Greg Fosco directs the Family PrOcess and Well-being Enrichment Research (POWER) Lab, working with colleagues and students to investigate the family as a context of adolescent development with the ultimate goal of informing interventions to better serve families and youth. His research, and that of the Family POWER Lab, follows two inter-related lines of inquiry.

The first line focuses on understanding the family system and its influence on adolescent development. He has conducted research on adolescent social/emotional outcomes (e.g., romantic relationship competence, self-regulation), psychopathology and substance use risk, and positive well-being (e.g., subjective well-being, purpose in life). He has conducted work examining interparental conflict and relationships, family-level cohesion and conflict, and parent-child relationship quality as key facets of the family system.

The second line of research has focused on family-based prevention programs, such as the Family Check-Up, on adolescent substance use, problem behaviors, and emotional distress. He is particularly interested in examining the change processes during interventions (e.g., skill acquisition, mechanisms of change) so that we can better understand how interventions work and direct future work toward optimization of programs to be more effective and efficient.

All of his work is grounded in a family systems framework, which calls for a more complex understanding of how family relationships impact adolescent development by considering a broader range of family functioning (i.e., multiple family relationships), the interconnectedness of these family processes, and the reciprocal influence processes that unfold within families over time. For more information about the Family POWER Lab, family systems theory, current research projects, or lab activities, please visit his lab website: www.gregfosco.weebly.com

Dr. Fosco served as Associate Director of the Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center from 2017-2023.