MFT alum, and professor receive the Anselm Strauss Award

Jennifer Davis – ’07 PLU MFT graduate, David Ward – MFT program director and associate professor, and Cheryl Storm – PLU professor emeritus received the 2012 Anselm Strauss Award for their published article “The Unsilencing of Military Wives: Wartime Deployment Experiences and Citizen Responsibility,” in the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy.

The award is presented by the Qualitative Family Research Network of the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR). Each year, the committee recognizes authors of a qualitative journal article or book chapter published during the previous year which, in the estimation of the members of the committee, makes the most significant contribution to the area of family theory, methods, and/or research that comes from qualitative tradition.

The award is named for Anslem Strauss, whose life work was to develop and practice qualitative methodologies. The NCFR is the nation’s premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families, with a membership of more than 3400 family researchers, practitioners and educators.

During the selection process, the committee noted the following strengths of the article:

• The choose of data collection procedures was particularly attuned with the unique aspects of exploring the experiences of military wives.
• The depth and clarity of the discussion of the procedures was particularly notable. Committee members were especially impressed with the thoughtful discussion of the use of action research, the role of the researcher as research instrument, and data analysis.

The committee concluded their hope that the article will be used as a model for theory and research in qualitative family tradition.

The award will be announced at the 74th Annual Conference of NCFR, this November in Phoenix, Ariz.