Center for Families

The Center for Families awarded a 2007 Van Scoyoc Fellowship to Kyong-Ah Kwon, a doctoral student in the Department of Child Development and Family Studies (CDFS) at Purdue. Kwon plans to use the financial support during her dissertation project, "Coparenting, Parenting, and Socio-Emotional Development in Toddlers," which will highlight the importance of supportive coparenting and positive parenting, especially fathering, for child development. 

Kwon earned bachelor's and master's degrees from Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, Korea, before coming to Purdue. In 2004, she completed a second master's degree thesis through CDFS that focused on using teacher intervention to promote peer interaction in children with disabilities. Kwon's research interests address parenting in diverse contexts and its impact on social-emotional development in young children, along with quality of early childhood education programs and child development outcomes. She's currently exploring those interests in a research project that she developed to study adjustment and parenting among Asian international graduate students and their spouses.