Benjamin Karney

Benjamin Karney is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he serves as Social Area Chair in the Department of Psychology. He also holds an adjunct position as a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation, focusing on interpersonal relationships and marriage dynamics within diverse contexts.

His educational background includes a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles.

• Ph.D.: University of California, Los Angeles

Dr. Karney's research examines change and stability in intimate relationships, particularly during early marriage. He investigates how external stressors—including socioeconomic hardship, military deployment, and racial discrimination—impact cognitive and behavioral relationship maintenance processes. His methodology emphasizes longitudinal designs, repeated measures, multi-level modeling, and observational coding of couple interactions, with current work focusing on Latinx, Black, and White newlywed couples from low-income neighborhoods.

Analysis of his recent publications (2015-2021) reveals consistent focus on contextual factors influencing relationship trajectories. Key trends include examination of socioeconomic status as both stressor and adaptive framework, racial discrimination effects on marital quality, and context-dependent communication strategies. His work increasingly integrates duocentric social network analysis and challenges deficit-based models of low-income relationships.

Dr. Karney has received significant recognition for his contributions:

• Two-time recipient of the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award

His research has been supported by major grants from the Department of Defense (military marriage studies) and the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development (low-income marriage research). As director of the Florida Project on Newlywed Marriage and Adult Development (FPNMAD), he led landmark longitudinal studies of early marriage. He served as expert consultant for the Strengthening Healthy Marriage project—a national experimental study for low-income couples sponsored by the Administration on Children and Families—and conducted Florida's statewide marriage baseline survey in 2003.

Dr. Karney directs the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab, which maintains active research programs examining relationship dynamics across diverse socioeconomic and cultural contexts through multiple longitudinal studies.