Judith Smetana

Professor Smetana's research examines adolescent-parent relationships and development in cultural contexts; children's moral and social reasoning; and development of parenting beliefs. My current research focuses on three areas: (a) adolescent-parent relationships and adolescent development in different cultural contexts. We are currently conducting several studies of disclosure and secrecy in adolescent-parent relationships. We are focusing on adolescents' strategies for managing information about their everyday activities and parents' strategies for remaining informed about what their adolescents are doing. Our studies employ multiple methods (narrative interviews, questionnaires, and observations); (b) the development of children's moral and social knowledge, including the development of and conceptual distinctions between children's understanding of moral and social- conventional rules and transgressions, relationships among social knowledge, affect, and behavior, and contextual influences on social and moral judgments; and (c) parents' parenting beliefs and their relationships to parenting practices and child outcomes.