Pamela C. Alexander, Ph.D.
Senior Research Scientist
Pam Alexander is a senior research scientist at the Wellesley Centers for Women, where she conducts research on gender-based violence. Dr. Alexander received her Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Emory University in 1980, was an assistant professor and director of the Psychological Services Center at the University of Memphis, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, and a senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Research on Youth and Social Policy.
Dr. Alexander’s research career originally began with a concentration on the long-term effects of incest. In 1986, she received funding by the National Institute on Mental Health to conduct a psychotherapy outcome study on the effectiveness of group therapy for adult female incest survivors. Given the inevitable overlap between different types of violence perpetrated within the family, she began to focus more on the intergenerational transmission of violence, including abusive parenting and the perpetration of and vulnerability to intimate partner violence, with an emphasis on the attachment relationships between parents and children and between intimate partners. Her research has been based on clinical samples of men and women (ranging from batterers to battered women and incest survivors seeking services to parents at risk for child abuse) and samples of women recruited from the community (such as adult female incest survivors and mothers with young children). She has also evaluated both the U.S. Army’s and the U.S. Marines’ New Parent Support Program, a home visitation child abuse prevention program.
Two federally funded projects recently completed by Dr. Alexander consist of the following. First, a project funded by the Centers for Disease Control examined the determinants and consequences of readiness to change in a sample of more than 1,500 batterers court-ordered to treatment. Second, a project funded by the National Institute of Justice compared the effectiveness of a stages-of-change/motivational interviewing model of group therapy with standard batterer treatment for batterers court-ordered to treatment. Based on partner reports, the results of this latter study suggested that men who were randomly assigned to the stages-of-change treatment format were significantly less likely to be physically aggressive toward their partner at follow-up.
Dr. Alexander’s current interests include an exploration of the utilization and effectiveness of services for immigrant battered women and the development of an intervention for battered women with a history of childhood trauma and multiple abusive relationships in adulthood.
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