My research focuses on marital interactions and the parent-child relationship. These topics cover multi-dimensional personal interactions and mechanisms such as support, conflict, power, deception, and humor. Not limited to individual experiences, my work takes an interlaced view of values and intergenerational ties through analysis of long-term trace data to integrate the dyadic subsystem and the context of time in life stages and across the life course.
My research has three key aspects. The first, concerning interactions and long-term transitions experienced by married couples, explores characteristics of Taiwanese couples’ subsystem from longitudinal dyadic data collected since 2001. This has produced more than a dozen published papers including “Typology and influence of conflict-coping strategies,” “Influence of provided and received supports,” “Effects of deceptive motives and strategies,” and “Family values and marital interactions.” These studies demonstrate the unique meaning of interactions between husband and wife and reflect the profound role of culture to marriage.
The second involves interpersonal relationships and the psychological well-being of the youth in Taiwan, and entails a series of analyses based on the longitudinal and cross-generational survey data of the Taiwan Youth Project. It explores young people’s different growth trajectories and developmental patterns responding to diverse social contexts from adolescence to young adulthood. This has also yielded a number of papers: “When middle-aged parents meet adolescent children,” “Moral belief of adolescents in Taiwan,” “Longitudinal effect of parent-child interactions,” “Early life experiences, social capital, and leisure activity,” etc.
The third works from large-scale databases in Taiwan and Japan, the Taiwan Social Change Survey, Japan Social Change Survey, and the National Family Research of Japan, to compare the contemporary societies of Taiwan and Japan. This comparison looks at number of issues from the perspective of the individual, time period, and generational change, to discover the values, psychological needs, marital relations, and interpersonal interactions of Taiwanese and Japanese. This research has produced nearly ten papers, and provides clarification and a more representative interpretation of the psychological and social status of people in Taiwan and Japan by using a new methodology (cross-classified random-effect model, CCREM).