Fellows

Robert Joseph Taylor, PhD

Inducted in 2017

Bio

Robert Joseph Taylor is the Harold R. Johnson Endowed Professor and Sheila Feld Collegiate Professor of Social Work University of Michigan. He is also the Director of the Program for Research for Black Americans at the Institute for Social Research. Professor Taylor has published extensively on the informal social support networks (i.e., family, friends, and church members) of adult and elderly Black Americans as well as religious participation among African Americans. He has been principal investigator of several grants from the National Institute on Aging that examine the role of religion in the lives of Black and White elderly adults. He has been co-principal investigator with James Jackson on several grants from the National Institute of Mental Health on the correlates of mental health and mental illness among Black Americans, including the only major national study of the prevalence of mental illness among Black Americans (The National Survey of American Life). He has edited two books, Family Life in Black America (1997) and Aging in Black America (1993) with James S. Jackson and Linda M. Chatters. He is also the lead author of the book, Religion in the Lives of African Americans: Social, Psychological, and Health Perspectives (2004) with Linda Chatters and Jeff Levin. Robert Joseph Taylor has been selected as one of the 250 Highly Cited researchers in the General Social Science Category by ISIHighlyCited.com (Creators of the Citation Index and Current Contents).  The selection of a researcher is based on the total number of citations received by that individual as recorded in the ISI database between 1981 – 1999.  He is the founding editor of African American Research Perspectives and is currently on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marriage and the Family and Race and Social Problems.