Article on Family-funded academics for website
Lawrence Lilliston and Gary Shepard are undergraduate teaching faculty at Oakland University in Michigan who conducted a Family-funded evaluation of 52 children living in U.S. Family homes in 1993. Shepard is a professor of sociology who publishes on religion and culture. His colleague, Lilliston, is an assistant professor of psychology who completed a dissertation on adult schizophrenia in 1969. Since then, he has published on undergraduate psychology education and religious coping.

Although Lilliston has been touted by TFI as a clinical child psychologist, he has no published research in the area of child & adolescent mental health outside of two small studies on psychosocial adjustment in children of high demand organizations (HDOs). Lilliston & Shepard conducted both studies with small, purposive samples of children in The Family and The Church Universal & Triumphant. Neither of Lilliston & Shepard’s studies on children in HDOs have been accepted for publication in peer reviewed journals dedicated to research on child and adolescent mental health.

Despite Lilliston’s apparent lack of clinical research expertise in child and adolescent mental health and child abuse assessment, he felt confident to give an 18-year-old Rick Rodriguez a clean bill of health in a 1993 assessment.1 Using measures of psychosocial adjustment, Lilliston also concluded from his study of 52 Family children that “very few kidsâ€