Lerner, Jacqueline V.

Jackie Lerner was born Jacqueline Rose Verdirame, in 1954. Born and raised in Flushing, New York, she is the middle child of three children born to an Italian American father and a German American mother. After spending her childhood in New York, Lerner attended St. John's University as a psychology major. She graduated with honors in 1975 and decided to pursue a career in psychology, and went on to obtain a master's degree from Eastern Michigan University. Impressively, Lerner completed her master's in 1 year at Eastern Michigan. While there, she met her future husband and longtime collaborator, Richard Lerner. As he went on to accept a [Page 648]professorship at Penn State University, she continued her studies and later earned a PhD in educational psychology from Penn State University, in 1980. She spent the following year as a visiting scholar at the Center for Research on Women at Stanford University.

Lerner began her tenure track career at Penn State as an assistant professor of human development and family studies in 1981. Much of her early research focused on children's temperament. She collaborated with Alexander Thomas, Stella Chess, and other colleagues on the New York Longitudinal Study (NYLS), one of the earliest and longest longitudinal studies directed at assessing children's temperament. This study followed 133 White, middle-class children of professional parents and 98 Puerto Rican children from working-class homes from the first month of life into adulthood. Lerner and her colleagues' research focused on ideas consistent with a “goodness-of-fit” model (Thomas & Chess, 1977); that is, she adheres to an approach that posits that when children's individual characteristics match, or fit, with the demands of the child's context, then adaptive functioning is likely to occur. This match, or goodness-of-fit approach was used by Lerner to frame her research on children's temperament, which has resulted in numerous publications over the past 20 years, including an edited volume of New Directions for Child Development, titled Temperament and Psychosocial Interactions in Infancy and Childhood (Lerner & Lerner, 1986). In 1980, Jackie and Richard Lerner became the archivists for the NYLS. Research continues at present, with the Lerners and other members of the scientific community using archives of the NYLS sample.

In addition to assessment of the NYLS sample, much of Jackie Lerner's work has been the result of data collected in collaboration with Richard Lerner from two of their research studies: the Pennsylvania Early Adolescent Transitions Study (PEATS) and the follow-up to that investigation, the Replication and Extension of the Pennsylvania Early Adolescent Transitions Study (REPEATS). These short-term longitudinal investigations assessed the biological, psychological, and social aspects of children's adjustment during the transition to and development across middle school. They were two of the few longitudinal investigations at the time to incorporate a holistic approach in the examination of youth and their families. Given both the breadth and depth of these investigations, several theses and dissertations were completed and numerous published studies have resulted from the PEATS and REPEATS investigations (e.g., Castellino, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1998; East et al., 1992; Jovanovic, Lerner, & Lerner, 1989; Ohannessian, Lerner, Lerner, & von Eye, 1995, 1996, 1998).

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