Thomas S. Weisner, PhD is Prof. of Anthropology, Departments of Psychiatry (NPI Semel Institute, Center for Culture and Health) and Anthropology at UCLA.
His research and teaching interests are in culture and human development; medical, psychological and cultural studies of families and children at risk; mixed methods; and evidence-informed policy. He is Director of the Center for Culture & Health at UCLA, and the Fieldwork and Qualitative Data Laboratory in the Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities Research Center. The Lab has developed a range of supports for mixed methods, including the software Dedoose and EthnoNotes, and the Ecocultural Family Interview. He is currently collaborating (with Andrew Fuligni and Nancy Gonzalez) on a new study of the daily activities, family responsibilities and obligations, and academic and behavioral outcomes of 425 Mexican-American teens and parents in Los Angeles. He is a co-PI on a qualitative follow-up study of over 200 young adults diagnosed 12 years earlier with ADHD. He continues to study impacts of family supports on children and families, based on a longitudinal random-assignment experimental study over 8 years of a successful support program for working-poor parents (with Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston, Hiro Yoshikawa, Bob Granger and others). He has also collaborated in a longitudinal study of families with children with developmental disabilities (with Ron Gallimore, Barbara Keogh). He has done longitudinal field research (through 1992) in Western Kenya and Nairobi, on sibling caretaking of children, and on the long-term consequences of urban migration for children and families, as well as studies of sibling caretaking and school competence among Native Hawaiians (with Ron Gallimore) and Latina youth in California (Patricia East).
Weisner has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, a member of the MacArthur Foundation research network on successful pathways in middle childhood, is past President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, is a Senior Program Advisor to the William T Grant Foundation, is on the Board of ChildFund, International, and is on the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Child Development. He is the co-author of Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and Their Children(2007) (with Greg Duncan and Aletha Huston); co-editor of Making it work: Low-wage employment, family life and child development (with Hiro Yoshikawa & Edward Lowe), (2006); editor of Discovering successful pathways in children’s development: New methods in the study of childhood and family life (2005); and co-editor of African families and the crisis of social change (with Candice Bradley and Phil Kilbride) (1997). His B.A. in Anthropology is from Reed College (1965) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (1973) in Anthropology and Social Relations.
