Anita Barbee

Anita P. Barbee is an American psychologist and social worker. She is a professor, Distinguished University Scholar, and the PhD program director at the University of Louisville Kent School of Social Work and Family Science.

Education Barbee completed a Bachelor of Arts in English and psychology at Agnes Scott College in 1982. Her doctoral dissertation received the Dissertation Award from the International Association for Relationship Research (IARR) in 1989.

Career and research Barbee joined the University of Louisville in 1986 as an adjunct professor and director of the social psychology lab in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, moving to the Kent School of Social Work in 1993 as an assistant research professor before becoming a tenured professor and Distinguished University Scholar there in 2005. Barbee studies community-engaged interventions aimed at healthy relationship education. She evaluates programs like Love Notes, which target positive youth development among youth living in challenging contexts, including those who are or have been system-involved (e.g., child welfare, juvenile justice) as well as immigrant and refugee youth. Her work analyzes how relationship education affects dating violence, risky sexual behavior, teen pregnancy rates, and suicidality among youth in urban areas.

Barbee researches child welfare organizational structures. She designs, implements, and evaluates workforce interventions designed to address staff recruitment and hiring, onboarding and training, job redesign, supervision, use of technology, organizational context, and secondary traumatic stress to improve retention and practice among front-line child welfare workers. She served as the evaluation lead for the federal Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) from 2016 to 2023. Her studies investigate factors affecting the social support provided by child welfare supervisors to employees managing exposure to traumatizing events. She develops and evaluates strategies to improve practice through the use of practice models and to reduce racial disparities in the treatment of children and youth within child welfare agencies. She serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals, including the Journal of Public Child Welfare, Families in Society, and PLOS ONE. She received the National Staff Development and Training Association Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Public Human Services Association in 2007, and its Career Achievement Award in 2014. She was elected to fellow status in the American Psychological Association (Division 9: Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) in 2000 and invited to join the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists in 2017.

She holds fellow status in the American Psychological Association, the Society for Social Work and Research (SSWR), and the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare. She is a past president of the Junior League of Louisville. The University of Louisville named her a Wilson Wyatt Alumni Fellow in 2024.