Dr. Lucia Alcalá

Faculty Fellow for Qualitative Research Support

Lucia Alcalá is a Developmental psychologist, and her program of research explores children's prosocial development, executive function skills, and STEM informal learning through a sociocultural lens. She uses diverse methodologies to examine how cultural practices and children's everyday experiences guide early development.  She is currently working with faculty at UCI in a cross-cultural study to develop new cognitive tasks to evaluate issues of measurement bias for children from diverse communities.  She's also working with the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana, examining the experiences of immigrant children and families who are waiting at the boarder for the asylum petition. 

She has extensive experience using qualitative methods including Constructivist Grounded Theory, Phenomenology, and Narrative Analysis using NVivo, a qualitative software that aids the coding process.