Center for Family Research - Our Mission

At the Center for Family Research, we have been studying African American family life in the rural South since the early 1990s. Our faculty and staff have a particular interest in understanding how family, school and community contextual processes promote health and positive development in all family members. Up until now, mental health needs among rural African Americans have received little attention from either clinicians or researchers. For this reason, we are committed to using the information that we gather in our studies to design and evaluate research-based educational, prevention and intervention programs that enhance the well-being of African American families and their children.

Through our research efforts, we have forged important partnerships with members of rural African American communities in Georgia. These community liaisons, who are respected residents of the counties in which our studies are conducted, have collaborated in the conceptualization and implementation of our studies. They have been invaluable in gaining us access to rural communities and facilitating communication between our research teams and the families who participate in our studies. We attribute our retention of over 90% of the participants in our longitudinal developmental studies to this community liaison network.

Research aimed at fostering the development, implementation and diffusion of family-centered prevention programs requires conceptual sophistication, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and methodological and data-analytic expertise. We are currently sponsoring five work groups whose members represent eleven academic departments across the University of Georgia campus and five outside academic institutions. These faculty members are studying specific conceptual, methodological and infrastructure issues that have the potential to greatly advance our research on the delivery of family-centered interventions to rural African Americans. It is our hope and desire that their activities will contribute to the further development of the field of prevention science as well.