Yue Zhang

Ph.D. Canidate (ABD)

Department

Communication

zhan1600@msu.edu

Bio

Yue earned her master’s degree in Communication at Michigan State University. She's a fourth-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Communication.

Research and Teaching

Yue’s research lies at the intersection of interpersonal, family, and health communication. Her work examines how families and close others provide support and navigate shared challenges such as career barriers, health stressors, and life transitions, and how these processes shape relational and health outcomes. She uses surveys, experiments, and semi-structured interviews, along with advanced quantitative (e.g., structural equation modeling, polynomial regression with response surface analysis) and qualitative analyses (e.g., thematic co-occurrence analysis) to address theory-driven questions. Her research has been supported by the Strosacker Foundation, and she was funded as a research assistant on an NSF-funded project examining parent–child communication about high-barrier careers.

Related Work

Public Scholarship and Outreach

Wolfe, B. H., Zhang. Y (2025, April 21). What to Say to Your Child When They Graduate From College. Psychology Today. 

Michigan State University Science Festival. (2025, April). STEM Career Options Card Game. (Public outreach event). East Lansing, MI.

Publications

Dorrance Hall, E., Zhang, Y., Edwards, A.L., Wolfe, B. H., Morales, N., & Valdes, P. (2025). Applying and extending communication theory to understand parent-child communication about high-barrier careers. Annals of the International Communication Association, 00, 1-13. 

Dorrance Hall, E., Watson, O., Zhang, Y., Kuhar, M., & Ma, M. (2025). Linking Slovene women’s family-of-origin communication with perceptions of resilience, support availability and happiness in adulthood. Journal of Family Communication, 25(4), 336–355.

Dorrance Hall, E., Zhang, Y., Wolfe, B. H., Ma, M., Li, W., Kuch, L., Cui, X., & Edwards, A. L. (2025). Different by definition: First generation college graduates’ perceptions of family marginalization, resilience, and flourishing. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 42(8), 1880-1902.

Wolfe, B. H., Ma, M., Kuch, L., Zhang, Y., Cui, X., Edwards, A. L., & Dorrance-Hall, E. (2025). Memorable messages from family members about pride for First Generation College Graduates. Journal of Family Communication, 25(2), 1-18. 

Dorrance Hall, E., Earle, K., Ma, M., Kuch, L., Zhang, Y., & Osika, K. (2024). Women’s work-family balance in Slovenia: Associations with job stress, division of labor satisfaction, and relational wellbeing. International Journal of Communication, 18(1), 4770-4791. 

Hu, J., Zhu, R., & Zhang, Y. (2024). Does online dating make relationships more successful? Replication and extension of Sharabi and Dorrance-Hall. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 27(9), 635-640. 

Holmstrom, A. J., Lim, J. I., Zhang, Y., & Shelle, G. (2023). Factors influencing farmers’ use of adaptive and maladaptive coping strategies. Journal of Agromedicine, 28(4), 903-914. 

Meng, J., Rheu, M., Zhang, Y., & Peng, W. (2023). Mediated social support for distress reduction: AI chatbots vs. human. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, CSCW, 7(1), 1-25.

Contact Information

404 Wilson Road, Room 459