Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies Program

Introduction

This interdisciplinary program, led by law professor Dorothy Roberts, combines the interests of IPR faculty studying the ways in which social programs, policies, and contexts affect the lives of families and children from birth to young adulthood. Drawing from the fields of human development and social policy, psychology, sociology, economics, and law, many faculty share common interests with scholars in IPR’s Education Policy and Poverty, Race, and Inequality programs particularly in studying the impact of public policies on America’s poor. Faculty research covers:

Overview of Activities

Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study
P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, a developmental psychologist, is co-principal investigator of Welfare, Children, and Families: A Three-City Study, a multidisciplinary study of 2,400 low-income children and families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, which is now in its 14th year. With support from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the researchers are analyzing a third wave of data collected from home-based interviews. At the time the interviews were conducted, half of the children from the first wave of the study were in elementary school (aged 6 to 10), and the other half were adolescents (aged 16 to 20) who were making the transition to young adulthood and either were enrolled in, had graduated from, or had dropped out of high school.

Additionally, Chase-Lansdale and her colleagues have data from the Three-City Teacher Survey (TCTS), a Web-based survey of the teachers of children and adolescents in the Three-City Study. The teachers have provided independent assessments of the youths’ academic and social functioning and their schooling experiences.

Chase-Lansdale and colleagues are currently analyzing the three waves of data, which will result in one of the few reports on the long-term implications of welfare reform for children, adolescents, and young adults.

Funding for the Three-City Study has come from NICHD and the Annie E. Casey, Joyce, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur, Lloyd A. Fry, and Robert Wood Johnson foundations, Searle Fund for Policy Research and Woods Fund. For TCTS, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and Searle Fund for Policy Research supplemented NICHD funding.

Reading and the Immigrant Paradox
Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Survey-Kindergarten Cohort—which includes data on more than 16,000 children—Chase-Lansdale, IPR graduate research assistant Natalia Palacios, and postdoctoral fellow Katarina Guttmannova looked at the longitudinal reading trajectories of immigrant children from kindergarten through 3rd grade. After examining various factors, their study provides support for the idea of the immigrant paradox in revealing that first- and second-generation children experience an academic advantage over their third-generation counterparts.

The researchers posit that unmeasured characteristics of successful immigrants, such as high skill levels, motivation, and ambition, might explain why first-generation immigrant children perform as well as—or better than—children born in the United States. Yet postmigratory experiences, such as discrimination, low-achieving schools, and poor employment opportunities compounded by the potential loss of protective traditional cultural factors, might translate to lower levels of overall achievement.

New Welfare Bureaucrats
Sociologist and African American studies assistant professor Celeste Watkins-Hayes has a forthcoming book from University of Chicago Press in 2009, “The New Welfare Bureaucrats: Entanglements of Race, Class, and Policy Reform.” In it, she explores how the professional and social identities of street-level bureaucrats shape how low-income families receive welfare services. Against the backdrop of increasing income inequality, work requirements for impoverished mothers, and a restructured social safety net, this study provides a detailed look at the inner workings of a poverty relief agency.

As welfare offices attempt to shift their organizational model from one of writing checks and monitoring fraud to an increasingly professionalized institution, caseworkers and others advance their own interpretations of how to transform their clients, the office, and their work. For these situated bureaucrats, the politics of professional roles and racial, class, and community interests give rise to distinct interpretations of what “helping the poor” looks like.

Welfare Reform in Illinois
Social policy professor Dan A. Lewis is currently completing a book titled “Gaining Ground in Illinois: Welfare Reform and Person-Centered Policy Analysis.” The book will summarize the major findings of the Illinois Families Study (IFS).

The legislation that created IFS was crafted by then-Illinois state Sen. Barack Obama to assess in a nonpartisan manner how welfare reform was actually working. It was signed into law in 1997. From 1999 to 2004, Lewis led a major effort to conduct in-depth qualitative interviews and quantitative analyses of a random sample of the poor—mostly young single mothers—and track them over time. In the book, Lewis also offers a big picture perspective, discussing the two competing views of welfare reform—conservative versus liberal—using IFS data to debunk major tenets of both.

“We hope that we can remove the blinders of the ideological debates of the ’80s and ’90s and look at the problems of the poor with a clearer sense of what problems people have and what we can do about them,” Lewis says. “Our goal is to point to a fresher way of tackling the problems of poverty in our society.” Northern Illinois Press will publish the book in 2009.

Lewis is starting a new project with IPR graduate research assistant Lindsay Monte using IFS data to look at the links between welfare receipt, financial hardship, and crime. While many have examined the effects of the reform on work, well-being, health, and economic stability, the effects of welfare reform on the criminal behavior of welfare recipients is still unknown. As state welfare rolls have declined significantly in the years since welfare reform, female criminality has been on the rise. Previous IFS findings have shown that the 1996 reform increased neither the number of jobs available nor the wages they paid, but did, with its “work-first” philosophy, increase the number of women competing for positions. With funding from the Joyce Foundation, Lewis and Monte will examine whether denying women cash benefits increased criminal activity.

IFS received funding from the Department of Education, NICHD, Administration for Children and Families, Chicago Community Trust, and the Joyce, MacArthur, and Polk Bros. foundations.

Racial Disproportionality of Child Welfare
Law professor Dorothy Roberts, Kirkland & Ellis Professor, published research on the community-level effects of the disproportionate number of African American children in child welfare systems. From her in-depth interviews of black women in Woodlawn, a mostly black Chicago neighborhood with high rates of foster-care placement, Roberts concludes that the residents of such neighborhoods must increasingly rely on child protection agencies for needed financial assistance due to the growing dearth of social programs in these neighborhoods. Roberts explores the implications of these findings for a new research paradigm to address racial disproportionality and to understand the impact and role of child welfare agencies in African American neighborhoods.

Economics of Adoption
Adoption, as an alternative to childbearing, is a widely accepted means of forming a family in many modern societies. In this study, economist Éva Nagypál and her colleagues provide a comprehensive overview of the U.S. adoption market and its historical development. They describe three different adoption markets, document trends in these markets using aggregate-level data from 1951 to 2002, and explore possible reasons for observed historical patterns. In addition, with data from the National Survey of Family Growth and the Survey of Income and Program Participation, they conduct the first econometric analysis of the adoption market by estimating individuals’ propensities to adopt or to relinquish a child for adoption.

Northwestern Juvenile Project
Social psychologist Linda Teplin leads the Northwestern Juvenile Project, the first large-scale longitudinal study of health needs and outcomes of delinquent youth. Launched in 1995, the pioneering project tracks and interviews 1,829 participants to examine their ongoing health needs and their life trajectories. The group is investigating the relationship among substance abuse, mental disorders, and HIV/AIDS risk behaviors and infection from adolescence through young adulthood.

A recent finding shows that males, African Americans, Hispanics, and older youth were more likely to be processed in adult criminal courts than females, non-Hispanic whites, and younger children. Of those transferred to adult courts, 68 percent had at least one psychiatric disorder and 43 percent had two or more. Teplin and her colleagues called for the provision of psychiatric services to these youth, including those sentenced to prison, and to take into account the disproportionate number of racial-ethnic minority groups.