Jennifer A. Schmidt is associate professor of Educational Psychology at Northern Illinois University. Prior to coming to NIU, Dr. Schmidt was Director of Research at the Sloan Center for the Study of Parents, Children, and Work at the University of Chicago, where she led the data collection efforts for The 500 Family Study (B. Schneider and L. Waite, Principal Investigators). She holds a PhD in Psychology: Human Development from the University of Chicago. Dr. Schmidt’s research focuses on the ways that parents, teachers, and community members can foster youth engagement in activities that promote positive youth development. She is a member of the steering committee for the Northern Illinois University Collaborative on Early Adolescence (NIU-CEA), and her work there involves research, evaluation, and outreach in schools and other organizations serving early adolescents. Recent publications have explored the benefits of youth engagement in community service, and parent involvement in homework. She currently has a 3-year grant from the National Science Foundation to examine gender differences in adolescents’ experiences with science. Dr. Schmidt is an expert in the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) -- a signal contingent method of data collection in which respondents provide multiple reports of their activities and subjective experience. She leads training workshops for researchers interested in this methodology, and has co-authored a book on ESM (with J. Hektner and M. Csikszentmihalyi) titled Experience Sampling Method: Measuring the Quality of Everyday Life (Sage, 2007). She has used ESM to study time use and daily subjective experience of parents and children in working families.

More information about Dr. Schmidt and her work can be found at her website:

http://www.cedu.niu.edu/~schmidt/

Expertise: Dual Earner Families, Resiliency and Stress, Community, Work, and Family,