Families, Relationships, & Health

Description

• Studies how social inclusion and exclusion, discrimination, and racism affect family health
• Focuses on how family circumstances, including socieoeconomic factors, welfare status, and chronic illness are linked to family functioning, parenting, and health of family members, particularly children
• Addresses how differential access to healthcare and to advances in biotechnology may contribute to further disparities in family health

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Research Projects

Family Stress Study
Principal Investigator(s): Emma Adam

As part of the Sloan Working Family Study out of the University of Chicago, Adam explores factors that increase or decrease stress hormone levels in children and parents as they go about their everyday lives. She uses a noninvasive method - measuring the stress-sensitive hormone cortisol in saliva - and daily journal entries to gauge the psychological and physiological states of the mothers, fathers, and children throughout the day. She found that cortisol levels were lower, indicating lower stress levels, when parents felt productive, engaged, and challenged. Both parents and adolescents had higher stress hormone levels when they felt negative emotions such as worry and anger; adolescents also had higher stress hormone levels at moments they were alone rather than with other people. Kindergarten-aged children had higher stress hormone levels when they lived in a home that had high levels of conflict between parents and low levels of maternal involvement and warmth.

Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study
Principal Investigators: Ronald Angel (University of Texas - Austin), Linda Burton (Penn State), P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Andrew Cherlin (Johns Hopkins), Robert Moffitt (Johns Hopkins), William Julius Wilson (Harvard)

Chase-Lansdale is co-directing this large multidisciplinary research project on the consequences of welfare reform for children and families. With five co-investigators, she is tracking 2,400 low-income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. A primary focus is the health and development of children. The study consists of four components: (1) a longitudinal survey of mothers, preschoolers, and adolescents followed at three time points over six years; (2) an embedded developmental study (EDS) of young children that includes two waves of videotaped interaction with mothers, interviews with their fathers, and observations in childcare settings; (3) an ethnographic study that provides an extensive, in-depth picture of 250 additional families; and (4) the Three-City Teacher Survey (TCTS) in which one teacher of each child and adolescent completes a web-based survey. The main findings to date were published in 2003 in the journal Science. The 6-year follow up study is currently underway. Policy briefs, publications, a design report, and the interviews and measures are accessible at http://www.jhu.edu/~welfare. The data from the first two waves of the survey and the embedded developmental study are publicly available through Sociometrics.

Long-Term Outcomes for Gautreaux Families
Principal Investigators: Greg Duncan and James Rosenbaum (Northwestern University)

This study analyzes housing, welfare receipt and labor market outcomes of low-income mothers and their children who have relocated from Chicago public housing under the Gautreaux Program. The research focuses on the effects of the characteristics of the original destination neighborhoods on these outcomes. Duncan and co-investigator James Rosenbaum add to previously collected survey results with new state administrative data on outcomes and a more complete characterization of the initial neighborhood to which the families relocated. Key outcomes will include enrollment of children in special education programs, welfare receipt and census-based demographic characteristics of their most recent neighborhoods. These new data will enable them to weigh the impact of various characteristics of neighborhoods, such as poverty, crime, and male joblessness within the suburban and city locations.

Evaluation of the New Hope Project
Principal Investigators: Greg J. Duncan, Aletha Huston (University of Texas), and Thomas Weisner (UCLA)

In collaboration with the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC), Duncan and two IPR graduate fellows are continuing to evaluate the effects on family functioning and child well-being of an innovative, random-assignment anti-poverty program in two Milwaukee neighborhoods. The New Hope Project, which began in 1994, guaranteed poor families access to a job, a wage supplement, and subsidies for health insurance and childcare. The researchers have analyzed quantitative data from surveys and administrative records and collected and analyzed ethnographic data from 45 randomly selected program and control families in the sample. The ethnographic component of the study chas been conducted along with a five-year quantitative assessment of the families and children. Reports based on two and five years of the study were published by MDRC in 1999 and 2003. A follow-up survey at eight years is currently underway. Duncan, Aletha Huston and Thomas Weisner are writing a book about New Hope which is likely to be published in the Summer of 2006.

Next Generation Project
Principal Investigators: Pamela Morris (MDRC), Lisa Gennetian (MDRC), Greg Duncan and collabators at University of Texas at Austin, University of California at Los Angeles, Syracuse University, University of Oregon, New York University, the Social Research & Demonstration Corporation

The Next Generation project aims to inform policymakers, practitioners, and scholars by identifying lessons that cut across evaluations of individual welfare, antipoverty, and work programs. With a focus on how such programs can influence children’s and families’ well-being through their effects on employment, income, and child care, the project addresses questions such as how do programs that share certain effects on parents’ economic outcomes — for instance, that boost employment or income — affect children? What combinations of economic effects harm or benefit children most?

Parenting Styles, Adolescent Health and Youth Outcomes
Principal Investigators: Jelani Mandara

Jelani Mandara is a family and developmental psychologist. His primary research examines the nature and effects of socialization, father’s involvement, and how they interact with gender, race, and SES to impact youths’ academic and social development. His current projects examine the effects of parenting styles on Black, Latino, and White American youth’s academic achievement, sexual activity and behavioral problems. He is also in the process of creating a comprehensive and culturally relevant measure of parenting called the Socialization and Family Environment Scale (SAFE). Mandara’s health interests include patterns adolescent drug use and sexual activity.  For example, he has developed an ecological model of personal, familial, and extrafamilial risk factors to predict African American adolescents’ sexual activity.

Biomarkers for Population-based Health Research
Principal Investigators: Thomas McDade, Emma Adam

The application of minimally-invasive, “"field-friendly”" methods for measuring physiology is an important part of McDade's effort to conduct integrative population-based research on health. He has developed methods for assaying biomarkers in a drop of blood collected from a simple finger prick, and is currently consulting on the implementation of these methods into a number of large, nationally-representative health surveys, including the Health and Retirement Survey, the National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project, and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health). C2S members have been centrally involved in the planning for Wave IV data collection for Add Health, which is scheduled to go to the field in 2006.

The Social Consequences of HIV/AIDS for African-American Women: An Ethnographic Study
Principal Investigator: Celeste Watkins-Hayes

This ethnographic study explores the social experiences and
processes of Chicago-area African-American women infected with
HIV/AIDS. Researchers are increasingly documenting the social
context of infection risk and the ways in which systems of
inequality result in disproportionate infection rates among
disadvantaged groups. (MORE)

Race and Child Welfare Policy and Practice
Principal Investigator: Dorothy Roberts

Roberts has been studying the racial disparity in state removal of children from their homes, the impact of the child welfare system on black families, and how racial politics helps to shape child welfare policy. Using both statistical analysis and interviews, she focused on the effects of state intervention on family and community life, the impact of recently enacted adoption and welfare reform laws on parental rights, and the role of poverty and racial bias in determining child neglect. The study, which culminated in the book, Shattered Bonds, also proposed ways to improve the child welfare system and considers whether a goal of policy should be to reduce numbers in foster care through either family preservation policies or policies that make adoption easier. Roberts is currently conducting a qualitative study that examines the impact of high rates of child welfare agency involvement in African American neighborhoods.

 

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