Social Capital and Family Therapy

Teresa McDowell, professor and chair of the graduate school’s counseling psychology department, has received the prestigious Anselm Strauss Award from the National Council on Family Relations. The award recognizes outstanding qualitative research in the area of family theory.

McDowell’s paper, “Mapping Social Capital: A Critical Contextual Approach for Working With Low-Status Families,” explores how effective therapeutic work with families depends on the way cultural factors such as race, ethnicity, gender, and social class relate to societal systems of power, privilege, and oppression. It contains suggestions for interventions aimed at increasing the social well-being of low-status families.

The award is shared by coauthor and adjunct professor Marisol Garcia and was published in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy in 2010.