Peter Salem is the executive director of the Association of Family and Conciliation Courts (AFCC), based in Madison, Wisconsin. Salem is well-known in the family court and mediation community and received the Distinguished Mediator Award from the Association for Conflict Resolution in 2008. AFCC is an interdisciplinary association that in part provides training and education on research and best practices to judges, lawyers, mediators and mental health professionals. Salem will use his Distinguished Fellows award to become a more effective consumer of research in order to systematically integrate social science research into the family law community and facilitate partnerships between researchers, practitioners and policymakers. He will work with Irwin Sandler, Sharlene Wolchik and David MacKinnon at the Arizona State University Prevention Research Center, which specializes in research on children of divorce. Salem will strengthen his understanding of research methods and processes by immersing himself in an experimental evaluation of a court-based intervention for high-conflict families, as well as participating in some smaller scale research undertakings. He will spend one week each month participating in research activities at ASU. Additionally, Salem will undertake two directed readings courses (with MacKinnon and Sandler) on research methods and design, and prevention science, respectively.
Salem will use his Distinguished Fellows award to become a more effective consumer of research in order to systematically integrate social science research into the family law community and facilitate partnerships between researchers, practitioners and policymakers.
