Please join us for our next speaker in the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences Seminar Series. Wednesday February 18th at 12:30pm, Debrielle Jacques, Assistant Professor, Psychology, UW will give a seminar titled: Making All the Pieces Matter: Bridging Theory, Methodology, and Analyses to Uncover Nuance in Parenting and Child Development Research.

This seminar will be offered as a hybrid session. Below please find the abstract and information about joining in-person or on Zoom.

Parents with addiction and mental health challenges (also known as psychopathology) can struggle to consistently and responsively meet their children’s needs. This can increase children’s risk for future mental health problems and adverse developmental outcomes. Sometimes the effects of parent addiction and psychopathology are subtle, less “visible”, and unfold in diverse, complicated processes that are difficult for researchers to capture or explain. Consequently, this requires scholars to adopt more sophisticated or creative empirical approaches to enrich our understanding of associations between addiction, psychopathology, parenting, and child development. However, few studies explicitly, intentionally, or strategically combine theories (which help explain complex phenomena) with diverse methods or advanced analytical approaches to explore the nuance, novelty, and complexity of these associations. This talk demonstrates the utility of integrated and intentional theory-methods-analysis approaches via multiple studies that merge developmental theories, diverse methods, and advanced analyses (e.g., longitudinal, structural equation (SEM), and person-centered analyses). Studies 1 and 2 combine affective developmental theories with longitudinal SEM to examine how and why parental substance use and psychopathology uniquely predict infant emotional development and trajectories of anxiety and depression across early childhood. Study 3 combines social-affective-cognitive developmental theories with mixture modeling to examine heterogeneous associations between maternal alcohol dependence, psychopathology, and parental scaffolding and parent-child problem-solving behaviors.

Join us for the next event in the Human Trafficking Prevention Lecture Series, “The Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People,” taking place on Thursday, Feb. 19, 2026, from 3:30–5:00 PM in Cunningham Halh. The event is Hosted by the UW Women’s Center and the UW School of Social Work. This lecture features Carolyn DeFord, an activist, advocate, and the founder of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and People, a grassroots organization that raises awareness and supports the families of missing and murdered Indigenous people. In her current role as an Anti-Trafficking Program Manager at the Puyallup Tribe of Indians, Carolyn oversees the development and implementation of strategies to prevent and respond to human trafficking in the tribal community. She will share insight into how her extensive experience in the anti-human trafficking field helps empower and protect communities from exploitation and violence while promoting cultural identity and dignity. RSVP here.