Recent Projects

Our research is dedicated to increasing culturally responsive counseling interventions for minoritized populations. Three interrelated domains of research are to 1) investigate etic and emic factors contributing to health disparity, 2) examine the impact of parenting, parent-child interaction, and other family processes on minoritized youth’s psychosocial development, and 3) evaluate the training, dissemination, and implementation of culturally adapted interventions into community settings. We have several key research projects currently ongoing. We use diverse qualitative (e.g., grounded theory, consensual qualitative research) and quantitative approaches (e.g., multigroup-based trajectory modeling, multilevel modeling) across these projects. We also use several large publicly available datasets (e.g., Healthy Minds, Chinese Family Panel Study).

Please see Google Scholar for the most updated list of academic publications.

Health Disparities

1. Help-Seeking Barriers for Racial-Ethnic Minority/Asian American Caregivers Accessing Autism Interventions. Led by Amani, this is a systematic review of the literature on healthcare barriers that exist for racial-ethnic minority families in accessing autism interventions within the healthcare system, followed up by interviews conducted with Asian American caregivers, who were underrepresented in the autism literature. This study is funded by the Organization for Autism Research (OAR).

2. Burmese American Community Institute (BACI) Participatory Action Research (PAR) program. As an ongoing community-engaged scholarship funded by the Purdue Research Fund, Dr. Zhou has been providing mentorship to Burmese students through BACI on research focused on health disparity issues that were informed, conducted, and interpreted by Burmese community members. Counseling doctoral students Brenda Shein and Jenni Thang had been past leaders in the BACI PAR program.

3. Well-being Disparities among Parenting Students. This is an ongoing project using archival and new data to unveil the understudied challenges and strengths of parenting students at the interplay of race and gender.

Minoritized Youth Development

1. Burmese Youth Psychosocial Development Longitudinal Study. This is an ongoing project to collect longitudinal data from Burmese high school students in south Indianapolis. In collaboration with Ball State University, this project includes several domains of investigation: health and mental health, ethnic-racial socialization, identity development, and civic engagement. This project is funded by the Purdue Center for Families (CFF).

2. Friendship development among Asian American youth. We are interested in answering fundamental questions about why Asian American youth make same-race and cross-race friends, and what are the functions of these diverse friendships. In collaboration with researchers from the University of Chicago, the University of Washington, and Rutgers University, we have analyzed a longitudinal dataset of Korean and Filipino youth’s friendship development.

3. Chinese Queer Diaspora. Funded by the American Psychological Foundation, this project adopts a serial interview design aimed to understand how Chinese queer migrants make sense of their life narratives, particularly around sexuality, across time and space (i.e., migration), and how they construct and negotiate the concepts of “home” and “family” living in the Chinese queer diaspora.

Culturally Adapted Interventions

1. Culturally Adapted Parenting Intervention to Address Autism Spectrum Disorders among Burmese American Families. This is a pilot study to develop an intervention that addresses the intersecting needs of Burmese American parents who have children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder. This project is funded by the NIH Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute.

2. Health Service Psychology Trainee Dismissal Study. This is a mixed method study in order to understand the trend of and trainees' perspectives on the dismissal process. The study is funded by the APA Commission on Ethnic Minority Recruitment, Retention and Training in Psychology II (CEMRRAT2) Task Force.