E. Mavis Hetherington
Quick Facts
Biography
E. Mavis Hetherington (born November 27, 1926) is a retired psychology professor at the University of Virginia. She is a leading researcher on the impacts of divorce, family as units, and the development of children. Throughout her career she has published more than 200 articles and edited 13 books. While a professor at the University of Virginia she helped improve their psychology department, making them a nationally ranked program. Hetherington also introduced a new method of analyzing observational research as well as help open the field of psychology to women by overcoming discrimination in her early career.
Early life and education
E. Mavis Hetherington was born in British Columbia on November 27, 1926. She earned a B.A. degree in English and Psychology in 1947, and a year later earned her M.A. in Psychology at the University of British Columbia. After receiving her masters, she applied to the graduate program at the University of California, Berkeley where she earned her Ph.D. in clinical and developmental psychology in 1958. At Berkeley, Hetherington studied under Leo Postman who influenced her to become involved in research instead of becoming a practitioner.
Marriage and career
Hetherington met her husband, John Hetherington, while working on her Ph.D. She started her academic career at Rutgers University-Newark. In 1960, Hetherington and her husband both decided to get teaching jobs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While teaching in Wisconsin, Hetherington experienced some discrimination by being paid far less than the men while out publishing them and being one of the most popular professors. Throughout her career she published more than 200 research articles and edited 13 books. Hetherington has received many awards throughout her career including the Distinguished Teaching in Developmental Psychology Award from the APA. She also was honored with the Distinguished Scientist Awards from multiple organizations, the Society for Research in Child Development, the American Psychological Society, the American Family Therapy Association, the Society for Research in Adolescence, the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and the National Council on Family Relations.
Major contributions
Virginia Longitudinal Study of Divorce and Remarriage.
In 1972, E. Mavis Hetherington and colleagues started a 20-year Longitudinal Study of Divorce and Remarriage. Hetherington followed 450 families who had children that were 4 years of age and lived in Virginia. Today, some of those children are adults and have also been divorced or remarried. This has allowed Hetherington to study the effects of divorce and remarriage throughout generations. Numerous follow up studies have also been completed from this data. Findings have caused controversy and a new perspective on divorce, remarriage, and families. Hetherington and colleagues found that divorce is devastating but not as devastating as most theorists have concluded. She also discovered that divorce can't be looked at as a single event but must be viewed as a process of transitions and perspectives from the entire family. Hetherington concluded that social interactions of the family will affect the outcomes of divorce and remarriage and variations of outcomes must be acknowledged.
Late life
Throughout Hetherington's career at the University of Virginia she made great strides with their psychology program by bringing them up to national status in the psychology world. Hetherington's research continues as our generation strays farther away from traditional marriages and replacing it with cohabitation, remarriages, and single parent house holds. Due to her husbands illness Hetherington retired in 1999 after 29 years at the University of Virginia, but her research still continues through the students she worked with.