Lorey Wheeler

Dr. Lorey A. Wheeler is currently an Associate Research Professor with the Nebraska Center for Research on Children, Youth, Families and Schools and Co-Director of the Nebraska Academy for Methodology, Analytics & Psychometrics. Prior to coming to UNL, Dr. Wheeler was the Assistant Director of Methodology for the Arizona State University (ASU) Prevention Research Center where she provided methodological and statistical support for multiple federally-funded community-based intervention trials and basic research studies of children and families under stressful conditions. She was also a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the ASU T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics for a federally-funded study of Mexican American families raising adolescents and young adults. She received her bachelor's in psychology from Nebraska Wesleyan University; her master's and doctorate in family and human development with an emphasis in quantitative methodology from ASU.<br><br>Dr. Wheeler’s research focuses on the role of family in normative youth development from early adolescence into adulthood and includes outcomes related to interpersonal relationships, psychosocial adjustment, and health primarily among Latino families. Grounded in cultural-ecological and developmental perspectives, her work addresses macro forces (e.g., gender and culture) and proximal and distal contexts (e.g., families, workplaces), and the mechanisms by which these systems are linked to youth development and family dynamics. A second focus of her research pertains to statistical models used to answer questions about complex ecological, developmental, and relational phenomena, and the translation of these methods into useful tools for researchers.<br>Dr. Wheeler has presented at national conferences and co-authored articles on the topics of Mexican-origin adolescents’, young adults’, and adults’ psychosocial adjustment as related to family contexts (e.g., parental work, parent-adolescent relationships, parenting, and marital relationships) that will or have appeared in Child Development, Developmental Psychology, Family Process, Journal of Family Psychology, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Sex Roles.<br>Her methodology expertise includes:<br>•dyadic data, mediation/moderation, missing data, LGM, LCA, MLM, SEM