UC Santa Cruz psychology professor honored with 'Best Paper' award

UC Santa Cruz associate professor of psychology Shelly Grabe and social psychology graduate students Rose Grose and Anjali Dutt have been named winners of the 2015 Georgia Babladelis Award by the Society for the Psychology of Women.

The award recognizes the best paper published annually in Psychology of Women Quarterly. The trio was honored for their article published last May,  “Women’s Land Ownership and Relationship Power: A Mixed Methods Approach to Understanding Structural Inequities and Violence Against Women.”

The paper will be reprinted as the lead article in the journal’s March 2015 issue and is accompanied by an $1,000 honorarium. Lead author Grabe and her co-authors will receive the award at the American Psychological Association’s annual convention, scheduled for Toronto in August.

The article is based on data Grabe collected from 492 women in Nicaragua and Tanzania and suggests that when women in developing countries own land they gain power within their relationships and are less likely to experience violence.

The award is named in honor of PWQ’s founding editor, Georgia Babladelis, and began in March 2011 to mark the 35th anniversary of PWQ. The journal’s editor and associate editors choose the winning paper from the pool of all accepted papers from the previous year.