UC Riverside psychology researchers Kate Sweeny and Elizabeth Davis are among the recipients of a $4.7 million grant from the Templeton Religion Trust. The grant will be used to advance research on patience, with a focus on what can be learned from parents of adolescents who face unique forms of adversity.
The study will take place over four years and will include faculty in psychology, religion, and philosophy. It will consider how patience is practiced in daily life and across one’s lifespan, how people facilitate or inhibit patience, and how people cultivate patience. Latino families from Inland Southern California, Muslim-American families, and families with children who have developmental disabilities will be included in the study.
“Patience is understudied in psychology, religion, and philosophy compared to many other virtues, like empathy or gratitude,” the grant proposal reads. “…Understanding patience as a construct, in general, and concerning the experience of adversity, in particular, is well past due.”
About $700,000 of the grant is coming to UC Riverside. Sweeny and Davis will recruit 680 parents from the Inland Empire, which has a highly diverse, low-income population facing disproportionate risk and adversity — a set of circumstances requiring higher-than-average levels of patience. Inland Empire adolescents “learn both effective and ineffective ways to manage stress and emotions from their parents,” the grant proposal asserts.
“We’re excited to gain a better understanding of what members of the Riverside community face in terms of challenges to practicing patience,” said Sweeny, who is one of the grant’s three co-principal investigators. “Through surveys, lab visits, interviews, and physiological assessments, we’ll learn a lot about those challenges and how we can help people to overcome them.”
The researchers intend to produce an open-access codebook/dataset, numerous research papers and presentations, four conferences, resources for caregivers, and other public materials. In addition, they plan to train 18-21 early-career scholars.
The grant proposal is titled “Patience in Adversity: Field Building and a Multi-Year, Multi-Site Mixed-Methods Longitudinal Study for a Foundational Virtue.” Other researchers on the grant include co-principal investigators Anne Jeffrey and Sarah Schnitker, along with researchers Erik Carter, Sarah Mire, and Terrill Saxon, all of whom are with Baylor University; Juliette Ratchford, Merve Balkaya-Ince, and Eranda Jayawickreme, all of Wake Forest University, and Kendall Bronk of Claremont Graduate University.
Templeton Religion Trust is a global charitable trust chartered by Sir John Templeton in 1984. The foundation supports projects as well as storytelling related to projects seeking to enrich the conversation about religion.
