RELEASE DATE: June 10, 1996
The federal government has awarded $7.5 million to Northwestern University and the University of Chicago to establish a major new research center to advise on some of the nation's most pressing social policy questions.
The two Chicago-area universities have won a nationwide competition by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for a cooperative agreement to establish the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.
The new Joint Center will study the causes of poverty in America and the effectiveness of policies to reduce poverty. A major focus will be research on innovations in welfare reform and poverty policy at the state level around the country.
"The new Joint Center grows out of an exceptionally strong foundation of research that is shaping the poverty debate today," said Henry S. Bienen, president of Northwestern University. "It will greatly expand upon an unusual poverty research training program for doctoral students that has been jointly run by Northwestern and the University of Chicago since 1991. Many of our researchers already are in the forefront of current policy discussions about poverty, work and families."
"Urban sociology was established as a discipline at the University of Chicago," said President Hugo Sonnenschein," and we are gratified to be given this opportunity with Northwestern University to build on our strongtradition of research on poverty. We look forward to our faculty continuing to make pioneering contributions to research on the causes and consequences of poverty in America, and to training future generations of outstanding scholars concerned with these issues."
To be jointly administered by Northwestern's Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research and the University of Chicago's Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, the Joint Center was established with the first installment of the $7.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The five-year grant will support research on the causes of poverty and the effectiveness of programs and policies to alleviate it. The grant also will provide for the training of graduate students at the University of Chicago and Northwestern in poverty-related research and will fund regular policy briefings around the country.
In addition, the Joint Center will cultivate and work closely with a network of leading scholars and government policymakers interested in finding solutions to the problems of poverty. Assessing new state-level initiatives to combat poverty through welfare reform will be a major emphasis, and a national conference on the topic is planned for 1997 or1998.
"The establishment of the new center affirms that Northwestern and the University of Chicago are the places to be for new approaches to research and policy discussion on poverty, work and family," said Rebecca Blank, director of the Joint Center for Poverty Research.
Blank, a professor of economics and a faculty fellow at the Center for Urban Affairs and Policy Research at Northwestern, is well known nationally for her work on poverty and labor issues. In forthcoming research, she will look at the effect of unemployment on low-income families.
Robert T. Michael, the Eliakim Hastings Moore Distinguished Service Professor in the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies, will serve as the Joint Center's first deputy director. His current research compares the effects of the family and of social policy on the healthy development of children age 0-13 in the U.S. and the U.K.
"The University of Chicago has long been committed to basic social science research, and the Joint Center's focus on the study of urgent policy problems is a natural complement to our work," said Michael.
Main areas of research for the Joint Center will include the changing labor market; family functioning and the well-being of children; teen-age pregnancy; and initiatives to replace welfare recipiency with work. A national network of leading scholars working in these areas will collaborate with researchers at the Joint Center to help integrate the work of the Northwestern and University of Chicago faculty with the research of scholars at other universities.
The center will hold regular policy briefings and disseminate research findings through newsletters and a site on the World Wide Web. It also will publish its findings on a regular basis and hold periodic conferences to share its work with interested policymakers and others in the research community.
Thinking about poverty has shifted dramatically over the last 30 years. "Immediately following Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, the conventional wisdom held that poverty was a cause of educational failure, family breakdown and crime," said Blank, the Joint Center director.
"Although the precise nature of the causal links between poverty and other social problems was seldom spelled out, many people assumed that these problems were the causes as well as the consequences of poverty," she said.
"By the end of the 1980s many believed just the opposite, that the growth of a new underclass -- which rejected traditional American values and dropped out of school, refused to marry or engaged in crime -- was the main cause of persistent poverty."
"The debate highlights the importance of understanding the differences between correlation and causation and of building a body of solid empirical evidence about the impact of different social phenomena on one another," added Michael, deputy director of the Joint Center. "To be useful," he said, "such a body of evidence needs to provide a sense of how much additional family income would reduce various social problems and how much reducing these social problems would raise income."
Untangling that web of often contradictory conclusions about poverty in America -- with enhanced statistical methods, experimental data and ingenuity -- will be the main task of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research.
CONTACTS: Pat Tremmel, Northwestern University, at (847) 491-4892 or William Harms, University of Chicago (312) 702-8356.