Elizabeth Larson

Dr. Larson is an occupational therapist and occupational scientist with thirty years of clinical and research experience working with children with disabilities and their families. Her research uses mixed methods approaches to examine the impact of managing the child’s disability on the family and especially the caregiver. She employs multi-faceted approaches to gain a deeper understanding of the caregiver’s perspectives and daily lived experience including the use of participant-grounded methods such as interviews, focus groups, and participant observation within the family homes, in concert with well-validated well-being measures, and biomarkers of health. The overarching goal of her work is to investigate how the caregiver’s organization and orchestration of daily activities tailored to the child’s developmental needs promotes or impedes family functioning, and in turn influences the caregiver’s health and well-being.