Morgan Pardue-Kim

mpardue-kim@ssw.umaryland.edu

Morgan Pardue-Kim CV

Previous education 
MSW, University of Maryland School of Social Work 

BA, University of Colorado, Boulder 

Research interests 
Parenting; childhood trauma and healing; relationship violence; supporting immigrant and refugee communities; constructivist grounded theory; lived-experiences; community-engaged participatory research.

I study what supports parents who survived childhood abuse, neglect, and extreme adversity — and how to conduct rigorous research with, not just about, participants.

I specialize in community-based participatory research (CBPR), lived-experience and survivor-informed methodologies, constructivist grounded theory, and mixed methods, and I work bilingually in Spanish and English. Across the projects I lead, people with relevant lived experience collaborate throughout the research process. Depending on the project and available resources, this can include working with community advisory boards, building fair compensation into project budgets, hiring community-based collaborators as research team members, using iterative and responsive member checking, making analytic decisions in dialogue, and disseminating findings with collaborators as co-authors.

Substantively, I focus on parenting following childhood adversity and on preventing intergenerational harm. My work examines childhood exposure to intimate partner violence, child maltreatment prevention and intervention, and the mechanisms — particularly reflective functioning (I am a certified AAI and RF coder) — through which parents interrupt patterns of harm. I hold a strength- and resilience-oriented stance that these intergenerational patterns are not deterministic, and healing is possible. I pair this orientation with attention to the policies that shape the broader context of family safety and flourishing.

These commitments come from practice. I began working with families in 2007 as a case manager and victim advocate for survivors of sexual assault on the U.S./Mexico border, and then served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Ecuador, working as a health counselor at a public infectious disease hospital — providing pre- and post-test counseling, health education, and co-facilitating therapeutic wellness groups for people living with HIV/AIDS in Spanish. I later interned as a school social worker supporting families in Baltimore, facilitating therapeutic groups and conducting a school-wide needs assessment.

I bring these research and practice experiences together in my dissertation: a bilingual constructivist grounded theory and participatory investigation of the parenting experiences of young mothers who arrived in the U.S. from Central America as unaccompanied children. It is guided by a community advisory board and conducted with a research team of community-based collaborators who share similar lived experiences with participants. The design engages mothers as collaborators rather than passive participants through prolonged immersion and an iterative, co-analytic approach. A full description of our methods will be published in the Journal of Participatory Research Methods in late fall 2026.

Looking ahead, I am building a program of research and instruction that advances participatory methods as rigorous, teachable practices while addressing what actually helps all families thrive — scholarship accountable to communities and useful to the practitioners and policymakers who help shape the context of their lives.