MARIAL profile:
MARSHALL DUKE

Telling family stories about where Grandma and Grandpa grew up, how Mom and Dad fell in love and why Aunt Sadie has 10 cats may not only be entertaining, it may also help children weather the inevitable ups and downs of modern life.

That’s the theory being tested by Marshall Duke, award-winning professor of psychology and core faculty member of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life (MARIAL).

His primary interest is resilience in children, specifically what makes some children more resilient than others. “Resilience is the ability to weather the inevitable storms of life, and to come out all right,” said Duke. “I’m looking at trying to understand what are the factors that are going to help kids establish and maintain this resilience so they can get through, despite stresses and strains on the family.”

For more than three decades, his goal as a clinical psychologist has been to help children ease the pain of growing up. His most recent research involves the effect of storytelling among family members and whether it strengthens familial bonds.

Working with Robyn Fivush, also a psychology professor and core faculty member of MARIAL, Duke is studying the degree to which families tell stories together and what difference that makes. “How much information do kids know about their families, and what is the possible relationship between that and their level of adjustment in early and middle adolescence,” he said. Their work will build on research of others who have found that family stories help establish continuity in children.

“There are heroes in these stories, there are people who faced the worse and made it through,” said Duke. “And this sense of continuity and relatedness to heroes seems to serve the purpose in kids of making them more resilient.”

Family stories also help children by evoking pride, personal history, a sense of connectedness and feelings of being special, even in the most ordinary family, Duke said.

“Ordinary families can be special because they each have a history no other family has,” he said. “They all have uncle so and so, they all have aunt so and so. They all have a brother who went off and did this adventure, and everyone has a story that no one else has. So if you know that, it makes you special. It’s a fingerprint.”

Duke’s goal in his MARIAL research is to formally test his hypothesis that family myths are an important source of family resilience. Ultimately, if he can show that families who routinely tell stories bounce back more quickly when facing life’s challenges, Duke may have a prescription for improving the mental health of America’s middle class families.

A member of Emory’s psychology department for 30 years, Duke has twice received the Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching. Last year, he received Emory’s Thomas Jefferson Award to honor his significant service to the University. In addition to his work as a clinical psychologist, Duke has written or co-written many books and articles. With Dr. Steven Nowicki, he co-authored a textbook on abnormal psychology and two books dealing with social problems in children: Helping the Child Who Doesn’t Fit In and Teaching Your Child the Language of Social Success. He and his wife, Sara, a learning disabilities specialist, co-edited a book called What Works With Children: Wisdom and Reflections from People Who Have Devoted Their Lives to Working With Children, a collection of essays by 40 professionals, each of whom have worked with children for more than 25 years.

In the families he and Fivush study for MARIAL, they will ask parents and children what kinds of stories they tell. They will ask the children what they know about their parents, grandparents and other relatives. They also will ask the families to record conversations, and they will take other standard measures to see how the family functions and how the children, especially pre-teens, adjust to change.

So far, they are studying 40 middle-class families in metro Atlanta, and they are looking to recruit many more. Duke wants to find families who don’t tell stories so that he will have a control group. In some cases he will intervene, instructing them on the importance of telling family stories, and he will ask them to keep a diary of when they do this. In other cases, he will tell the families that its important to spend time together, but he will not tip them off about the idea that they have to talk about the family background.

“So we might say sit together and discuss the news once a week, it’s really important to do that,” Duke said. “And if, in fact, we find that simply sitting together talking about the news, if there’s no difference in those two groups, and they both change in a positive direction, then is not so much the stories, it’s the interaction, it’s the time they spend together.”

Although he believes strongly in family time, he expects to find that it’s the families who tell stories that will come out ahead.

“I think the stories, the content of the stories and the continuity that that establishes that is important,” said Duke, who is concerned that today’s busy families have lost the ability to tell stories. “We are busy doing things that we think are useful for the kids and the family, but in fact, what’s happening is that we’re all growing very separate from each other.”

He personally experienced this growing separation when he drove the carpool for his grandchildren one day, and spent the nearly 90-minute ride in silence. Each child in the van was doing his own thing, including watching videos and playing electronic games, and no one was talking to anyone else. “This is family time,” he said, but there is no interaction. “So I’m saying, well even the time we could be talking to the kids, because we’re trapped in traffic, we’re not using it.”

He persuaded his daughter to move her family closer to their school, and now they have a 15-minute commute and more family time.

Duke hopes that his research will offer middle-class families solutions to getting through today’s stressful routines. He thinks it is unrealistic to ask dual career couples to choose who will give up a career and stay home for the sake of the children. “They’re not going to do that,” he said. Instead, “we will take people where they are” and make suggestions about very basic things they can do to help children adjust to whatever stresses result from today’s hectic and demanding lifestyle.

“You need to make them feel special. You need to tell them stories. They need to know who they are, where they come from. They need to know what happened to Grandma and Grandpa. They need to know where you were when you were kids. They need to have a connection and continuity,” Duke said.

He hopes the data will show that there’s a relationship between resilience and family storytelling. “To me, that’s a gift to working, middle-class families,” he said.

Index of all MARIAL Faculty, Fellow, and Staff Profiles

Dr. Marshall Duke, award-winning professor of psychology and core faculty member of the Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life