Benjamin Karney

Benjamin R. Karney is an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation and a professor of social psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is an expert on interpersonal relationships, especially marriage, and has done extensive research on how relationship processes and interactions are facilitated or constrained by the contexts in which they take place. This has included research on marriages in the military, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, and curently involves marriages in low-income populations, funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. He has been the director and principal investigator of the Florida Project on Newlywed Marriage, a series of longitudinal studies examining the processes through which initially satisfying marriages either remain satisfying or deteriorate over time, and in 2003, he conducted the baseline survey of marriage and families for the state of Florida as part of their initiative to strengthen families. Karney codirects the UCLA Relationship Institute and consults for the Strengthening Healthy Marriage project, a national experimental study of marital interventions for low-income populations, sponsored by the Administration on Children and Families. He has twice been the recipient of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to family science. Karney received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.