School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Robinson Family Professor, Director, Center for Children and Families
Research Interests
Trajectories of self-regulation development and relations to school readiness and achievement in low-income ethnic minority children. Parent-child relationships and other important developmental contexts.
Biography
Dr. Margaret Owen is a leading researcher in the areas of parent-child and caregiver-child relationships and young children’s development in the context of these and other close relationships. Some of her recent research focuses on how the qualities of parent-toddler communication lay a foundation for successful language learning. She has collaborated with a large team translating these findings into interventions with parents and child-care providers to support low-income children’s language success. In another large collaborative effort, she is studying individual, family, and contextual factors contributing to risk and resilience in the development of school readiness and school achievement in a longitudinal study of low-income, African American and Latina children in Dallas, now spanning from toddlerhood through middle school. Dr. Owen previously studied the effects of maternal employment and child care on children’s development, from infancy through adolescence as an investigator on the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development throughout its multiple phases. Dr. Owen is the Director of the UT Dallas Center for Children and Families. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has received the Rueben Hill Award from the National Council on Family Relations and the Margaret Cone Impact Award of the Dallas Association for the Education of Young Children. Dr. Owen earned her bachelor’s degree from Oberlin College, her master’s degree from the University of Kansas, and her doctoral degree from the University of Michigan.
Recent and Selected Representative Publications
ARTICLES IN PEER-REFEREED JOURNALS
Caughy, M. O., Mills, B., Owen, M. T., Dyer, N., & Oshri, A. (2017). Ethnic differences in mothering qualities and relations to academic achievement. Journal of Family Psychology, 31(7), 855-866. doi: 10.1037/fam0000334.
Peredo, T., Caughy, M. O., Owen, M. T., & Mills, B. (2016). Gender differences in the relation between mothering behaviors and the emergence of child behavior problems among Mexican-American preschoolers. Developmental Psychology, 52(2), 592-598.
Peredo, T., Owen, M. T., Rojas, R., & Caughy, M. O. (2015). Child vocabulary, maternal behavior, and inhibitory control development among Spanish-speaking children. Early Education and Development, 26:5-6, 749-769.
Caughy, M. O., & Owen, M. T. (2015). Cultural socialization and school readiness of African American and Latino preschoolers. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology, 21(3), 391-399.
Hirsh-Pasek, K. Adamson, L. A., Bakeman, R., Owen, M. T., Golinkoff, R., Pace, A., Yust, P., & Suma, K. (2015). The contribution of early communication quality to low-income children’s language success. Psychological Sciences, 26(7), 1071-1083.
