Constance Ahrons

This information is accurate as of the fellowship year indicated for each fellow.

A professor of sociology and director of the Marriage and Family Therapy Training Program at the University of Southern California, Constance Ahrons is best known for her research focusing on issues of marriage and divorce. Her book The Good Divorce (HarperCollins, 1994) received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Literary Association (1995) and a Third Prize in the Taiwan Best Books of 1999. The book, Divorce and Remarriage: The Children Speak Out, is forthcoming from HarperCollins in 2001.

Ahrons will devote her Radcliffe fellowship year to writing a book and several articles based on the findings of her 20-year longitudinal study of divorced families. She will concentrate on studying children of divorce, addressing the following questions: How does the coparenting relationship between divorced parents affect the quality of each child's relationship with each parent? Do young adult children continue to experience loyalty conflicts? How does the coparenting relationship affect the way children experience family cohesion twenty years following their parents’ divorce?

A fellow of the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and the American Orthopsychiatric Association, Ahrons earned her PhD in counseling psychology from the University of Wisconsin.