Matthew Johnson

Email

matthew4@ualberta.ca

Address

319 Human Ecology Building

8905 - 116 St NW

Edmonton AB

T6G 2N1

My research program is centered on understanding the development of couple relationships. I am primarily involved with two research projects.

I am a co-investigator of the Edmonton Transitions Study (ETS) with Drs. Harvey Krahn and Nancy Galambos. The ETS is a unique long-term longitudinal study that surveyed over 900 (at baseline) Edmontonians eight times from age 18 to age 50. The original aim of this project was to understand the transition from school to work, but as the participants aged, the focus shifted to other transitions over the life course, such as forming a committed intimate union and having children. I have developed manuscripts with these data examining how the development of mental health over the transition to adulthood developmental stage (ages 18 to 25) is associated with couple relations in midlife (Johnson, Galambos, & Krahn, 2014; 2015) and how marital timing predicts future subjective well-being (Johnson, Krahn, & Galambos, 2017). Find more information about the ETS here: https://edmontontransitionsstudy.weebly.com/

I am also fortunate to work with data from the German Family Panel (pairfam) study. Pairfam began in 2008 with a representative sample of 12,402 focal participants from three birth cohorts (adolescence, young adulthood, and midlife). In addition, pairfam also recruited intimate partners, parents, and children for a subset of the focal participants. Survey data are collected annually and are scheduled to conclude in 2022 with 14 total assessments (more information is available on the study website: http://www.pairfam.de/en/). So far, publications based on pairfam data have examined longitudinal associations between sex and men’s housework contributions (Johnson, Galambos, & Anderson, 2016), links between support provided to a partner during times of stress, commitment, and willingness to make sacrifices for a partner (Johnson & Horne, 2016), how couple relations are implicated in each partner's mental health (Johnson, Galambos, Finn, Neyer, & Horne, 2017), associations between parent-adult child and couple relations (Johnson, Galovan, Horne, Min, & Walper, 2017), dynamics across intimate partnerships (Johnson & Neyer, 2019), and the development of immigrant couple relations (Johnson, Anderson, & Neyer, 2019).

I am currently accepting hardworking graduate students interested in studying couples.