Shannon Gottschall

Dr. Shannon Gottschall obtained her PhD in psychology in 2014. Before joining the Department of National Defence (DND), she worked for the Correctional Service of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. She is currently a Defence Scientist with the Psychosocial Health Dynamics team under Director General Military Personnel Research and Analysis at DND. She has completed defence research relating to recruit health, health promotion, adverse childhood experiences, and gender differences in mental health.

Shannon previously completed research at Carleton University in the areas of women offender desistance and gender differences in anticipated reactions to segregation.  However, her doctoral dissertation focused on the psychology of women and studied the effects of sex, gender, and power on relationship styles and the associations between relationship styles and psychosocial outcomes. Shannon received a SSHRC fellowship award in 2010.

Research: Shannon’s Ph.D. thesis was titled “The Influences of Sex, Gender Identity, and Power on Faculty-Graduate Student Relational Mentoring and its Association with Student Psychological Health,” and involved two studies. The purpose of the first study was to assess the impact of mentoring relationships between graduate students and their faculty thesis advisors on student psychological health. This study found a significant relationship between relational mentoring and positive student psychological health. The purpose of the second study was to identify factors impacting the quality of mentoring between graduate students and their faculty thesis advisors. This study found that female participants and those with more feminine traits were most likely to demonstrate greater authenticity, engagement, and empowerment.