Deborah Casper
Biography:
Dr. Casper has a range of research and practical experiences working with youth, adolescents, adults and military families. As a former school counselor, she worked directly with students, parents, teachers, administrators and community members on school-related bullying, peer relationship and mental health issues. She worked directly with multiple agencies in a wrap-around program to ensure the most comprehensive approach for addressing the needs of at-risk youth within the school context. As a former family advocacy educator for the department of defense, she created and delivered a wide variety of classes and workshops to active-duty service members and their families on topics such as child maltreatment, domestic violence, child development and parenting. As the director of research for the Military Center for Research and Outreach, a collaborative, grant-funded program between the University of Arizona and the Department of Defense, she conducted and published research examining the effects of military life on children and families. Dr. Casper’s research is situated at the intersection of positive and negative peer relationships (e.g., friends and enemies), interactions (e.g., aggression, victimization, defending, assisting, peer acceptance and rejection), and psychosocial adjustment (e.g., depression, anxiety and prosociality). Toward advancing the field of human development and family studies, Dr. Casper published multiple meta-analyses examining factors directly linked to ACEs (i.e., aggression, victimization, and psychosocial maladjustment; Casper et al., 2017; problematic peer relations; Casper et al., 2020; and psychosocial maladjustment among children of deployed military servicemembers; Card et al., 2011). She has developed scales that measure bystander roles that children and adolescents take when overt and when relational aggression and victimization occur within the school context and their relation to psychosocial maladjustment (Casper et al., 2017). She has recently extended her bystander work to sexual and physical dating violence (well-established consequences of ACEs), investigating bystander motivation (Casper et al., 2018), bystander involvement and trauma (Witte et al., 2017; Seo et al., 2021) and specific bystander behavior (Casper et al., 2022). |
Education:
Ph.D., Family Studies and Human Development, University of Arizona, 2013 M.S., Family Studies and Human Development, University of Arizona, 2009 M.A., Counseling, University of Maryland, 2001 B.S., Psychology, University of Maryland University College (Heidelberg, Germany), 1998 Recent Grant Awards: Dr. Casper is a Co-PI on the Minds and Mentors Paraprofessional Training Program II (MiMP-TP II) Grant awarded by the Health Resources and Services Administration to 1) enhance the quality of training for behavioral health-related paraprofessionals by providing experiential opportunities related to children, adolescents, and transitional youth, and 2) strengthen the network of organizations that provide substance use and mental health services by expanding access to quality integrated behavioral health for individuals and families. |
