Kathleen Boyce Rodgers

Hi! I'm an associate professor in the Department of Human Development at Washington State University. My expertise is in adolescent development, sexuality, gender socialization, parent-teen communication, and working with community health organizations to conduct community–wide assessments of adolescent risk behaviors, psychosocial health, and relationships within multiple contexts.

My research explores how personal and social factors in one's environment interact and influence adolescents’ and young adults’ sexual health and risk-taking. My work has examined parent-teen communication and closeness, and violence and poverty as risk factors that contribute to adolescent sexual risk taking. My research also examines how media content may inform adolescent and emerging adults’ attitudes about dating violence, sexual stereotypes, objectification of women, and acceptance of sexual harassment.

I've been working with Stacey Hust for the past five years. We received the 2014 National Council on Family Relations Innovation Grants award to examine how parents and teens negotiate difficult conversations about healthy and unhealthy romantic relationships when prompted by content in music videos. We also received the 2014 Mary Ann Yodelis Smith Award for Feminist Research from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for qualitative research to explore how young women make sense of romantic relationships.

My research has been published in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, and the Journal of Research on Adolescence. My research has been sponsored by local communities, the Washington State University Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Program, and the Research in Human Sciences grants through the College of Agriculture, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University.

October 2016