Postdoctoral Fellow
Andrus Gerontology Center
3715 McClintock Ave., Suite 208J
Los Angeles, CA 90089
My Ph.D. is from a marriage, family, and human development program with special emphasis on cross-cultural intimate relationships and value systems. My current post-doctoral work is in family gerontology, emphasizing an ongoing connection between values and health outcomes within families across the life-course, across historical time, and across generations-cohorts. The theory underlying my work is a synthesis of a number of theories including: general systems theory, dialectics, and catastrophe theory modeling. This synthesis aims at explaining the developmental processes of coping with irresolvable stressor situations. I am interested in applied statistical methods. My research applications have include intimate relationships, value systems, religious-homosexual conflict, retirement stress, caregiver burden, and changing religiosity.
This website is an still in construction. I hope this website can help to explain the general model I'm working on and draw connections across different research topics. Here are some different parts of it:
Internal Diversification Process (Auto-dynamic)
Typology of Adaptation Styles
Examples of Stress Dynamics
I have been writing papers that apply these theories to a number of stress situations (e.g. ambiguous loss & caregiver burden, distance in intimate relationship, religious diversity and change, religious-homosexual identity conflict (Or more recent theoretical model: Ch.2). These papers need to be updated and revised but at least they provide an idea of how the model works.
Underlying my research is the mathematical models identified by Rene Thom (1975) referred to as catastrophe theory. I believe catastrophe theory provides the tools for understanding the mechanism by which a resolution (synthesis) between oppositional forces (status quo or thesis versus impetus for change or antithesis) [Hegel & Marx dialectics] occurs. I believe this process is at the root of evolutional processes, developmental processes, and is evident in irresolvable stressor situations. Four models (fold, cusp, swallowtail, butterfly) purport to be the simplest and only ways in which discontinuities can evolve within a stable system with a single dependent variable. The most general and complex of these models (butterfly), a possibility opens to transcend the stressor situation and allows for integrating aspects of both conflicting forces while simultaneously rejecting aspects of both, thereby eliminating the stress and transcending the problem. A number of concepts have a special place in this theory.
Since these applications are quite diverse and broad, I have decided instead of continuing to work in so many different directions, to focus my attentions more on developing the statistical methodology necessary to statistically model more complex social and biological developmental processes. As I work towards my two MAD goals and continue my academic journey, I hope to eventually be an applied statistician with emphasis in social and biological developmental processes.
Last Modified: 09 May 2008
Copyright © Gary T. Horlacher