Dr.Alexa Smith-Osborne
Presented to The University of Texas at Arlington Libraries on the occasion of Promotion to Associate Professor, Dr. Alexa Smith-Osborne, Social Work, Fall 2012.
Item(s) added to the Libraries' collection:
Overcoming the odds : high risk children from birth to adulthood
Werner, E., Smith, R., & Smith-Osborne, A. (1992). Overcoming the odds : high risk children from birth to adulthood . Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
I appreciate this opportunity to add to the library's collection in my field of study: resilience. Werner and Smith's seminal longitudinal study of native Hawaiian high risk children from infancy to adulthood was the groundbreaking work establishing resiliency as an empirically derived theoretical construct. On the basis of their work, and the confirmatory concurrent work by Sir Michael Rutter in England, resiliency theory has continued to be one of the few theories of human behavior in the social environment of empirical origin followed by a sustained, rigorous empirical course of development. Methodologically, Werner and Smith also were pioneers. They shifted the research lens from focusing on the majority sample who experienced developmental psychopathology to examining the minority contrast cases in the sample who had unexpectedly typical developmental outcomes in a context of adversity.