Miwa Yasui
Assistant Professor
School of Social Service Administration
Miwa Yasui’s work focuses on the application of methodology as a vehicle through which she examines how culture shapes our current conceptualizations of normative and atypical developmental processes. She further examines how this lens of culture can be clinically applied to enhance the lives of culturally diverse children and families. She specifically examines the intersection of culture and methodology in three domains: the application of observational methods to examine how culturally anchored processes impact the developmental trajectories of ethnic minority children and youth; the investigation of the cultural validity of research methodology as a cornerstone for understanding of culturally grounded developmental processes; and the development of a culturally adaptive intervention aimed at enhancing clinical engagement.
She is the coauthor of “Direct Observation of Adolescent Family Interaction: Validity and Reliability as a Function of Coder Ethnicity and Training,” in Behavior Therapy; “The Ethnic Context of Child and Adolescent Problem Behavior: Implications for Child and Family Interventions,” in Clinical Child and Family Review; and “An Adaptive Approach to Family Intervention: Linking Engagement in Family-Centered Intervention to Reductions in Adolescent Problem Behavior,” in Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.
She holds a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Oregon and received undergraduate degrees in comparative culture from Sophia University, Tokyo, and in psychology from the University of Oregon.
