Biography

Terri Williams completed her PhD in Community Psychology at DePaul University in June 2009. Her work centers around issues related the educational, emotional, physical, mental and community health of adolescents. As a community psychologist, she holds firmly to the values of social justice and citizen participation as tools to guide her research and scholarly activism. Her career goals are driven by her pursuit to decrease the discrepancy between theory and practice so that all members of our society, especially youth, have the opportunity to grow and thrive. From working with datasets as large as 20,000 and as small as 25, she realizes that, regardless of size, all well-designed research plans have value; each have a role in the research literature and help us create and implement better policies and procedures. Terri's dissertation was an empirical investigation of the conceptualizations of parental involvement in education in an urban, low-income African American community. To support her research, she was awarded two research grants by the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues and the Social Science Research Council. Terri is eager to gain more experience in community-based research designs and advanced statistical analysis techniques at the University of Michigan.