Kristin M. Lindahl

• Interaction between marital and family interaction patterns
• Mediating and moderating roles of ethnicity
• Family interaction patterns and implications for mental health and relationship functioning in young adults, including heterosexual as well as LGB youth

I am interested in understanding the complexity of the family system and the inter-relationships among family subsystems. Within this area, two central questions have dominated my work:

1. how dysfunctions within the different subsystems of the family (whole family, marital, and parent-child) operate and are related to children's behavioral and emotional functioning, and
2. what scientific methods can be best utilized in the study of family functioning within and across cultural or ethnic groups?

Couples and Families Project/ Family Communication Project

Questions addressed by the above studies include, for example, cross-ethnic examinations of the relations between marital conflict and family functioning; the moderation of the relations between marital problems and child functioning by triadic family functioning; cross-ethnic examinations of the associations between balance of power in the marriage and domestic violence; the moderation of the association between marital conflict and parenting by parenting cognitions; and the moderation of the association between marital aggression and child aggression by aggressogenic child social cognitions.