Starkey Duncan Jr. has been on the faculty of the University of Chicago since 1961 and is Professor in the Psychology Department. He is currently a member of the programs in developmental and social psychology. He is faculty advisor for the undergraduate program in psychology, member of the Board of Athletics and Recreational Sports, university representative to the NCAA and University Athletic Association (the college's athletic conference), and faculty advisor for the annual University of Chicago Folk Festival. He received his B.A. from Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He became a Charter Fellow of the American Psychological Society in 1988.

Professor Duncan is a member of the American Psychological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Society for Research in Child Development, and the International Society for Infant Studies. He has reviewed manuscripts for numerous journals including Child Development, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, American Psychologist, Psychological Bulletin, and Science.

Duncan's research focuses on the process of face-to-face interaction between humans, most recently parent-child interaction during the child's first two years. Current projects include the relation between early family interaction patterns and the child's language acquisition; the organization of various sorts of interaction within the family, such as feeding, discipline, conflict, games; the age at which infants begin patterned interaction with caregivers; and the process by which parent-child interactions are constructed, including the quantification of bi-directional influence in these interactions.

Contact Information:
Beecher 204
5848 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Fax: 773.702.0886
Email: dunc@uchicago.edu
Other Links: http://ccp.uchicago.edu/faculty/Starkey_Duncan/

Research Interests
My research is on the process of face-to-face interaction within the family. We are currently focusing on the interaction of parents with their children between the ages of eight and twenty-four months. The work is predicated on the notion of interaction as a rule-governed activity structured in part by the use of conventions. While we are interested in all sorts of interaction, a particular current emphasis is conflict. A major goal of the research is to discover and describe the signals, rules, and other elements that comprise parent-child interaction structure. The child's developing interactive competence and family interaction patterns can be described in part through such structures. Once structures are hypothesized for observed interactions, one can consider the implications of particular types of structures for family interaction process. Given the operation of rules in interaction, there is also interaction strategy: the way individuals conduct themselves within the rules. A rough analogy to interaction structure and strategy would be the rules for a game and the strategies that participants take within the game.

Recent Publications
Articles
Duncan, S. D., Jr. (1997). Early parent-child interaction grammar prior to language acquisition. Language & Communication, 17, 149-164.

Duncan, S.D., Jr. & Collier, N.T. (in press). C-quence: A tool for analyzing qualitative sequential data. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments and Computers.

Selected Courses
Graduate Proseminar
Introduction to Interaction Research
Early Socialization