation are developed in relationships. Furthermore, a cumulative relationship history that has a negative influence may lead to poor emotional health, further disrupting relationship formation processes through that mechanism. Hypotheses were tested using data from a prospective longitudinal study of participants (218 women, 174 men) who were not in a romantic relationship at initial data collection and reported on their relationship status 4 times over the course of 1 year while completing the READY or RELATionship Evaluation (RELATE). Cumulative relationship history and emotional health prospectively predicted the intercepts in longitudinal growth curve analyses of relationship status, while mediational analyses supported the hypothesis that emotional health partially mediates the influence of cumulative relationship history on relationship status. The findings support the developmental conceptualization that inter- and intrapersonal capacities increase the probability of forming a committed, romantic relationship over time.

With the aim of increasing practitioner competence, this dissertation provides marriage and family therapists and mental health service providers with insight into the experiences of legally married same-sex couples. Specifically, the inquiry's objective was to elicit narratives of strength and agency from these couples who navigated the oppressive circumstances of an anti-gay amendment campaign situated within the debate over the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples. Fourteen couples were interviewed in order to respond to the dissertation's overriding question: How do the lesbian and gay couples and families who are among those who were legally married in California before the passage of Proposition 8 narrate their experiences of their marriages? Through portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot & Davis, 1997), a method of inquiry situated within a postmodern, social constructionist framework, a narrative was produced which evolved through five emergent themes: 1) Our Commitments Have Rich Histories -- the symbolic and legal ways in which these couples commemorated and brought definition to their commitments, in the absence of a nationally-sanctioned and collectively-recognized state of legal marriage; 2) Not a Simple Matter: The Complexities of Language Choice -- their contextual language choices, which reflected the absence of representative and collectively-recognized language options for their relationships after their legal marriages; 3) The Battle Metaphor -- the couples' experiences of California's political debate over the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples; 4) Support Shaped Lived Experiences -- the impact of support from friends, family, and community; and lastly, 5) Legal Marriage Shaped Individual, Relational, and Social Identities -- individual, relational and social shifts that occurred for the couples through the experience of being legally married. A follow-up focus group further validated the theme Support Shaped Lived Experiences, and examined more deeply the tensions that occurred when important persons were silent about and/or did not recognize the legitimacy of the couples' legal marriages, and/or the discriminatory context in which their legal marriages were situated. In addition to its contribution of the experiences of legally married same-sex couples to the family therapy literature, the dissertation concludes with important implications for affirmative therapeutic practice, research, education, training, advocacy, and social policy.

Resiliency is an important characteristic of successful therapists (Aponte, 1991; Aponte & Carlsen, 2009; Aponte & Winter, 2000; Clark, 2009; Hamel & Laraway, 2004; Kuiper, 2012; Protinsky & Coward, 2001; Rosenburg & Pace, 2006; Wolgien & Coady, 1997), especially those in entry-level positions that tend to involve high stress and turnover (Acker, 2004; Clark, 2009; Davis, 2013; Greenson, Guo, Barth, Harley, & Sission, 2009; Grosch & Olsen, 1994; Gupta, Peterson, Lysaght, & Zweck, 2012; Horan, 2002; Maslach & Leiter, 1997; Negash & Sahin, 2011; Rosenburg &Pace, 2006; Skovolt &Trotter Mathison, 2011). This study explored the perspectives of six therapists providing in home services in community based agencies who succeeded and thrived in entry-level positions. The researcher inquired about how the therapists defined and maintained necessary resiliency. The participating therapists were recommended by their agency directors for their exemplary performance; they defined themselves as succeeding and thriving. The researcher used the qualitative research method of phenomenology (Kafle, 2011) to examine the participants’ lived experiences. The researcher derived five primary themes from the thematic analysis of the interviews: (1) In-home therapists should enjoy the freedom of their jobs; (2) In-home therapists should schedule their time creatively; (3) In-home therapists should understand the unique needs of their clientele; (4) In-home therapists should practice self-care; and (5) In-home therapists should vary their clientele. These themes represent methods by which the participants manage to become successful in-home therapists and prevent burnout.

The Susan B. Anthony Recovery Center (SBARC) in Pembroke Pines, Florida is a residential center where women live with their children while receiving treatment for a variety of co-occurring substance abuse and mental health issues and while participating in mandatory parenting classes. Unlike most women's residential treatment centers, which address only the woman and her problems, SBARC treats the mother-infant/child dyad. I designed and created a database to examine the data previously available only in the paper client records of over 800 women who received treatment at SBARC from 1995 through 2010 in a previous project. This nonexperimental, retrospective explanatory study (Johnson, 2001; Johnson & Christensen, 2014) analyzed that newly digitized historical data to examine the efficacy of the SBARC treatment with respect to three key variables: dyadic attachment, maternal anxiety, and maternal depression (N = 268). Correlational analysis (MANOVA) of the three variables showed significant results, which suggest that reductions in maternal anxiety and maternal depression may be related to increases in the quality of the dyadic attachment. Statistical analysis (ANOVA) found significant increases in dyadic attachment and decreases in maternal anxiety and maternal depression. The results of this nonexperimental study support the need for future research via controlled studies to determine the relationships among these key treatment variables. Grossmann, Grossmann, and Waters (2005) and others claim that improvement in dyadic attachment improves outcomes for children. Dodge, Sindelar, and Sinha (2005) and others also believe that reductions in maternal depression and maternal anxiety may result in better outcomes. The results of this study suggest that there is value in combining these two perspectives so that measurements of dyadic attachment, maternal anxiety, and maternal depression inform future program offerings and treatment plans. The multi-disciplinary foundation of attachment theory and its rich offering of systemic and relational therapy approaches provides what I believe may be an effective blend of treatment options supported by useful empirical measures that can greatly enhance and expand professional competencies of Marriage and Family Therapists involved in clinical practice with similar at-risk populations.

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As second-year graduate students from LMU’s Art Therapy program, we are excited to introduce the focus of our Master’s research project, a concept we coined as exhibition as intervention. Our goal is to create a space that brings awareness to the possibilities of exhibition to amplify the voice and increase empathy between artist and viewer. Originally, our vision was to hold the exhibition at Cedars-Sinai to supplement the 2020 Art Therapy Research Symposium. With COVID-19 placing restrictions on public gatherings, the exhibition had to transform from a physical experience to a virtual one. The catalog which began as our secondary focus to the exhibition, shifted to become the primary source of communicating our intentions. Informed by the literature of our research, we felt a catalog best collected and organized the data, which in this case was the artwork submitted. It is our great privilege to present this catalog with the works of artists engaging in the creative process to make meaning of their experiences with cancer.

Understanding how intimate relationships influence physical health has been an important topic of focus; however, research remains unclear on the mechanisms through which this influence occurs. The purpose of this study was to examine how relationship satisfaction relates to diet quality, through mental health (depression and anxiety) and diet self-efficacy. Using a dyadic mediation model with a sample of 234 heterosexual couples, researchers found that women's higher relationship satisfaction was associated with better diet through lower depression and higher diet self-efficacy. Results revealed the same association between women's relationship satisfaction and diet through lower anxiety. Interestingly, rather than mediation through mental health, the association between men's relationship satisfaction and diet was mediated through their partners' diet self-efficacy. This presentation will review the gendered pathways by which relationship satisfaction influences diet in heterosexual couples and discuss the important implications of these findings for tracing how intimate relationships affect overall well-being.