Sanford Braver

Arizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology

We applaud the effort to draw attention to generalizability concerns in twenty-first-century psychological research. Yet we do not feel that a pessimistic perspective is warranted. We outline a continuum of available methodological tools and perspectives, including incremental steps and meta-analytic approaches that can be readily and easily deploy...

Objective To examine the psychometric properties of a scale of perceived mattering to (step)parents and its links to adolescent mental health. Background Parenting behaviors are important for adolescent development; less is known about the meanings adolescents attach to parents' behaviors. One fundamental meaning adolescents may intuit is that par...

Drawing on five waves of longitudinal data from 392 families (52% female; mean age of wave 1 [ Mage_W1 ] = 12.89, standard deviation [ SD ] = .48; Mage_W5 = 21.95, SD = .77; 199 European American and 193 Mexican American families; 217 intact and 175 stepfather families), this study documented transactional relations of mothers’ and fathers’ depress...

Petitions by custodial parents to relocate children away from noncustodial parents present difficult choices for family courts. In the current study, the sample (N = 81) was randomly recruited through the children’s schools according to the following criteria: Children were 12 years old and at the time resided primarily with their mothers and mothe...

Policymakers and researchers are concerned with whether joint physical custody (JPC) produces better outcomes for children than sole custody. Although several review articles summarizing up to 61 empirical articles demonstrate very positive answers, many of the research designs used compromise the ability to claim that it is JPC per se—and not sele...

This article summarizes panel discussions that took place at an international conference on shared parenting (SP) held in May 2017. The panelists were internationally recognized experts on the legal and psychological implications of custody arrangements and parenting plans. Seven broad themes dominated the discussions: whether or not there was pers...

The article provides a brief introduction to a special issue focused on shared parenting. The articles in the special issue provide up-to-date summaries of the research and scholarship relating to key questions and controversies around the effects of divorce and contrasting custody arrangements. Two articles focus on infant–parent attachments in se...

The public health impact of evidence-based, preventive parenting interventions has been severely constrained by low rates of participation when interventions are delivered under natural conditions. It is critical that prevention scientists develop effective and feasible parent engagement methods. This study tested video-based methods for engaging p...

We examined the mediational roles of multiple types of adolescents’ emotional security in relations between multiple aspects of the interparental relationship and adolescents’ mental health from ages 13 to 16 (N = 392). General marital quality, nonviolent parent conflict, and physical intimate partner violence independently predicted mental health....

Parents who experience great amounts of legal conflict as they dissolve their relationship and arrive at their parenting arrangements require an outsize proportion of courts’ time and resources. Additionally, there is overwhelming evidence that conflict has a deleterious effect on their children. We partnered with the family court to conduct a stud...

Whether a custodial mother's new husband earns more or less than the father, economic realities ensure his income will usually affect the child's financial well-being, sometimes dramatically. The stepfather's daily contact with the child may be more than the father's, possibly burdening father's relationship with his child, especially if mother mov...

All couples with minor children who filed for divorce within a specific 6‐week period ( N = 191 couples) in one jurisdiction were ordered to attend a divorce education program. The control group included about 20 couples randomly selected from each of six 6‐week intervals before and six 6‐week intervals after the treatment interval ( N = 243 couple...

The states differ substantially among themselves as to what their guideline systems specify about reducing child support awards as a function of the division of parenting time after divorce. Most adopt a “cliff-model”, whereby no reductions are accorded until the parenting time to the noncustodial parent reaches some “shared parenting” threshold, g...

Allocations of child custody postdivorce are currently determined according to the best interest standard; that is, what is best for the child. Decisions about what is best for a child necessarily reflect cultural norms, at least in part. It is therefore useful as well as interesting to ask whether current understandings of the best interest standa...

The current crisis in scientific psychology about whether our findings are irreproducible was presaged years ago by Tversky and Kahneman (1971), who noted that even sophisticated researchers believe in the fallacious Law of Small Numbers-erroneous intuitions about how imprecisely sample data reflect population phenomena. Combined with the low power...

Nearly all American states use one of two systems for setting the amount of child support that noncustodial parents (NCPs) are required to pay to custodial parents (CPs). In previous work, we found that lay judgments of the child support amount the law should require differ in meaningful ways from these two systems: Our respondents favored child su...

The AFCC Think Tank on Research, P olicy, P ractice, and S hared P arenting is quite groundbreaking, had an all‐star cast, and the issues could hardly be more important to our organization. Yet, many will regard the final report from the think tank as disappointing because, simply, it fails to say very much. I argue that the reason is that the thin...

We studied young adolescents' seeking out support to understand conflict with their co-resident fathers/stepfathers, and the cognitive and affective implications of such support-seeking, phenomena we call guided cognitive reframing. Our sample included 392 adolescents (Mage = 12.5, 52.3% female) who were either of Mexican or European ancestry and l...

When a custodial mother marries a new partner, the income of the custodial household rises. The stepfather may earn much more than the father, or much less. He may or may not assume the social role of father, but his day to day contact and interaction with the child will often be more than the father’s. If the mother and stepfather move together wi...

We evaluated maternal gatekeeping attitudes as a mediator of the relation between marital problems and father-child relationships in 3 waves when children were in Grades 7-10. We assessed each parent's contribution to the marital problems experienced by the couple. Findings from mediational and cross-lagged structural equation models revealed that...

This article reports on the development of a brief 15-item parent-report risk index (Child Risk Index for Divorced or Separated Families; CRI-DS) to predict problem outcomes of children who have experienced parental divorce. A series of analyses using 3 data sets were conducted that identified and cross-validated a parsimonious set of items represe...

The current study examined the associations between child mental health problems and the quality of maternal and paternal parenting, and how these associations were moderated by three contextual factors: quality of parenting by the other parent, interparental conflict, and the number of overnights parents had with the child. Data for the current st...

While most American states today exclude or severely limit consideration of marital misconduct in allocating property at divorce, about 15 still allow judges broad discretion to consider it. This study asks whether there is popular support for considering fault in property allocations. We surveyed a representative cross-section of over 600 citizens...

Little attention has been paid to how early adolescents make attributions for their fathers' behavior. Guided by symbolic interaction theory, we examined how adolescent gender, ethnicity, family structure, and depressive symptoms explained attributions for residential father behavior. 382 adolescents, grouped by ethnicity (European American, Mexica...

A great many fathers will have their fathering eliminated, disrupted, or vastly changed because they become divorced from the child’s mother. In fact, between 40% and 50% of marriages end in divorce (Cherlin, 2010). Although the divorce rate (measured as divorces per 1,000 people) is high by the standards prior to the late 1960s, it has actually fa...

In previous work, we have demonstrated that lay intuitions about how much child support should be paid in various situations differ in meaningful ways from extant systems. We find that the wealthier the NCP, the more dollars respondents think he should be paying. But the wealthier the CP, the smaller the percent the NCP should be paying, because sh...

Defining Various Sibling and Family TypesTheories of Sibling and Family RelationshipsResearch Findings Regarding Sibling Relationships in Blended FamiliesA Model of the Quality of Sibling Relationships in Blended FamiliesPreliminary Data Probing the ModelConclusion and Future Directions

Two questions often confront family law courts and policymakers: “Is the quantity or the quality of parenting time more important for children’s outcomes?” and “Should parenting time be limited in high-conflict families?” Most discussions in the research literature give the following answers: The quality of parenting time is more important for chil...

“Never-married parents” (NMPs) is the term usually given to unmarried couples who have children together. Because NMPs have no formal legal status, unlike divorcing parents, they are not required to use the court in formalizing the details of their arrangements when separating. Indeed, many NMPs have no arrangements between them except informal one...

When conducting parenting plan evaluations, mental health professionals must have an understanding of the most current findings in developmental research, behavioral psychology, attachment theory, and legal issues to substantiate their opinions. This online resource focuses on translating the research associated with the most important topics withi...

This chapter from a forthcoming book brings together data from a series of empirical studies that ask a sample of American citizens about the legal obligations intimate partners should have to one another, when their relationship ends. (Ellman, Braver, & MacCoun 2009; Ellman, Braver, & MacCoun 2012; Ellman & Braver 2011; Ellman & Braver 2012). In p...

This paper describes 27 years of collaborative activities between a team of researchers at the Arizona State University Prevention Research Center (ASU PRC) and the Maricopa County Family Court Division of the Superior Court. The complementary goals and expertise of the family court and prevention science are described as providing the foundation i...

Given the fact that the child and custodial parent generally share a living standard, there is some tension between the traditional rule excluding marital status altogether as a consideration in setting child support levels, and the traditional American rule making marriage an absolute requirement in claims by one spouse against the other for suppo...

Most people have a sense of obligation to family members that is more powerful than the law in compelling compliance with its demands. When families dissolve, however, the power of such nonlegal norms often dissolves as well. The question then becomes what the law should require in their stead. This paper is part of a larger series of studies that...

In a pair of studies, we examine lay people's judgments about how hypothetical cases involving child custody after divorce should be resolved. The respondents were citizens called to jury service in Pima County, AZ. Study 1 found that both male and female respondents, if they were the judge, would most commonly award equally shared custody arrangem...

Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various statements about principles to use in setting child support amounts. These twenty items were derived from extant child support systems, from past literature and from Ellman and Ellman's (2008) Theory of Child Support. The twenty...

Most parent education programs are designed to improve child well-being following divorce by changing some aspect of parenting. However, there has been relatively little discussion of what aspects of parenting are most critical and the effectiveness of programs to change different aspects of parenting. This paper addresses these issues by: 1. Disti...

The current study investigated how fathering behaviors (acceptance, rejection, monitoring, consistent discipline, and involvement) are related to preadolescent adjustment in Mexican American and European American stepfamilies and intact families. Cross-sectional data from 393 7(th) graders, their schoolteachers, and parents were used to examine lin...

In a pair of studies, we examine lay people’s judgments about how hypothetical cases involving child custody after divorce should be resolved. The respondents were citizens called to jury service in Pima County, AZ. Study 1 found that both male and female respondents, if they were the judge, would most commonly award equally shared custody arrangem...

This article describes a program of research on effectively transporting the New Beginnings Program (NBP), a university-tested prevention program for divorced families, to community settings. The four steps in this research are described: (1) selecting a community partner, (2) developing effective methods of engaging parents, (3) redesigning the NB...

Using evidence-based methods to help divorcing families requires the combined best efforts of legal professionals, courts, judges and administrators, mental health oriented service providers, and university researchers. Collaborative program development, implementation, and evaluation involve a complicated process of negotiation between professiona...

Citizens awaiting jury service were asked a series of items, in Likert format, to determine their endorsement of various principles that might be called upon to explain legal judgments about the appropriate amount of child support to require in individual cases. These items were derived from extant systems, from past literature and from Ellman and...

Participation rates in parenting programs are typically low, severely limiting the public health significance of these interventions. We examined predictors of parenting program enrollment and retention in a sample of 325 divorced mothers. Predictors included intervention timing and maternal reports of child, parent, family, and sociocultural risk...

Setting the amount of a child support award involves tradeoffs in the allocation of finite resources among at least three private parties: the two parents, and their child or children. Federal law today requires states to have child support guidelines or formulas that determine child support amounts on a uniform statewide basis. These state guideli...

This study examined the relations between perceptions of 133 early adolescents in stepfamilies concerning how much they mattered to their stepfathers and nonresidential biological fathers and adolescents' mental health problems. Mattering to nonresidential biological fathers significantly negatively predicted mother-, teacher-, and youth-reported i...

We examine how ordinary citizens translate intuitions about child welfare and distributive justice into dollar amounts for post-divorce child support payments. Our analyses indicate that child support judgments are quite sensitive to anchoring and question-wording effects. Nevertheless, we find much that is both interpretable and principled in thes...

This article studied the relations of children's mental health problems to the warmth of their relationship with their noncustodial father and custodial mother and the level of conflict between the parents. Using a sample of 182 divorcing families, multiple regression was used to test the independent effect of father warmth, mother warmth, and inte...

This paper attempts to identify the factors that explain service provider readiness to fund and implement evidence-based programs for children from divorcing families. Representatives from 128 family courts in United States counties were surveyed about the programs currently being offered for families of divorce and plans for changes in the service...

We performed several re-analyses of data presented in Braver, Ellman, and Fabricius (2003) to examine whether their findings that parental relocation after divorce was associated with negative long-term outcomes in their grown children could be due to pre-existing levels of parent conflict and domestic violence. Conflict and violence might have cau...

Legal rules are often understood as setting the appropriate balance between competing claims. One might expect policymakers to identify these competing claims and employ a systematic and comprehensive analysis to assign them relative values, and to generate legal rules that follow from those values. But probably, they will not. If policy is instead...

This study examined the prevalence of bulimia and frequent binge eating in female college students. Additionally, sex differences in binge eating and in labeling one's behavior as binge eating were assessed. All students in an introductory psychology course, 485 women and 327 men, were subjects. Of all students, 49% reported binge eating. Significa...

The ability of parents to forge harmonious coparenting relationships following divorce is an important predictor of their children's long-term well-being. However, there is no convincing evidence that this relationship can be modified through intervention. A pre-ventive intervention that we developed, Dads for Life (DFL), which targeted noncustodia...

This book is the product of a multi-year initiative, sponsored by the Division of Family Psychology (43) of the American Psychological Association, the Family Institute at Northwestern University, Oxford University Press and Northwestern University, to bring together the leading researchers in family psychology in five major areas of great social a...

A survey was conducted to assess the content coverage of more than 100 divorce education programs for parents in North America. Fifty-six percent of the programs were mandatory for at least some categories of divorcing parents. Results showed that the most intensively covered topics involved the effects of divorce on children and the benefits of pa...

Although there has been in recent years a proliferation of court programs, especially divorced parent education programs, evaluations of the effectiveness of these programs lag dangerously behind their inception, perhaps because program developers and courts lack the expertise to perform these evaluations. The present article provides a primer of t...

Divorced nonresident fathers are a promising target for preventive efforts to assist families after divorce. The research literature suggests that such programs should focus both on the frequency and the quality of the child's contact with the father, as well as the quality of postdivorce mother–father relations. Dads For Life (DFL) is the program...

In their critique, Garfinkel, McLanahan, and Wallerstein raise concerns about the representativeness of the authors' sample, benchmark approach methodology, and historical review of guidelines, all of which lead them to discount the evidence presented opposing the cliff-model assumption of father expenditures on children, and to laud instead child...

This article reviews psychoeducational programs to reduce interparental conflict in divorcing families and the negative impact of conflict on children. The authors initially identify factors shown in the basic psychosocial research literature to be related to the effects of interparental conflict on children. They then review the content of program...

This study examined predictors of intervention-induced resilience in children of divorce whose mothers participated in a preventive parenting program. Contextual, maternal, and child factors were examined as predictors of improved child adjustment using two strategies: (a) within-group analyses conducted with program participants and (b) between-gr...

Despite advances in our understanding of fatherhood, most social and behavioral science research is based on data from white, middle-class, European-American families. In this chapter, the authors argue for including Latino families in fatherhood studies and highlight some special issues in the assessment of Latino men's family involvement that hav...

Recent publications describing long-term results of longitudinal investigations of divorced couples have stirred controversies because of substantial differences in findings. The current Special Collection was initiated to clarify some of the issues brought into controversy. Five primary themes are explored by the nine papers in this collection: Ho...

Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that "in gene...

Most states' child support guidelines adopt a “cliff” model in providing credits or adjustments for time spent in the nonresidential parent's home. Such guidelines implicitly or explicitly assume that no appreciable expenditures are made directly by obligors for child-rearing expenses at levels of contact or visitation beneath some threshold value,...

Relocation cases, in which a divorced parent seeks to move away with the child, are among the knottiest problems facing family courts. The recent trend is to permit such moves, largely because of Wallerstein's (1995) controversial amica curiae brief, which a recent court (Baures v. Lewis, 2001) interpreted as supporting the conclusion that "in gene...

Reliable, quantitative, and current information is needed to inform the policy debate about whether parents, most commonly noncustodial parents, should be compelled to provide support for their children's higher education. We report data from a large study of the financial support college students reported receiving from their divorced mothers and...

A survey was administered at a state bar convention to 72 family law attorneys who reported on their experiences in representing a total of 3,860 clients. Results showed that lawyers believed that (a) most losers in relocation cases do not or would not ultimately move; (b) the Family Court Masters system seems to be helpful to families; (c) lawyers...

The factors influencing court readiness to implement programs for divorcing families that are evidence based (i.e., have received support as being effective in scientific trials) were examined in a stratified random sample of the 3, 140 U.S. counties. Represented in the final survey were 22 large, 58 medium-sized, and 74 small counties with establi...

Findings from comparisons of joint and sole custody families that do not control for predivorce differences in demographic and family process variables (factors that may predispose families to choose or be awarded joint custody) are of limited generalizability, since obtained group differences may be attributable to predisposing (self-selection) fa...

Data we collected in longitudinal and cross-sectional studies of divorcing families provide an empirical basis for understanding the dynamics of divorced fathering. Our findings focus on the difficult circumstances of divorced fathers, rather than on their defective characters. We find that fathers continue visiting and paying at high levels when t...

Few theoretical perspectives have had as continuous a place in the history of community psychology as stress theory. There has, however, been considerable change in stress research over the past decade, which has added greater complexity to our understanding of the processes by which stress impacts on well-being. Concomitantly, our models of the ch...

Although power differentials are commonly believed to be central to sexual harassment experiences, prior empirical investigations have found no clear association between a perpetrator’s organizational status (as an index of his power) and perceptions by the victim that the perpetrator’s behavior constitutes sexual harassment. A model to explain thi...

The current study examined several demographic and psychosocial predictors of mothers' legal custody preference early in the divorce process. Simple logistic regressions between these predictors and custody preference were completed. Variables that had a significant or marginally significant simple relation with legal custody preference were includ...

In a three-stage study, noncustodial parents' psychopathic deviance and alcohol use accounted for significant variance in custodial parents' reports of child support and visitation. In noncustodial parents 'reports' compliance with child support, but not frequency of visitation, was related to measures of deviance. Implications for policy, research...

Human services interventions are most rigorously evaluated with true experimental designs in longitudinal experimental field trials (LEFTs). However, differential self-selection or attrition often pose a serious threat to the LEFTs internal validity. This threat can be largely overcome by describing all conditions in advance to prospective subjects...

The purpose of this study was to determine if the quality of children's relationships with their primary residential par- ents interacts with interparental conflict to predict children's postdi- vorce psychological adjustment problems. It was predicted that a high quality relationship would moderate the relation between inter- parental conflict and...

Based on previous research, it was expected that women would be less satisfied with their divorce settlements than men. A survey of over 400 divorced persons contradicts this hypothesis: Women indicate greater satisfaction with custody, visitation, financial (excepting child support), and property settlements. Three explanations for these results a...

Visitation problems were examined from the perspectives of residential and nonresidential parents on 3 occasions. Visitation problems were common at all assessments and moderately stable over time. Residential parents' perceptions of visitation problems were significantly correlated with concerns about their ex-spouse's parenting abilities shortly...

Evaluated an experimental preventive intervention developed for children who perceived their parents as problem drinkers. The 8-session program was designed to improve children's coping, self-esteem, and social competence, and modify alcohol expectancies which were specified as mediators of the effects of parental alcohol abuse on child mental heal...

Using an ecological perspective, the comprehensive effect of divorce variables on children's post-divorce adjustment was investigated. The microsystem, exosystem and overall composite scores accounted for significant proportions of variance in children's self-reported maladjustment and self-esteem, but not in parents' reports of children's maladjus...

An issue of frequent concern to researchers studying the antecedents and consequences of divorce is which spouse decides to terminate the marriage, i.e., who divorced ("dumped") whom. However, researchers have not agreed on how to best operationalize the dumper-dumpee variable. The present study explored the issue with a sample of 378 families. Sev...