Julie Titone

A 12-year-old boy walks from a segregated school past hate-filled graffiti and clusters of teenagers spoiling for a fight. Does the presence of social conflict in this child’s life make him more likely to land in prison or the unemployment line? Does his future success depend on whether he is going home to comfort and cookies, or to parents who are arguing?

Kroc Institute Faculty Fellow E. Mark Cummings is poised to answer those questions. He is principal investigator for a $1.4 million, four-year project in which a team of researchers will examine the impact of political, community, and family conflict. Their laboratory is Northern Ireland. Their study group will include 700 mothers, each of whom will be asked about her 10- to 15-year-old child. The children will also be interviewed.

The researchers want to know why some children struggle greatly in the presence of political violence, and others thrive.

" Children don’t just live in a vacuum,” noted co-investigator Ed Cairns of the University of Ulster. “Normal life goes on, parents still have rows, there’s probably still gang warfare going on. We need to not only sort those factors out, but to look at the interaction between them.”

Together, Cairns and Cummings sought federal funding for the major study, “Children and Political Violence in Northern Ireland.” Cummings holds the Notre Dame Chair in Psychology, and is known internationally for his research on family dynamics. His recent research has delved into such subjects as the effects of marital conflict on children’s functioning and adjustment, emotional security as a general theoretical model for children’s development, and research-based prevention and parent-education programs.

Cummings compares children’s difficulties to an iceberg: “You don’t know what’s going on underneath.” The Northern Ireland study marks a change of direction for him, because it expands his study of conflict and families to include contexts of ethnic conflict, continuing a line of research beyond the United States, and allows him to step beyond the family threshold to look at social influences on behavior. The project is also a significant change from the norm in conflict research. “Most research on conflict resolution is done at the political level. Then there’s a fair amount of research on domestic/family conflict, the psychological level,” Cummings said. “Our goal is to bring together the social ecology of political violence.”

" I think the findings will be generalizable to other cultures,” said John Darby, a former University of Ulster professor who has provided advice and contacts for Cummings. “This makes it all the more surprising that a major study of this sort has not been carried out before.”

Darby is now a professor of comparative ethnic studies at the Kroc Institute, where he directs the Research Initiative on the Resolution of Ethnic Conflict. One of the initiative’s areas of interest is young people, particularly their roles as peacemakers or troublemakers.

Darby is a co-investigator for the Northern Ireland project, as are Scott Maxwell of Notre Dame, Matthew A. Fitzsimon Chair in Psychology, and psychology professor Marcie Goeke-Morey of the Catholic University of America.

The project’s first year is being spent designing the best survey, which includes carrying out a series of focus groups involving some 60 mothers in different areas of Belfast. The researchers are reviewing research literature to find the best ways to measure marital conflict, parental experience with alcohol, childhood adjustments, and the like. They intend for their survey methods to be adaptable for use in other conflict areas. Cummings and Cairns may seek funding for a project in Israel.

Over the next two years, the research data will be collected in two sets of interviews — one primary, one follow-up — conducted by professional surveyors in the subjects’ homes.

The project is a good example of the Kroc Institute’s role in bringing together researchers from different disciplines. The research opportunity presented itself to Cummings in the context of his undergraduate teaching and mentoring. He became acquainted with Erin Lovell, a political science major with a concentration in peace studies, when she took his psychology course on conflict in families. After a year abroad in the Dublin program, she was interested in the impact of political conflict on families, particularly in Northern Ireland, where, in a long and often violent conflict known as “the Troubles,” Catholics have sought, and sometimes fought for, jobs and educational opportunities enjoyed by the majority Protestants.

Cummings served as mentor for Lovell’s University Honors Thesis on this topic. In 2001, he and Lovell co-authored a Kroc occasional paper titled Conflict, Conflict Resolution and the Children of Northern Ireland: Towards Understanding the Impact on Children and Families (No. 21: OP 1). In it, they argued for multi-disciplinary research on the subject.

The paper is posted on the institute’s web site, where it caught Cairns’s attention. The Northern Irish psychologist has devoted his career to studying the impact of political violence, and is author of Caught in Crossfire: Children and the Northern Ireland Conflict (Appletree Press, 1987). He has been frustrated by the number of “academic tourists” who visit his country without seeing the big picture of children’s lives in that culture. Too often researchers from other parts of the world are only interested in the conflict and forget that children in Northern Ireland have to face the same developmental hurdles that face all children: sibling rivalries, making friends, adjusting to new schools, marital breakups.

After hearing Cummings speak at the Kroc Institute, Cairns rendezvoused with him at an international conference and they agreed to collaborate on a research project, bringing together their common interests in child development, conflict process, and violence. Before and after that meeting, Cummings made three groundwork-laying trips to Northern Ireland. The initial trip was made possible through support from the Kroc Institute and Notre Dame’s Keough Institute for Irish Studies.

Coincidentally, Cummings and Cairns became aware on the same day that the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development was calling for proposals to study children exposed to violence. After applying twice, they beat long odds and were awarded a grant in June 2005.

The research findings will be released as they become available, in journal articles and conference papers. Cummings expects the ultimate product will be a book.

" We’re hoping for the widest possible impact, reaching people at the political level, sociologists, people interested in the well-being of children in war-torn areas,” he said. “I want to take the next step and make this useful.”

Armed with solid, research-based information, counselors, educators, and politicians may be better
able to ensure that the Irish school child has the support system necessary to thrive despite the legacy of
the Troubles.

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Home > Publications > Peace Colloquy > Issue 9, Spring 2006 > What's 'normal,' what's not-Major study looks at interaction of family conflict, ethnic strife