Dr Sarah Foley

Lecturer in Development Psychology

Moray House School of Education and Sport, IECS
University of Edinburgh

Email: sarah.foley@ed.ac.uk

Street: Moray House School of Education and Sport
City: University of Edinburgh (Holyrood Campus)
Post code: EH8 8AQ

Biography

Background

Dr Sarah Foley is a Lecturer in Developmental Psychology in Moray House School of Education

Sarah conducts research on the causes and consequences of variability in parenting and children’s adjustment, with a particular focus on outcomes associated with co-parenting in diverse family forms.

Sarah's ESRC-funded PhD examined the transition to parenthood in heterosexual couples, with a particular focus on the impact of expectant parents' thoughts and feelings about their unborn infant on their representations of and interactions with their infant. Her subsequent post-doctoral research explored parent-child relationship quality and child development in new family forms (e.g., those created through assisted reproductive technologies). Following this, Sarah gained an ESRC Post-Doctoral Fellowship to examine parent and children's experiences of shared parenting arrangements post separation and divorce. Sarah's previous research also included studies of pre-adolescent adjustment and assisting with the creation of the Brief Early Skills and Support Index (aka BESSI), a ‘school-readiness’ questionnaire.

Qualifications

BA (Hons), University of Cambridge.
PhD, Centre for Family Research, University of Cambridge.

Teaching & PhD supervision

Undergraduate teaching

Educational Studies 2A: Child and Adolescent Development in Education - course organiser
Cognitive and Social Child Development in Education

Postgraduate teaching

Children and Young People 1 - course organiser (MSc TLT)
Child and Adolescent Development (MSc Education)
Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Wellbeing (MSc Education)

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Research

Research summary

Sarah's research explores family influences on children’s social, emotional and cognitive outcomes. Specifically, Sarah utilises observational and advanced quantitative methods to examine the antecedents and consequences of individual differences in mothers’ and fathers’ parenting in a bid to help inform evidence-based support for families.

Sarah's current research explores:

outcomes associated with co-parenting in diverse family forms, for example after separation or divorce and within elective co-parenting families (i.e., where parents come together outside of a romantic relationship to have a child)
trajectories in parent mind-mindedness and sensitivity and the subsequent links with children's theory of mind, internalising and externalising problems

Projects

Current project grants

2024 - 2026 Economic and Social Research Council New Investigators Grant - Keeping the Child in Mind? Family Functioning and Experiences of Shared Parenting After Separation

Past project grants

2019 Economic and Social Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellowship - ‘A Parenting Team?’,

Publications

Grappling with tradition: The experiences of cisgender, heterosexual mothers and fathers in elective co-parenting arrangements 18 May 2023 In: Journal of Family Studies
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/13229400.2023.2209060
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Developmental links between executive function and emotion regulation in early toddlerhood May 2023 In: Infant Behavior & Development, vol. 71
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101782
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Relationships between mothers and children in families formed by shared biological motherhood (10 pages) May 2023 In: Human Reproduction, vol. 38, pp. 917-926
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dead047
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
A longitudinal study of families formed through third-party assisted reproduction: Mother-child relationships and child adjustment from infancy to adulthood 13 Apr 2023 In: Developmental Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001526
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Siblings in lockdown: International evidence for Birth Order Effects on Child Adjustment in the Covid 19 pandemic 24 Dec 2022 In: Social Development
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12668
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Mind-mindedness in new mothers and fathers: Stability and discontinuity from pregnancy to toddlerhood 7 Nov 2022 In: Developmental Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001468
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Measuring antenatal depressive symptoms across the world: A validation and cross-country invariance analysis of the patient health questionnaire-9 (PHQ-9) in eight diverse low-resource settings Nov 2022 In: Psychological assessment, vol. 34, pp. 993-1007
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/pas0001154
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Expectant mothers’ not fathers’ mind-mindedness predicts, infant, mother and father conversational turns at 7 months 26 Aug 2022 In: Infancy
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12498
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Cross-cultural equivalence of parental ratings of child difficulties during the pandemic: Findings from a six-site study (38 pages) 22 Aug 2022 In: International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/mpr.1933
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Patterns of adverse childhood experiences and associations with prenatal substance use and poor infant outcomes in a multi-country cohort of mothers: A latent class analysis (12 pages) 22 Jun 2022 In: BMC pregnancy and childbirth, vol. 22, pp. 1-12
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-022-04839-0
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Perceived stress during the prenatal period: Assessing measurement invariance of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10) across cultures and birth parity 14 Apr 2022 In: Archives of women's mental health
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-022-01229-5
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Predictors of self-harm and suicide in LGBT youth: The role of gender, socio-economic status, bullying and school experience (7 pages) 27 Nov 2021 In: Journal of Public Health
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/pubmed/fdab383
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Family function and child adjustment difficulties in the COVID-19 pandemic: An international study (14 pages) 23 Oct 2021 In: International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, vol. 18
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph182111136
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Parenting and child adjustment in families with primary caregiver fathers 7 Oct 2021 In: Journal of Family Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000915
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Measuring resilience in the context of conflict-related sexual violence: A novel application of the Adult Resilience Measure (ARM) (46 pages) 7 Jul 2021 In: Journal of Interpersonal Violence
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/08862605211028323
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)
Family influences on theory of mind in middle childhood (21 pages) 27 May 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429326899-8
Research output: › Chapter (Published)
Prenatal attachment: Using measurement invariance to test the validity of comparisons across eight culturally diverse countries (7 pages) 9 Feb 2021 In: Archives of women's mental health
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00737-021-01105-8
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Adoptive gay father families: A longitudinal study of children’s adjustment at early adolescence (19 pages) 25 Jan 2021 In: Child Development, vol. 92, pp. 425-443
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13442
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Two's company, three's a crowd? Maternal and paternal talk about their infant differs in associations with wellbeing, couple relationship quality, and caregiving sensitivity (13 pages) 19 Nov 2020 In: Frontiers in psychiatry, vol. 11
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2020.578632
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (Published)
Single mothers by choice: Parenting and child adjustment in middle childhood (12 pages) 17 Sep 2020 In: Journal of Family Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000797
Research output: Contribution to Journal › Article (E-pub ahead of print)

View all 29 publications on Research Explorer

This article was published on 19 Apr, 2024