Research Interests

Growing older is a pervasive, constant, and universal process, understanding self perceptions of aging throughout the lifespan is critical to understanding adult development. I investigate questions about how aging is conceptualized, anticipated and experienced by adults of all ages. Research has traditionally emphasized the study of later life perceptions of aging. I argue that this is limiting to the field’s understanding of aging as a whole; instead we must focus on understanding how thinking about aging affects adult lives throughout the lifespan.

My program of research centers three questions:

(1) How do adults across the lifespan think about getting “old?”

(2) How are women socialized to think about growing older?

(3) How can methods used to study development be strengthened to understand diverse experiences of growing older?

Life History Interviews

To understand aging, it is imperative to consider how identities, such as gender, influence aging experiences. In early life, developmental trajectories are relatively uniform, motor milestones and school achievements happen on similar timelines for most children. With age, adults follow increasingly divergent life paths, diversifying the human experience and fortifying the need to understand how different lived experiences contribute to different conceptualizations of aging. Without this perspective, the study of aging risks siloing, leading to empirical support for theories of aging that do not include attention to the experiences of diverse aging adults. By neglecting to investigate these experiences, aging adults who are under-researched are at a disadvantage, both in research about aging that is applicable to their lived experiences, and in the subsequent policies and resources that result from this work.

Lifeline Drawing (Briggs & McClelland [Under Review])

I developed a novel qualitative method that asks women to generate a timeline of their lives prior to their verbal interview (Briggs & McClelland, 2026, under review). This method contributes to developmental metrics to assess a midlife perspective on life events seen as organizing and self defining for midlife women inclusive of the identities they hold, offering moments of critical intervention and support. More implicitly, this work generates insights into women's self-concept in midlife, the moments disentangled in their visual depictions of their lives contribute implicit data about how women in midlife depict their lives and integrate the events of their past into their current perceptions of themselves guided by life experiences and present-day values.