Monday, December 20, 2010

Where I'm going and Where I've Been...

WARNING!! TEXT HEAVY POST!! Since most of the people that read this are still friends and family I ask that you all indulge this personal update!

For the past 4.5 years I've been working towards my Ph.D. in clinical child and pediatric psychology.


Micheal and I at my Masters graduation in December 2008.

My mom and grandma came for my graduation, it was very special.


I posted a little over a week ago that I successfully defended my dissertation and one of my readers (Hi Ann!) asked for a little blurb about what my research was on. So quick blurb:

Title: Maternal Depressive Symptoms and Health Outcomes in Young Adolescents with Type 1 Diabetes: A Mediational Model.

Across research studies about 25% of mothers of children with type 1 diabetes report clinically elevated symptoms of depression (which is much higher than the general population.) My results showed that mothers that report high levels of depressive symptoms also report being less involved in their children's diabetes management. In turn, when mothers are less involved in diabetes care their children didn't check their blood sugar or use insulin as frequently and they ate less frequently.


This was a HUGE step in my education (duh) and is also very appealing to internship sites so the impact of being done has even bigger implications. Over the next month I'll be traveling to Maryland, Delaware, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas and Oklahoma for interviews. There is a chance that the F2F family will be split up for a year but we're hoping against hope that this won't happen! Thank you all for your support and I'll keep you updated!

1 comment:

Nutbird said...

This is very important work because of the increase in both types of diabetes in children. I've seen figures that 30% of the US population will have diabetes in the next twenty years. It is shameful, because a lot of this is preventable. Ann