Anita Barbee
American psychologist and social worker
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Barbee completed a Bachelor of Arts in English and psychology at Agnes Scott College in 1982. She then pursued graduate study at the University of Georgia, earning a Master of Arts in 1985 and a PhD in social psychology, with a specialization in child and family studies, in 1988. Her doctoral dissertation received the Dissertation Award from the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) in 1989. She later earned a Master of Science in Social Work (MSSW) from the University of Louisville in 2001.
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Career and research
Barbee joined the University of Louisville in 1986 as an adjunct professor and director of the social psychology lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, moving to the Kent School of Social Work in 1993 as an assistant research professor before becoming a tenured professor and Distinguished University Scholar there in 2005.
Her research examines close relationships, relationship initiation, and social support communications. Barbee studies community-engaged interventions aimed at healthy relationship education. She evaluates programs like Love Notes, which target positive youth development among youth living in challenging contexts, including those who are or have been system-involved (e.g., child welfare, juvenile justice) as well as immigrant and refugee youth. Her work analyzes how relationship education affects dating violence, risky sexual behavior, teen pregnancy rates, and suicidality among youth in urban areas.
Barbee researches child welfare organizational structures. She designs, implements, and evaluates workforce interventions designed to address staff recruitment and hiring, onboarding and training, job redesign, supervision, use of technology, organizational context, and secondary traumatic stress to improve retention and practice among front-line child welfare workers. She served as the evaluation lead for the federal Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) from 2016 to 2023. Her studies investigate factors affecting the social support provided by child welfare supervisors to employees managing exposure to traumatizing events. She develops and evaluates strategies to improve practice through the use of practice models and to reduce racial disparities in the treatment of children and youth within child welfare agencies. She serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Public Child Welfare, Families in Society, and PLOS ONE.
She has secured over $50 million in extramural grant funding for the University of Louisville from organizations including the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), the Children's Bureau, the Child Care Bureau, the Family and Youth Services Bureau, the Office of Adolescent Health, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). She was the president of the International Association for Relationship Research from 2018 to 2020, following a term as president-elect from 2016. She currently serves on the board of directors as treasurer of the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare.