Biography
Kevin Stephenson is an Assistant Professor of Developmental Psychology at Brigham Young University and a licensed clinical psychologist. He earned his Ph.D. and M.S. in clinical psychology from BYU and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in clinical research at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Before joining BYU, he served as an Assistant Professor-Clinical in the Department of Pediatrics at The Ohio State University and as a psychologist and principal investigator at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. His research examines developmental processes in children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities, with particular emphasis on cognitive development, psychological assessment, caregiver-child contexts, and evidence-based supports for children and families. Dr. Stephenson’s work integrates developmental science, clinical psychology, and advanced quantitative methods to better understand individual differences in development and to improve assessment and intervention practices across childhood and adolescence.
Research Interests
Dr. Stephenson’s research focuses on cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development in children with autism and other neurodevelopmental disabilities. One major line of his work examines how cognitive abilities develop and are measured across childhood, including the validity and stability of IQ scores, the interpretation of cognitive profiles and score variability, and the identification of developmental subgroups using latent variable methods. This work is intended to improve how researchers, clinicians, educators, and families understand children’s developmental strengths and needs.
A second line of research focuses on the developmental contexts that shape child and family functioning. Dr. Stephenson studies caregiver stress, parenting self-efficacy, disruptive behavior, emotion dysregulation, and parent-mediated intervention for children with autism and developmental disabilities. He is also interested in how dissemination and training models can expand access to evidence-based supports during key developmental periods. Across these areas, his research uses advanced quantitative methods, including measurement invariance, latent profile analysis, structural equation modeling, multilevel modeling, and meta-analysis, to answer developmental questions with direct implications for clinical and educational practice.