Cauce, Ana Mari

Education and Training

Cauce lived at home, with her parents, while attending the University of Miami. It was a work-study job with professor of psychology Leonard Jacobson that first led her to contemplate research in psychology, and she graduated with a BA in psychology and English literature. In her first substantive research involvement, Cauce reviewed the literature on intelligence assessment, particularly as it applied to Latinos. In general, she found the research in this area to be conceptually and methodologically weak and permeated by implicit and incorrect assumptions about ethnic minorities (Cauce & Jacobson, 1981). Over time, she found that sloppy scholarship was more often the norm than the exception when ethnic minorities were the subject of interest, and she believed that she could do better.

Leaving home was not easy for Cauce, but a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) pre-doctoral fellowship through Yale University and one from the American Psychological Association (APA) Minority Fellowship Program made the transition easier. While at Yale, she studied with and was most influenced by Edmund Gordon, her dissertation adviser, and committee members Edward Zigler and Seymour Sarason. Another enduring influence from those days was the death of her brother, then 25, murdered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he was a civil rights and union activist. He remains an important source of inspiration for her advocacy for social justice, whether through her research, professional, or personal undertakings.

While continuing her focus on her research and studies was difficult in the face her brother's murder, Cauce completed her PhD in 1984, with a focus on child clinical and community psychology. As it has progressed, Cauce's work has contributed to three areas that are not mutually exclusive: youth social support networks, family processes and development in ethnic minority adolescents, and community-based interventions with at-risk youth.

Contributions to Understanding Social Support in Childhood and Adolescence

Research on social support networks had long suggested that adults who report higher levels of support are more resistant to the deleterious effects of life stress, employment disruption, and normative life transitions. But Cauce (Cauce, Felner, & Primavera, 1982) was one of the first to examine the relationship between social support and adjustment during childhood and adolescence. In this study, she delineated the structural features of youth networks, hypothesizing that different subgroups of support providers (e.g., parents, peers, etc.) form separate “support systems” within the network and that these distinct support groupings differentially affect the impact of social support on adjustment.

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