Mary Kate Koch Ph.D. ’22 won the 2023 Hershel D. Thornburg Dissertation Award, which recognizes outstanding scholastic promise in research on adolescence, from the Society for Research in Adolescence. She received it at the SRA’s annual meeting, April 13 to 15, in San Diego.  

The award recognized Koch’s work studying individual, social and cultural aspects of the psychology of puberty and adolescence in American youth. Her dissertation, “In Whose Words? Experiences at Puberty Situated in Individual, Social and Cultural Contexts,” explored how young people experience puberty and how their perceptions of it are influenced by the adults in their lives and cultural cues such as television and books.  Her dissertation committee included Jane Mendle, associate professor of psychology; Anthony Burrow, Ferris Family Associate Professor of Life Course Studies; and Qi Wang, Joan K. and Irwin M. Jacobs Professor of Human Development.

“I wanted to take the idea of puberty, which has been studied extensively, and recast some of the questions surrounding it from the perspectives of youth themselves,” she explained.

The dissertation is divided into three chapters, which will turn into three publications at academic journals. In the first chapter, Koch asked girls to write journal entries about the social changes they experienced during puberty. It was published in July 2022 in Child Development. 

“We found that girls who focused more on period-related changes were more distressed over time,” Koch explained. “The central message is that helping girls to normalize menarche by having conversations that are open and encouraging can help them to better manage distress.”

For the second section of the dissertation, Koch created a study that involved adults witnessing an adolescent near a broken car window. The adults all knew that the adolescent was in the seventh grade. Koch found that when the youth looked more physically mature, the adults in the study were more likely to call the police. “This tracks with other research that youth who experience puberty at earlier ages have more contact with law enforcement,” she explained.

In the third section, Koch analyzed the language in more than 300 coming-of-age novels. She found that female characters often were associated with more communal and weaker traits. Male characters tended to be associated with more agency, but less emotion. 

“If you’re thinking about a take-home message, I think it’s important to consider the norms that literature conveys to youth,” she said. “No matter the gender of your child, it might be best for them to read broadly books with protagonists of different genders, so they are exposed to many kinds of traits, feelings and actions.” 

Koch is now a post-doctoral fellow in the University of Florida’s Psychology Department. Her current research focuses on the opposite end of the lifespan, studying how older adults cope with terminal diagnoses. This research continues her interest in understanding the unique individual differences in how people cope with universal life transitions.