Where are we conducting our studies?

We’ve been doing research on the development of gratitude in children and adolescents for almost 10 years, and we have now gathered data from seven different countries—the United States, Brazil, Russia, China, Turkey, South Korea, and Guatemala. Dr. Lia Freitas, a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, began this work started this off with her work in, in the south of Brazil, and we’re still gathering information on children and their parents in that city as well as in others around the world.

In the United States we’re gathering our information from children and their parents in Greensboro and in the Raleigh area (North Carolina) as well as in Marietta, GA and in Framingham, MA. In Greensboro we’re collecting data from European American and African American children and parents (thanks to Lia O’Brien, Uzama Price, and all members of the research group), evenly divided by their social class background, and children and families from Latin America (primarily from Mexico originally, with Sara Mendonça doing all the interviews with Spanish speakers).

Marietta and Framingham are home to quite large Brazilian populations, and so in addition to collecting data from Brazilians in Brazil we’re also collecting from Brazilians who have emigrated to the United States (thanks to Elisa Merçon-Vargas). In the Raleigh (NC) area we also have quite a few Brazilian immigrants, as well as many who have emigrated from China. So, as well as collecting data in China, we’re gathering the same data from the children of Chinese immigrants (thanks to Yue Liang).

Our research in Brazil is being conducted by Lia Freitas, Fernanda Palhares, and their research group in Porto Alegre. From China we have data that were collected in Guangzhou (thanks to Yudan Wang) and in Guilin (thanks to Yue Liang), and from Russia we have data from Moscow and Tula (thanks to Irina Mokrova). We’re grateful to Ayse Payir, of Boston University (with help from Selin Zeytinoglu, her mother, and research assistants), for collecting the Turkish data in Izmir. Dr. Soeun Lee, of the Korean National Open University, very kindly collected data in Soeul for us, and we’re thankful to Katelyn Poelker, of St. Louis University, who is collecting data in Antigua, Guatemala.

Much of this research is being very generously funded by the John Templeton Foundation, to whom we are most grateful. We have funds from the Foundation starting in 2014 and ending in 2017.