Dr. Brian K. Barber

Professor of Child and Family Studies
Adjunct Professor of Psychology

Brian K. Barber rejoined the faculty of the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of Tennessee in 2001. He began his faculty career in this same department in 1987. In the interim years, he held faculty positions in sociology at Brigham Young University and psychology at the University of Utah.

Dr. Barber's research focuses on the role of family, peer, school, community, and religious influences in adolescent development. In 1993, he received a National Institute of Mental Health FIRST Award to conduct this work in the United States in the form of a 5-year longitudinal study of families with adolescents (The Ogden Youth and Family Project). Additionally, he has extended this investigation to numerous cultures in South America, Africa, Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, and among ethnic minorities in the U.S (The Cross-National Adolescence Project ).

Since 1994, Dr. Barber has also been studying adolescent development in contexts of political violence, comparing youth from the Gaza Strip, Palestine and Sarajevo, Bosnia (The Adolescents in Political Violence Project). For this work, he was awarded an Advanced Research Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council in 1998, Scholar in Residence positions at the BYU Jerusalem Center for Near Eastern Studies in 1999 and the BYU Kennedy Center for International Studies in 2000, and a Rockefeller Bellagio Italy fellowship in 2002.

To build on this work, Dr. Barber has founded the Center for the Study of Youth and Political Violence at the University of Tennessee (http://youthviolence.tennessee.edu ) that has been designed to facilitate a much needed integration among research and applied professionals interested in understanding and caring for conflict youth.

Dr. Barber publishes regularly in the leading family sociology and developmental psychology journals. Consistent with his research, Dr. Barber teaches courses on child and adolescent development, using a social context, and often a comparative, perspective. He gives many presentations to community groups on his research and is currently a Technical Advisor to the World Health Organization's Program for Child and Adolescent Health and Development.

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Barber, B. K. (Ed.) (2008). Adolescents and war: How youth deal with political violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Barber, B. K. (2008). Making sense and no sense of war: Issues of identity and meaning in adolescents' experience with political conflict . In B. K. Barber (Ed.), Adolescents and war: How youth deal with political violence. NY: Oxford University Press.

Barber, B. K. (2008). Contrasting portraits of war: Youths' varied experiences with political violence in Bosnia and Palestine. International Journal of Behavioral Development, xx.

Law, J. H., & Barber, B. K. (2006). Neighborhood conditions, parenting and adolescent functioning. Journal of Human Behavior and the Social Environment, 14, 91-118.

Barber, B. K. (2005). Positive adolescent functioning: An assessment of measures across time and group. In K. A. Moore and L. Lippman (Eds.), What do children need to flourish? Conceptualizing and measuring indicators of positive development. Springer Science & Business Publishers.

Bradford, K. P., & Barber, B. K. (2005). Intrusive and coercive family processes: Interparental conflict and ineffective parenting. Journal of Emotional Abuse, 5, 145-170.

Barber, B. K., Stolz, H. E., & Olsen, J. A. (2005). Parental support, psychological control, and behavioral control: Assessing relevance across time, method, and        culture. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 70, No. 4.

Krishnakumar, A., Buehler, C., & Barber, B. K. (2004). Cross-ethnic equivalence of socialization and interparental conflict measures in African American and European American families. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 66, 809-820.

Barber, B. K. (Ed.) (2002). Intrusive parenting: How psychological control affects children and adolescents. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press.

Barber, B. K. (2001). Political violence, social integration, and youth functioning: Palestinian youth from the Intifada. Journal of Community Psychology, 29, 259- 280.

Contact Information

1215 W. Cumberland Ave
420 Jessie Harris Building
Knoxville, TN 37996-1912

Phone: 865-974-5316
Email: bbarber1@utk.edu

Contact CEHHS

335 Claxton Complex 1122 Volunteer Boulevard
Knoxville, Tennessee 37996

Phone: 865-974-2201
Fax: 865-974-8718