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CRF Funds Five Graduate Students with Fall Travel Awards

Katie Newkirk

The Center for Research on Families is pleased to announce the recipients of its Fall Family Research Travel Award. Katie Newkirk, a Psychology Doctoral student received the top award of $500 for her paper, “Dishes and Diapers: Division of Household and Childcare Tasks and Marital Quality among Working-Class Parents," which was written in collaboration with CRF Family Research Scholar (’06-’07) Maureen Perry-Jenkins.

Newkirk presented the paper this November at the 73rd National Council on Family Relations Annual Conference in Orlando, Florida. Newkirk and Perry-Jenkins’s research explores the relationship between the division of household labor, child care and marital quality. Results of their research suggested that wives’ perceptions of the division of family labor mattered more for marital quality than husbands’ perceptions. In addition, an unequal division of childcare mattered more for wives at this stage and predicted less marital love.  For husbands, an unequal division of housework predicted more marital conflict. Their study was unique in that it examined both household tasks and childcare tasks separately, examined both husbands’ and wives’ reports of family labor and marital quality, and explored change in marital outcomes across the first year of parenthood.

Newkirk, a Clinical Psychology doctoral student in her second year, focuses her research on the transition to parenthood, gender in family dynamics, parental mental health, women’s mental health, and family processes. 

Winners of the Supplemental Travel Awards are:

Another round of CRF Family Research Travel Awards will be given this spring for conference travel in 2012. The Travel Awards are given to graduate students who have written outstanding papers or posters on issues of family research with their research team and are presenting the paper at a national research conference.  The deadline for the Spring Family Research Travel Award is February 13, 2012.  Applications can be found here.