Amy Kerivan Marks, PhD
Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate and Graduate Studies
Department of Psychology
Currently accepting students for Fall 2014
Phone: 617-573-8017
Fax: 617-367-2924
Email: akmarks@suffolk.edu
Office: Donahue Building, Rm. 636H
Education
- PhD, Brown University
- BA, Cornell University
Specialty Areas
Developmental Psychology (Social & Emotional), Immigration, Diversity, Culture & Acculturation, Mixed Methods and Statistics.
How do cultural and social contexts like immigration influence youth development? How do adolescents navigate competing cultural contexts (e.g., home, school, peers) as they form their identities? How can every day social settings such as schools and peer groups promote positive development among at-risk youth? My students and I are interested in exploring person-context interactions such as these, particularly within vulnerable populations. Vulnerability can come in many forms – through poverty, discrimination from being a “minority” group member, or through legal status as an undocumented immigrant, for example. Learning about how children and adolescents from vulnerable groups thrive (or don’t thrive) is a central goal of our research. Because many of our research questions are process and context oriented in nature, our lab draws from a variety of mixed qualitative-quantitative methodological techniques. We also rely heavily on positive youth development and resiliency perspectives to inform our work. Graduate students in my lab have recently applied these methodological and theoretical orientations to dissertation topics related to adolescent female sexual identity development in context, health behaviors and outcomes among immigrant youth, characteristics of the college context which support ethnic minority student retention, transgender identity development, and drug misuse patterns among ethnic minority adolescents.
Selected Publications
Garcia Coll, C., & Marks, A. K. (In Press). The Immigrant Paradox in Children and Adolescents: Is becoming American a developmental risk? Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Marks, A. K., Patton, F., & Garcia Coll, C. (2011) Being Bicultural: A mixed-methods study of adolescents’ implicitly and explicitly measured multiethnic identities. Developmental Psychology, 47(1), 270-288. PDF
Guarini, T. E., Marks, A. K., Patton, F., & Garcia Coll, C. (2011). The immigrant paradox in sexual risk behavior among Latino adolescents: Impact of immigrant generation and gender. Applied Developmental Science, 15(4), 201-209.
García Coll, C., & Marks, A. K. (2009). Immigrant stories: Ethnicity and academics in middle childhood. New York: Oxford University Press.
Marks, A. K., Patton, F. & García Coll, C. (2009). More than the A-B-C’s and 1-2-3’s: The importance of family cultural socialization and ethnic identity development for children of immigrants’ early school success. In R. Takanishi & E. L. Grigorenko (Eds.), Immigration, Diversity, and Education. Routledge/Taylor and Francis Group.
Courses Taught
PSYCH 215 - Behavioral Statistics
PSYCH 334 - Adolescent Development
PSYCH 428 - Psychology Honors Seminar
PSYCH 723 - Multivariate Statistics
PSYCH 734 - Multicultural Perspectives on Development
