Todd M. Jensen

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Verified

Todd verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

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• PhD, MSW
• Assistant Professor of Human Development and Family Science at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Systematic review procedures are used to empirically evaluate the “implicit” logic model that guides the Air Force Family Advocacy Program’s secondary prevention efforts of family maltreatment among active-duty Air Force members. Searches of seven electronic databases and manual searches of 10 journals yielded 586 peer-reviewed articles published i...

Stepfamilies are an increasingly common family form, marked by distinct challenges, opportunities, and complex networks of dyadic relationships that can transcend single households. There exists a dearth of typological analyses by which constellations of dyadic processes in stepfamilies are analyzed holistically. Factor mixture modeling, a form of...

Family stressors marked by ambiguity can place significant demands on families. Family scholars have written extensively about ambiguous stressors in the context of loss or separation—situations that represent ambiguous loss. Given extant demographic trends, including those that lead to changes in family structure, there remain valuable opportuniti...

In the United States and across the globe, demographic trends have coalesced to produce an increasingly diverse set of family structures, fueling international interest in exploring diverse family structures as key developmental contexts for adults and children. Given the persistence of research focused on well-being differences across family struc...

Given their value, literature reviews and syntheses are featured in numerous family-centered academic journals, including the flagship journals of the National Council on Family Relations. Although literature reviews and syntheses , including meta-analyses, have been published in family-centered academic journals for decades, the application of the...

To address the behavioral health workforce crisis occurring in the United States, supporting students’ interest in the behavioral health professions is urgent. Ongoing exploration of possible educational pathways into the behavioral health workforce is warranted, which can highlight opportunities to expand the number of adequately trained, cultural...

Youth in foster care are more likely than their peers to require mental health supports to promote their well-being, and this level of need has likely been heightened by individual, familial, system-level, and societal factors arising during the COVID-19 pandemic. These changes have simultaneously produced a shortage in the supply of available comm...

Background Alzheimer’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease related dementias (AD/ADRD) have increased in prevalence. Objective This article describes the Add Health Parent Study (AHPS) Phase 2, a study of social, behavioral, and biological factors influencing healthy aging and risk for AD/ADRD, in a national sample of adults aged 58–90. Methods Sampl...

Background: Professionals who provide implementation support in human service systems describe relationships as being critical to support evidence use; however, developing trusting relationships are not strongly featured in implementation science literature. The aims of this study were to (a) assess the feasibility and acceptability of a theory-dri...

Divorce and remarriage rates have increased dramatically in China, and more children live in stepfamilies. There remain valuable opportunities to understand the various family and school assets that support the well‐being of Chinese youth amid family structural transitions, such as the transition to stepfamily life. Using latent profile analysis, t...

This study examined current evidence on children’s pathways into commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) in the United States to determine if characteristics, vulnerabilities, and social contexts were distinguishable by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and location. Using Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Review and Meta-Analyses guidelines, peer-r...

This article is a commentary on the recently published theoretical article by Constantine (2024) on the Paradigmatic Framework and its application to family science.

As the United States faces burgeoning behavioral health needs and a growing recognition of the inextricable link between social conditions and health outcomes and quality-of-life indicators, a current representative profile of the MSW workforce with respect to sociodemographic and employment characteristics can provide a reference point for ongoing...

Aims/Background: Consistent with a stress-and-support perspective, high-quality caregiver-child relationships can reduce stress for youth, particularly in the context of family structural transitions (Jensen, 2022; Sheeber et al., 2001). Emotional security theory also highlights the role of high-quality couple relationships in promoting youth well-...

Despite evidence suggesting overlapping risk factors for family maltreatment and other forms of interpersonal violence and self-directed harm among active-duty military members, a recently developed assessment tool (the Personal and Family Strengths Inventory [PFSI]) has not been evaluated for use beyond efforts to prevent family maltreatment in a...

Issues of workplace violence (WPV) in healthcare has garnered increasing attention, due to the impact on the health care worker well-being and retention. Yet, our understanding of whether and how WPV rates vary between health care facilities and occupations is limited, particularly information on growth over time. This information is needed to deve...

Context The Public Health 3.0 (PH3.0) framework encourages local health departments (LHDs) to address the social determinants of health (SDOHs) that impact health equity. Objective This study sought to understand how often LHDs are working to address SDOH, which SDOHs are most often being addressed, as well as the mix of strategies that have been...

Many Americans believe that a breakdown in the "traditional" two-married-parent family and the rise in single-parent families are responsible for persistent family inequality. The general argument is that children do best when they are raised by both biological parents. Evidence increasingly calls into question conventional wisdom about the univers...

The United States (U.S.) military has focused on increasing service members’ (SM) mental and social fitness to bolster resiliency (successful role performance). The Resiliency Model of Role Performance posits that individual assets and social connections account for SM’s differential success in meeting military demands and personal obligations. We...

Background: Implementation support practitioners (ISPs) are professionals that support others to implement evidence-informed practices, programs, and policies. Measuring implementation support competencies provides a unique opportunity to assess an understudied facet of implementation science—how knowledge, attitudes, and skills used by ISPs affect...

Background: There is an increasing demand for building a workforce capable of using evidence generated from implementation science to support the wide-scale use of evidence-informed interventions. The demand for such a workforce has resulted in (a) the identification and operationalization of competencies for implementation scientists and (b) the d...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) confer risk to the mental health of Black youth, but few studies have examined how youth gender, family, and neighborhood factors jointly influence the psychological impact of adversity. This study investigates if family resilience and neighborhood cohesion jointly moderate the link between latent ACE profiles a...

There remain gaps in the literature with respect to how individuals perceive, identify, and make sense of the functions of their families over time as social systems. Leveraging a qualitative approach rooted in a contextual constructionist epistemology and life course theory, the prioritized functions of family systems were explored via semi-struct...

Background Implementation support practitioners (ISPs) are professionals that support others to implement evidence-informed practices, programs, and policies in various service delivery settings to achieve population outcomes. Measuring the use of competencies by ISPs provides a unique opportunity to assess an understudied facet of implementation s...

Background Every county in North Carolina must include a board of health (BOH) with specific prescribed duties and powers. It is unclear how BOHs in North Carolina are currently exercising their governance ability. In 2012, the North Carolina General Assembly provided coun­ties with additional flexibility to select among different configurations fo...

This study sought to understand the geographic distribution of three behavioral health clinician (BHC) types in disadvantaged communities in the U.S. across a standardized index of area disadvantage. CMS National Plan and Provider Enumeration System's data were used to identify BHC practice addresses. Addresses were geocoded and mapped to census bl...

Family science is grappling with the legacy of White supremacy embedded in its theories and methodologies. This presents an opportunity to move beyond traditional theoretical perspectives and statistical approaches that have perpetuated racist assumptions about the inferiority of people of color compared to White Americans. We build on Curtis et al...

Introduction: There is a growing body of literature on the activities and competencies of implementation support practitioners (ISPs) and the outcomes of engaging ISPs to support implementation efforts. However, there remains limited knowledge about the experiences of implementation support recipients who engage with ISPs and how these experiences...

Research Objective: The behavioral health workforce crisis in the United States (US) limits access to behavioral health treatment. Strategies to increase the supply, distribution, and diversity of the behavioral health workforce are needed, particularly for graduate-level behavioral health professions. This study aims to (a) identify distinct educa...

Objectives This study sought to identify groupings of policymaking behavior among local governmental health departments (LHDs) across the country and assess whether such groupings were associated with the governance activity of their board of health (BOH). Design We conducted latent class analysis (LCA) to identify possible classes of policymaking...

Although some research has examined the mental health of individual family members in military families, additional research is needed that considers mental health among multiple members of the family system simultaneously and that characterizes subsets of families with distinct patterns. Mental health patterns of depressive symptoms and well-being...

Despite their ubiquity, stepfamilies generally hold a stigmatized status. The scientific community at large has not been immune to the influence of stepfamily stigmatization. Misusing the term “stepchild” in science is unnecessary on several fronts. “Stepchild” is often intended to denote neglect, oversight, or mistreatment. Scholars should conside...

Media and research reports have highlighted the disproportionate burden of home and family responsibilities shouldered by women and mothers due to COVID-19-related school/childcare shutdowns. This cross-sectional study extends this line of inquiry to emerging adults. Our study of 329 diverse emerging adults suggests that young women took on more ho...

Introduction Although mindfulness‐based interventions (MBIs) show promise for promoting positive youth development, little is known about student engagement in MBIs. Initial research presents mixed findings in MBI engagement related to participant characteristics, and there is a lack of research examining the influence of context on engagement, des...

Many areas of social work research benefit from the analysis of longitudinal data, which enable researchers to model developmental processes and their associations with other variables of interest. In many cases, longitudinal studies aim to test theories and hypotheses about long-term developmental processes experienced by respondents, with measure...

Background and Purpose: Professionals who provide implementation support in human-service systems describe relationships as being at the heart of what they do to support evidence use; however, developing trusting relationships and addressing power differentials are not strongly featured in implementation science literature. The aims of this study w...

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are conventionally measured using a cumulative-risk index without consideration of distinct measurement properties across racial and ethnic groups. Drawing from the 2018–2020 National Survey of Children's Health (N=93,759; 48% female; average age: 9.52years), we assess the measurement invariance of a latent-fact...

Person-oriented analytic approaches offer valuable opportunities to uncover latent patterns of specific family-maltreatment experiences among active-duty Air Force members (Airmen). Understanding such patterns, and their correlates, could inform prevention efforts led by Air Force leaders and practitioners. The 2011 Air Force Community Assessment y...

Important ideas about how to conduct family-structure research (and why we even should) have continued to crystallize in recent years, yet many issues are raised and re-raised without a clear and concrete path forward. Building on a collaborative workshop at NCFR 2022 titled “Delineating the Pressing Issues in Family-Structure Research,” the purpos...

Background: Attention is being placed on the “ironic gap” or “secondary” research-to-practice gap in the field of implementation science. Among several challenges posited to exacerbate this research-to-practice gap, we call attention to one challenge in particular—the relative dearth of implementation research that is tethered intimately to the liv...

Objective: Supporting diverse students in transitioning from BSW to MSW degree programs is a promising strategy for diversifying the behavioral health workforce. We assess the extent to which racial/ethnic identity, education characteristics, and interactions between the two are associated with the odds of obtaining an MSW degree following a BSW de...

This study explores the coping patterns of essential workers of color during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using a cross-sectional design, participants (N = 319) completed an electronic survey and answered questions about 21 coping behaviors between December 2020 and March 2021. Latent class analysis was used to cluster coping behaviors and examine the re...

What function does parental self-efficacy have for parenting behaviors and children's adjustment, and what explains individual variations in parents' self-efficacy? Parental self-efficacy involves parents' beliefs about their influence on their children and this systematic review presents results from 35 empirical studies published between 2003 and...

Background: Chronic stress alters reward sensitivity and contributes to the emergence of anhedonia. In clinical samples, the perception of stress is a strong predictor of anhedonia. While there is substantial evidence demonstrating psychotherapy reduces perceived stress, little is known regarding the effects of treatment-related decreases in perce...

The study of family structure remains demonstrably popular among researchers across numerous fields and disciplines. Important ideas about how to approach the study of family structure (and for what reasons we even should) have continued to crystallize in recent years, yet many issues are raised and re-raised without clear synthesis or concrete pro...

African American family formations have been a contentious issue for decades. Much of this contention reflects racial variations in family formations. For instance, when compared to White Americans, African Americans are less likely to marry and more likely to experience a nonmarital birth. Racial variability in family formations is not, in itself,...

Purpose Researchers have suggested that victims of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) have deleterious long-term outcomes; however, longitudinal trajectories of youth who experience CSE have not been explored. For the current study, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adults Health (Add Health) survey was used to compare trajectories...

Objective: to assess differences in internalized stigma of mental illness based on demographic characteristics and mental healthcare utilization among college students. Participants: Students with self-reported mental illness (n = 128) were recruited via random sampling. Methods: participants completed an online survey, including questions related...

This paper presents a theory of change that articulates (a) proposed strategies for building trust among implementation stakeholders and (b) the theoretical linkages between trusting relationships and implementation outcomes. The theory of change describes how trusting relationships cultivate increases in motivation, capability, and opportunity for...

Clinical and empirical literatures have highlighted the value of attending to distinct dyads within stepfamilies to ensure the needs of various relationships are being met. From a family systems perspective, the growth and maintenance of positive dynamics within one dyadic relationship can yield gains in other relationships and shape the larger ste...

An inclusive conceptualization of “family” can enable family-serving systems and professionals to leverage high-quality family relationships, wherever they are found, to support the health and well-being of individuals. Stepfamilies are an especially common family form with distinct needs and experiences, and stepparent-child relationships can take...

Background: There is growing interest in the lived experience of professionals who provide implementation support (i.e., implementation support practitioners). However, there remains limited knowledge about their experiences and how those experiences can contribute to the knowledge base on what constitutes successful and sustainable implementation...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Our objective is to identify common family functioning measurement tools and assess their compatibility with family-health development and life-course perspectives. METHODS Data sources include PubMed, ERIC, CINAHL, Families and Societies Worldwide, PsychInfo, Web of Science, PsychNet, and Health and Psychosocial Instrume...

Efforts are warranted to understand correlates of formal help-seeking among active-duty military members self-reporting family maltreatment perpetration. Drawing from the Integrated Model of Determinants of Behavioral Intentions, we evaluate a hypothesized model in which the intention to seek formal services is associated with a set of plausible so...

Although individual and family strengths have been found to impact family maltreatment risk, optimal approaches to their assessment are lacking. To substantiate the utility of holistically assessing multiple strengths among active-duty Air Force members (i.e., Airmen) who might be at risk of perpetrating family maltreatment, the current study aimed...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic will only exacerbate the rising mental health concerns among college students. However, stigma toward such concerns continues to hinder mental health care utilization among the students, requiring urgent evidence that can help guide college campuses in implementing effective antistigma interventions. We propose and pro...

Background Chronic stress alters reward sensitivity and contributes to the emergence of anhedonia. In clinical samples, the perception of stress is a strong predictor of anhedonia. While there is substantial evidence demonstrating psychotherapy reduces perceived stress, little is known regarding the effects of treatment-related decreases in perceiv...

Popular media attention and scientific research in both mindful parenting and technology use in the context of parenting has expanded in the 21st century; however, these two streams of research have largely evolved separately from one another. Thus, in this conceptual paper, we integrate the research on mindful parenting with that on parents’ techn...

Context: Continuous quality improvement (CQI) has become prominent in public health settings; yet, little consolidated guidance exists for building CQI capacity of community-based organizations. Objective: To synthesize relevant literature to identify guiding principles and core components critical to building the capacity of organizations to ad...

Introduction: The generational relevance for determining disease risk for the leading causes of morbidity and mortality for U.S. adults is a source of debate. Methods: Data on 12,300 adults (Add Health Study Members) participating in Wave V (2016 −2018) of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (also known as Add Health) wer...

Background The association between a lifetime history of sexual victimization and the well-being of women during the perinatal period has received increasing attention. However, research investigating this relationship has yet to be systematically reviewed or quantitatively synthesized. Aim This systematic review and meta-analysis aims to calculat...

This study examined differences between first-married and remarried couples in marital conflict, physical and mental health, and the emotion regulation strategies of cognitive reap- praisal and expressive suppression. Marriage order and emo- tional regulation strategies were examined as potential moderators of the association between marital confli...

Objectives Mindful parenting and parenting cognitions likely have important linkages to each other and to parent-child communication, but these linkages have not been tested. In this article, we test the bidirectional linkages between mindful parenting and parenting cognitions (sense of competence, parent-centered attributions) and the underlying m...

In this article, we argue that accounting for sibling complexity is a necessary step toward more accurate assessments of family structure. First, we argue that current conceptualizations of family structure are rooted in (and reinforce) Eurocentric definitions of family, and we highlight contradictions between family theory and measurements of fami...

This study used longitudinal data to examine the transactional associations between mothers’ spanking and mother–child relationship quality with children’s externalizing behaviors in the context of intimate partner violence (IPV). Data came from a sample of 1,152 low-income mothers with children age 10–14 years. Results showed that past-year IPV tr...

The Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Parenting and Children’s Externalizing Behaviors: Transactional Processes Over Time.

Purpose: We aimed to assess the prevalence of four cardiovascular risk factors (obesity, diabetes, excessive alcohol intake, and cigarette smoking) for parents and their adult children at the same approximate midlife age. We also evaluated associations of parents' cardiovascular risk factors, childhood health exposures, and social contexts (i.e., f...

Stepparent-child relationships are a core pillar of stepfamily functioning and well-being. Stepparents can take on a variety of roles in the lives of their stepchildren, ranging from de facto parents to distant acquaintances. There remain important opportunities to explore specific interactional patterns between youth and stepparents, particularly...

We examined emotion regulation strategies as moderators of marital conflict and marital satisfaction between first-married and remarried couples. Remarried couples with a stepchild ( n = 108) and first marriage couples ( n = 111) with a child completed online surveys. Perceptions of both spouses were analyzed using actor–partner interdependence mod...

Background: A significant proportion of individuals seeking treatment for substance use disorders (SUDs) have experienced sexual victimization, which has been shown to disrupt the efficacy of SUD treatment services. Objective: To evaluate the relationship between lifetime sexual victimization and SUD treatment completion. Methods: Relevant literatu...

Objective The purpose of this systematic review was to synthesize quantitative or mixed-method studies that evaluate the efficacy of interventions with youth in the context of psychiatric residential treatment facilities (PRTFs) in the United States. Methods Systematic review procedures were conducted to identify relevant studies, both published a...

The concept of engaged scholarship has garnered significant attention across numerous scientific disciplines. Engaged scholarship can be conceptualized as both a method centered on cocreating and applying new knowledge and a movement focused on prioritizing community identification of needs and social problem-solving strategies. In an effort to pos...

Stepparent-child relationships and new couple relationships are core pillars of stepfamily functioning and well-being. Although research generally indicates that stepparent-child relationship quality and couple relationship quality are positively associated, questions remain about in which contexts and from whose perspective this association holds....

Objective To examine whether marital dynamics within remarried couples (in the form of perceived quality and confidence) or perceptions of stepparent–stepchild relationship quality were more strongly associated with stepfamily functioning. Background Stepfamilies are common in the United States, and identifying factors central to healthy stepfamil...

There is a dearth of research on the evaluation of the psychometric performance of instruments designed to measure students’ generalist-level social work competencies. There is also uncertainty on the performance of various response option formats used to measure students’ competencies in assessment instruments. Using a sample of 198 master of soci...

Remarried stepfamilies are a sizable portion of American families; in a 2011 Pew Center survey, 42% of respondents reported at least one stepfamily member. Family clinicians and researchers suggest that stepparents’ ability to develop close bonds with stepchildren may be critical to the well-being of couple and family relationships. Using actor-par...

Using a representative sample from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and a recently developed stepfamily‐process typology, this study explores three plausible functions of perceived neighborhood collective efficacy with respect to stepfamily life and youth adjustment: an ability to (1) prevent maladaptive patterns of ste...

Parental involvement in their adolescents' education plays an important role in promoting their children's academic outcomes. Yet, more research is needed to examine the relationship between parenting practices and parental warmth as well as to consider the potential joint contribution of warmth from both fathers and mothers. Thus, the primary purp...

Because of the potential stepparent-stepchild relationships have for tension and conflict, clinicians have identified the development of a positive stepparent-stepchild connection as one of the major tasks of stepfamily life. Stepparents often are advised to focus initially on developing friendships with stepchildren, or seeking affinity with them,...

In line with family systems theory, we examined patterns of hostile interactions within families and their associations with externalizing problems among early-adolescent children. Using hostility scores based on observational data of six dyadic interactions during a triadic interaction (n = 462; i.e., child-to-mother, mother-to-child, child-to-fat...

Social work doctoral education can prepare students to become research scholars whose work has impact by providing and promoting the develop- ment of an appropriately sophisticated and diverse research methods tool kit. Students can cultivate their tool kits through course work, mentored research experience, and specialized workshops. The tool kit...

Background/Rationale: Few studies have evaluated the psychometric performance of instruments designed to measure students’ generalist-level social work competencies (Bogo, 2008; Bogo et al., 2002; Regehr & Bogo, 2007; Tapp, Mache, & McLendon, 2012). Consequently, questions remain about the validity and reliability of generalist-level competencies a...

This study used data from 12 cultural groups in nine countries (China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Philippines, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States; N = 1,298) to understand the cross‐cultural generalizability of how parental warmth and control are bidirectionally related to externalizing and internalizing behaviors from childhood to early...

Social work and other professions are endeavoring to promote student proficiency with respect to core competencies of the discipline, and the attainment of these competencies must be demonstrated objectively in some way. This article provides an illustrative guide for social work educators seeking to develop comprehensive examinations to assess stu...

Stepfamilies are an increasingly common context in which adults and children reside. Past research has examined family processes that promote family resilience, such as dyadic relationships marked by warmth, positive communication, satisfaction, and closeness. What remains less clear is whether various profiles of dyadic relationship quality within...

Stepfamilies experience unique dynamics, with implications for family functioning and youth well-being. Emerging research is incorporating a holistic perspective whereby stepfamily dynamics are viewed more comprehensively, and constellations of stepfamily relationship quality are identified. In the current study, we examined short-term and long-ter...

Stepfamilies are an increasingly common family form, many of which are headed by a resident mother and stepfather. Stepfather-child relationships exert notable influence on stepfamily stability and individual well-being. Although various stepfather roles have been observed, more research is warranted by which stepfather-child interactions are explo...

Social work doctoral education can prepare students to become research scholars whose work has impact by providing and promoting the development of an appropriately sophisticated and diverse research-methods toolkit. Students can cultivate their toolkits through coursework, mentored research experience, and specialized workshops. The toolkit is bes...

Background and Purpose: Approximately one-third of youth will reside with a social parent (or stepparent) at some point before reaching legal adulthood. Despite increasing prevalence, the transition to stepfamily life can generate considerable role ambiguity and stress in family systems. Past research indicates that new social fathers can take on a...

Background and Purpose: Amid family structural transitions and stress, family processes are a proximal determinant of family resilience and well-being. Past research on stepfamily processes highlights the centrality of resident parent-child, stepparent-child, nonresident parent-child, and couple relationship quality; however, less is known about th...

Identifying intervention effects, their precision, and their variation across contexts is important to many social work researchers and the field of social intervention more generally. This workshop will focus on seminal and emerging recommendations for the design and analysis of random assignment experiments, including discussion of the strengths...