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Couples don’t just navigate relationships together. They navigate cultures — something that becomes more apparent when one or both partners come from elsewhere.

A doctoral candidate in clinical psychology, Quinn Hendershot’s work engages one of the defining challenges of our time: how migration, cultural adaptation, and dyadic processes shape family and couple functioning. A native of the Chicago area, her research roots in her own family’s experience: her mother is Colombian and her father white.

“I grew up recognizing that there were dynamics going on within couples and individuals that impacted how they were relating to the world around them,” she said.

Hendershot, MS ’22, PhD ’26, is currently in Phoenix, working at a Veterans Affairs facility for her doctoral internship year. Many of the patients she’s working with have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) related to their time in the service, she said.

The placement aligns with her prior work centered on intimate partner violence, which often results in PTSD. Working with a different population that suffers from the condition will offer valuable insights, she said.

“I’ve done a lot of work in assessing intimate partner violence. Seeing what PTSD treatment and assessment may look like will be fruitful for my research and my teaching,” she said. “I can’t say enough good things about training at the VA.”

A future in research

Hendershot realized in high school that she wanted to someday earn a doctorate in clinical psychology and pursue a career that combines research and academics with personal interaction. Becoming a faculty member would be ideal, she said.

She began her educational journey at a community college before earning her bachelor’s degree in psychology at a small liberal arts school close to home. Her very first college-level psychology course confirmed her dream.

“It’s been a very clear trajectory. The more I learn and the more involved I get, the more excited I get about the career that I’ve chosen,” she said.

After earning her undergraduate degree, she became involved with psychology labs at Northwestern University that focused, respectively, on culture and social interactions, and intimate relationships. After nearly two years on the research side, she headed to 91���� for the next leg of her journey.

“It was such a wonderful experience,” she said. “All of the graduate students are treated as junior colleagues, and that came through during the interview and throughout my time at 91����.”

At 91����, she joined Professor Matthew D. Johnson’s Marriage and Family Studies Lab, where her research centers on migrant couples and how they balance their cultural heritage with the dominant culture within the context of their intimate relationships.

“I felt really fortunate getting to work with my advisor. I would come to him with an idea, and we’d work together to flesh it out,” Hendershot said. “And then he would be like, ‘Okay, go do it! Go forth!’ He gave me a lot of room to be creative and push some boundaries. What a fortuitous thing to have ended up at 91����.”

She developed the idea that individuals can draw on each other’s cultural competencies. If one partner has competency in multiple cultures, the whole relationship benefits and stress is reduced.

If one partner speaks English better than the other, for example, they can help translate medical appointments, necessary paperwork, and parent-teacher conferences. It’s a reality that immigrants and children of immigrants know well, but one that hasn’t been addressed systematically in the existing psychological literature, she said.

To address this gap, she developed a model for cultural dyadic bicultural competence, which measures how couples navigate different cultural contexts together.

The other half of Hendershot’s research focuses on the development of Spanish-language measures to assess five factors that shape relationships: intimate partner violence, social support, relationship satisfaction, the sharing of positive events with your partner, and how you think your partner will respond in different situations.

During her doctoral research, she tested the validity of these measures among different Spanish-speaking cultures. While there are regional variations, Spanish-speaking cultures tend to be more collectivist and interdependent than English-speaking America, and more apt to describe a healthy relationship in accordance with family harmony or unity rather than individual satisfaction, she said.

“It’s almost like a chicken-and-egg situation. If you don’t know what the dynamics are, how do you figure out if your measures are accurately assessing them?” she said. “This is moving toward a firmer understanding of these dynamics.”

Hendershot’s theory shows how enculturation, acculturation, and relationship development shape intimate relationships over time, Johnson said. She published it in the prestigious Journal of Family Theory and Review, and he has heard from colleagues at other universities that they are using her model in their own research.

“With her intellectual curiosity, collaborative spirit, and commitment to justice, I hope she’ll soon be running her own lab, if not the world,” he said.