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Click here to view Fred Lorenz's curriculum vitae
(CV).
Fred Lorenz was a founding member of ISBR and one of the original
investigators (with Rand Conger, Ron Simons, Les Whitbeck and Glen H.
Elder, Jr.) of the Iowa Youth and Families Project (1989-1993) and the
Iowa Single Parent Project (1991-1994).
Lorenz's research, like all of Gaul, can be divided into three parts.
First, he was the PI on the Institute's
Midlife Transitions Project,
which examined the decade-long (1991-2001) effects of chronic economic and
family stress on the psychological well-being and physical health of rural
husbands and wives and divorced women. Among the results of this project was the
finding that divorce has some of the characteristics of an acute stressor in
that the process of becoming divorced undermines women's psychological
well-being, and some of the characteristics of a chronic stressor, resulting in
poorer health and more illnesses a decade after the divorce. This addresses a
controversy in the marital literature about whether divorce is best described as
a crisis or a chronic condition. Analyses on this data are continuing.
Second, Lorenz is the PI on a recent grant, "Relationship quality and health in
young adults." It is a continuation of the
Iowa Family Transitions Project
and is designed to examine factors affecting the timing of marriage in young
adults, the quality of their relationships, and the correspondence between
relationship quality and physical and emotional health. Because of its long-term
(1989-2005) multi-wave panel design, this study links the relationship quality
of young adults (2001-2005) to the quality of their relationships with their
parents, and the quality of their parents' marriage, when they were adolescents
(1989-1994). This study is a complement to another ISBR project, "Economic
stress and child development across 3 generations" (PI Conger).
Third, Lorenz conducts methodological research and provides (with colleagues K.
A. S. Wickrama and Dan Russell) statistical and methodological support to ISBR
faculty and affiliates in developing grant proposals and conducting data
analysis. Because ISBR data include observational data from videotapes of family
members interacting with each other, Lorenz collaborates with Jan Melby, who
directs the observation unit, in examining the strength of relationships between
observed behaviors and questionnaire reports of the same behaviors. Lorenz also
collaborates with statistics colleague Mike Larsen on methods of
imputing data in panel studies. Over
the past two decades, Lorenz has been a participant in an Agricultural
Experiment Station study group that conducts "experiments in surveys" to examine
the effects of question wording, response categories and question order on
respondents' answers to questionnaire items. |
