Mary J. Levitt

• PhD
• Florida International University

Romantic experiences in adolescence often predict relationship stability and marital status in adulthood. Religious practice and belief also have been linked to increased marital satisfaction and overall wellbeing. However, certain religions limit cross-sex interaction in areas of education, social and romantic relationships. Although gender segreg...

Academic outcomes as a function of parental absence were examined among 268 newly immigrant Latino youth from Argentina, Colombia, and Cuba. Participants experienced parental absence as a result of divorce, parental death, and serial migration. Students who experienced parental absence reported lower achievement expectations. Parental death, prolon...

Intergenerational relations among in-laws are involuntary ties emerging as a consequence of marriage. As such, these relations provide a window through which the dynamics involved in restructuring social networks following life transitions may be observed. A questionnaire, based on the social convoy model, was given to an ethnically diverse sample...

The transition from high school is a pivotal period for intergenerational relations, as the asymmetry characterizing pre-transition relations with parents is reconfigured. Changes in adolescent–parent relations across this transition have potentially important implications for post-transition adjustment. A prospective study was conducted with an et...

The focus of this study was on the social networks of preschool children and on the interface between network characteristics and the child's acceptance by peers and teachers. Fifty-six children and their mothers were interviewed about the child's social support network. Social acceptance measures included peer sociometric ratings and teacher ratin...

The current study is an examination of how support from siblings relates to psychological adjustment and academic competence in early adolescence, with a focus on the buffering and compensatory effects of sibling support. Participants were 695 (357 female and 338 male) African-American, Hispanic-American and European-American students in grades 5 t...

In this study of 429 newly immigrant children (ages 7–8 years) and their parents, we addressed generational variation in the stresses related to immigration. We also assessed whether child and parent psychological adjustment varied as a function of high versus low levels of stress and social support. Finally, we examined the comparability of effect...

Children's social networks often include close family members, extended family members, and friends, but little is known about interindividual differences in the patterning of support from these sources. In this study, we used person-oriented analyses to differentiate patterns of support for children undergoing the transition to adolescence. Social...

Research on the development of social relations has been largely fragmented along role‐specific lines and dominated conceptually by attachment theory. The Convoy Model is presented as an alternative to traditional approaches that fail to capture the complexity of social relationships across time and context. Research based on the model conve...

The aim of the current study was to assess the influence of intrinsic and extrinsic religiosity (Allport & Ross, 1967) in a sample of preadolescents and adolescents. Participants for the study were 694 African-American, European-American, and Hispanic-American students in grades 6 and 8. Students were interviewed in school regarding well-being and...

The authors in this collection have addressed topics of great relevance to the study of social relations across the life span, including the application of family systems models, the development of friendship relations, and the consequences of sibling conflict. Issues considered in this discussion are 1) the value of conceptualizing social developm...

The aim of this study was to assess the interrelations of social support and school attitudes as predictors of achievement across a culturally and economically diverse sample of preadolescent children. Parent and peer support were assessed along with parent and peer attitudes toward school. Achievement indices were the child's own attitudes, grades...

The effects of stress on children's long-term memory for a major hurricane were studied. Stress was objectively defined as low, moderate, or high according to the severity of damage to the child's home. One hundred 34 and 4-year-old children received a structured interview 2–6 months following the hurricane. Older children recalled and elaborated m...

Parents and peers have been studied extensively as distinct agents of socialization. However, less attention has been paid to the interface of the family and peer subsystems or to the role of nonparental family members, particularly during the pre-adolescent period referred to as middle childhood. The aims of this study were (a) to examine the link...

In a study of troublesome relationships, 343 university students and employees were surveyed. Issues addressed were the frequency, nature and precursors of negative relationship experiences. Over half of the respondents (55.7%) reported a very troublesome relationship within the previous 5 years. These were most often close relationships that deter...

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationships between maternal responsiveness, infant temperament, and infant-mother attachment as measured in Ainsworth's Strange Situation. Discriminant analysis revealed that infant temperament was more strongly related to attachment than maternal responsiveness. Infants rated as Anxious-Avoidant in a...

Investigated published authors' reasons for the file drawer problem (i.e., the view that studies that fail to attain significance are more likely to end up in file drawers than in pages of journals). Questionnaires were sent to 740 authors of empirical articles that had appeared in 75 journals. Contingency tables and multivariate analyses of respon...

This paper presents findings of a study that examined the role of social networks in promoting or inhibiting student achievement. The study was based on the convoy model--a "convoy" is a dynamic, hierarchical structure of social relations that provide the individual with a supportive base from which to develop personal competencies. The premise of...

Reports an error in the original article by J. Rotton et al ( American Psychologist, 1993[Aug], Vol 48[8], 911–912). Table 1 listed the journal Psychological Research twice, and the journals Cognition and Child Study Journal were omitted. The mean SSCI for applied journals in Table 1 should have been 1.17. Multiple rather than squared multiple corr...

Reports an error in the original article by J. Rotton et al ( American Psychologist, 1993[Aug], Vol 48[8], 911–912). Table 1 listed the journal Psychological Research twice, and the journals Cognition and Child Study Journal were omitted. The mean SSCI for applied journals in Table 1 should have been 1.17. Multiple rather than squared multiple corr...

Supportive relationships are known to contribute to personal functioning in adult life, but much less is known about the effects of social support in childhood and adolescence. In research with adults, support has been found to affect personal outcomes both directly and indirectly, either by interacting with stress or by enhancing self-appraisal. T...

The purpose of this study was to test a theoretical model of confirmation of expectations for mutual support after childbirth and to evaluate an intervention given in prenatal classes during which prospective parents clarified their expectations. Results provided support for the proposed model in that parents with greater confirmation of expectatio...

Much has been written about social support, but little is known about the processes that promote continuity or discontinuity in supportive relationships. A proposed model of relationship processes (Levitt, 1991) specifies that changes in the quality of close relationships are likely to occur when expectations for social support are tested and disco...

Within the Convoy Model, social networks are viewed as dynamic hierarchic structures surrounding the individual throughout life. As a step toward empirical definition of convoy structure and function across the life span, a bicultural sample (N = 159) of young adult women, their mothers, and their grandmothers were queried. Comparable results were...

Little is known about social networks in childhood, and even less is known about the networks of ethnically diverse children. Interviews were conducted with 333 African-American, Anglo/European-American, and Hispanic-American public school children in Grades 1–2, 4–5, and 8–9. The research was based on the social convoy model (R. L. Kahn & T. C. An...

Comments on L. C. Buffardi and J. A. Nichols's (1981) list of rejection rates for psychological journals and further examines the relation between rejection rates, citation impact, and journal value. It was found that 69% of the variance in rejection rates was explained by area and type of journal. As Buffardi and Nichols reported, rejection rates...

This descriptive follow-up study focuses on changes in maternal stress and close relationships over the infant's first year and explores the association of these maternal variables with infant health status. After initial interviews at 1 month, mothers of 43 infants completed a follow-up questionnaire when their infants were 13 months old. Women te...

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Exchanges of intergenerational support were assessed in a bicultural (Anglo/European-American and Latin American) sample of young-adult women, their mothers, and their maternal grandmothers. The goals of the study were (a) to describe the extent of supportive intergenerational exchange, with a particular focus on the balance of exchange across gene...

Temperament is a theoretical concept used to understand individual's behavioral styles. In this study, temperament was measured in 13-month-old infants (N = 51) and their mothers, who were also observed together in a teaching situation. The purpose of the study was to determine the relationships between maternal and infant temperaments and interact...

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A model of the relation between social support and maternal well-being was tested for mothers of distressed and normal newborns. It was hypothesized that the quality of the mother's closest relationship would mediate the link between social support and maternal affect, and that the mother's affect would, in turn, predict the mother's attitude towar...

Personal support provided by close social network members and professional support provided by nurses were studied in 83 postpartum mothers and newborns in neonatal intensive care units and newborn nurseries. Mothers perceived each type of support differently in terms of outcomes. Only personal support was significantly related to emotional affect...

Two environmental conditions hypothesized to influence toddler social involvement were investigated in this study, including the presence or absence of a barrier separating the children and the presence or absence of toys. Thirty-two same-sex toddler dyads were observed during a playroom session, with their mothers present, in one of four condition...

Interviews were conducted with elderly residents of an area targeted for massive redevelopment. Social support was considered simultaneously with health and personal control beliefs in relation to well-being, and the unresolved issue of the sufficiency of one support figure was explored. Health, control, and support each emerged as independent pred...

Explored the social networks available to mothers of infants, focusing on the contribution of specific relationships to maternal well-being. 43 mothers (aged 21–39 yrs) of 13-mo-old infants were asked to position individuals who were close to them in a network diagram and to indicate which of those individuals provided support. The mother's relatio...

Theories of temperament suggest that both maternal and infant temperament might affect a child's mode of interacting not only with the mother but also with unfamiliar adults. 36 mother-infant dyads were videotaped in the Ainsworth Strange Situation when the infants were 13 months old. These tapes were scored for crying intensity and duration, inter...

The structure of social support and its relation to health, affect, and life satisfaction are compared for two samples of the elderly. The first is a national representative sample; the second is a distressed sample from South Miami Beach. Although there are similarities in the structure of social support across the two groups, those in the Miami B...

20 29–36 mo old White children, matched according to sex, were observed with their mothers in a context structured to assess sharing behavior. Ss were separated by a barrier, and only 1 S was given toys. Following a period of noninterference, the mother requested her child to share with the toy-deprived peer. The situation was then reversed: The pa...

This study was designed to explore the possibility that variations in attachment security exhibited by infants in the Ainsworth Strange Situation at 13 months could be predicted from the behavior of mothers and infants in an analogous preseparation, separation and reunion situation at 7 months, when specific attachments begin to emerge. Data obtain...

To determine whether toddlers who experienced mutually responsive patterns of interchange with their mothers would be more likely to respond to the need of a peer than those who did not experience such interchange, 20 children with a mean age of 32 months were observed in pairs, with their mothers present, in structured and unstructured settings. I...

Several lines of inquiry have led to the expectation that an infant's response to an unfamiliar adult might be influenced by the degree of control that the infant is able to exert over the situation. 24 male and 24 female infants (9.5–10.5 mo old) participated in a study in which the initial appearances of a stranger were contingent (controlled by...

This study was designed to compare the inter-/intra-correlational and the behavioral commonalities approaches to the assessment of attachment behaviors of infants to their mothers. At 7 months, 147 infants were observed (and videotaped) sequentially during a free play period with their mothers present, a separation from their mothers and then a reu...

The current results suggest that paternal support is related to sibling support. These findings are consistent with previous literature using younger populations demonstrating the effects of parent relations on sibling relations. However, a strength of the present investigation is that parental support was examined separately and with an adolescent...