Inna Padmawidjaja, Ph.D.
Project Director

I am doing research focusing on parental functioning on child and adolescent mental health across cultures and across ethnic groups in the US. This is a particularly important and exciting area of investigation at the present time, as it is thought that parental functioning play a critical role in many child and adolescent outcomes including school motivation, performance and adjustment.

Rebecca Chau
Staff Research Associate

I have recently joined the MFAS research team and am heading the portion of the project that focuses on qualitative, in-home interviews of adolescents and their parents. I have extensive experience in conducting qualitative interviews. Previously, I served for 3 years as Project Coordinator for the Asian American Family Project at UCLA, funded by NICHD. We used a qualitative interview approach to study the concerns, difficulties, and struggles facing Chinese and Japanese families with developmentally delayed children. The family structure and dynamics were studied and also compared with same-age typically developing children from families of the same ethnic background. Next, I was involved for 2 years in an international research project on STD/HIV Prevention Trial at UCLA. This project is funded by NIMH as part of a collaborative agreement with similar projects in five other countries. In year 2000 I traveled to China for more than a month to help train the field workers on qualitative interviews. I have also been involved in many other projects since my undergraduate studies, such as religiosity, alcohol abuse, cancer, mental health, etc. I am a native of Hong Kong and am fluent in both Cantonese and Mandarin.

I look forward to doing individual interviews with the Chinese parents and adolescents in our MFAS sample families. It's always an exciting experience to learn from the participants. Through the qualitative interviews, we will learn about parenting, particularly parental control, in Chinese immigrant familes, and how adolescents and parents interpret (i.e., feel, think about, and make sense of the parent's control).