The UT Office of Research and Development funded Dr. Kristen Ravi’s application for a Professional and Scholarly Development Award (PSDA) to study how the daily lives, activities, and stresses of mothers living in intimate violent centers, their psycho-emotional well-being, and their children’s psycho-emotional well-being influence critical maternal-child bonds.

The project is an exploratory pilot study to inform the development of an intervention to support the maternal-child bond while living in a family violence shelter. We aim to identify the key mechanisms (e.g., maternal psycho-social well-being, daily stressors, shelter staff approval) of change that would support bonding in this context by collecting daily data from mothers, living in family violence shelters, regarding their regular activities, their, and their children’s psycho-emotional well-being, and perceived maternal-child bonds.