Student NameMerari Flores Saldana
Faculty Mentor NameDr.Larry Forthun
CollegeCollege of Agricultural and Life Sciences
MajorFamily, Youth and Community Sciences
MinorFamily Life Education
Research InterestsI am interested in the effects of parenting style and environmental factors and their effects on youth development. It is imperative to identify and understand the complex factors that influence youth development in order to create evidence-based, preventative programs to support the well-being of families and combat child abuse and neglect.
Hobbies and Interests One of my favorite things to do is go to the beach and explore new beaches. I also love to do yoga, go biking, dance, and read books.

Research Project

The Effects of Parenting Style on Emerging Adulthood Emotional Self-Regulation and Identity Development

The purpose of this research is to examine how parenting profiles, identity development, and emotional self-regulation may relate to one another in emerging adulthood. Using an existing dataset of over 10,000 college students, described in Castillo and Schwartz (2013), this research will examine profiles of parenting characteristics and their relationship to emotion self-regulation and identity development. It is expected that parenting characteristics will generate two or more parenting clusters. As a result, it is hypothesized that parenting profiles consisting of high nurturance will be related to a higher use of cognitive reappraisal for emotional self-regulation and a high amount of both identity exploration and commitment. Likewise, parenting profiles consisting of high psychological control will be related to a higher use of suppression for emotional self-regulation and a low amount of both identity exploration and commitment. This research will address the gap in knowledge on how these factors may influence emerging adults regardless of whether or not this research produces the expected results.