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Editor:
Tonya Allen
allen@pop.psu.edu
PRInformation
Fall 2004
Note from the Director
In our Fall 1997 issue, this space was devoted to an announcement of the launching of PRI's Geographic Information Analysis Core. Then-PRI director Daniel Lichter concluded with the phrase, "Place is destiny!" In the intervening years, spatial analysis and the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become essential elements of demographic research. Scholars and the general public are increasingly aware of the importance of place and spatial context in every aspect of the life course, from access to health care and educational and employment opportunities, to proximity to risk factors such as environmental pollutants and high-crime areas. PRI has a growing portfolio of projects which use GIS or contain a spatial dimension. In particular, spatial inequality is featured in studies investigating a variety of social problems.
Variations in state welfare laws and their possible effects on welfare recipients' migration patterns are the focus of two projects currently being conducted by Dr. Gordon De Jong (Sociology and Demography) and Dr. Deborah Graefe (Sociology and Demography): Welfare Reform and Migration: Moving to Benefits, Moving from Restrictions? (NICHD) and Welfare Reform and Migration of Poor Families (NSF). Using merged data from the 1996 and 2001 panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), the Urban Institute's Welfare Rules Database, and a local labor market characteristics file created from decennial census and Bureau of Labor Statistics data, De Jong and Graefe seek to test the hypothesis that inequalities in state welfare policies shape migration "push" and "pull" factors, and to assess pre-migration and post-migration well-being.
In Welfare, Children & Families: A Three City Study, Dr. Linda Burton (Human Development and Family Studies, Sociology and Demography) and Dr. Stephen Matthews (Geography, Demography, and Sociology, and director, Geographic Information Analysis Core), in collaboration with researchers at Johns Hopkins, Texas, Harvard and Northwestern, are examining the effects of welfare reform on impoverished families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio. GIS analysis of the data collected will pinpoint the contextual factors that are related to differences in the welfare experience in these three locales. Burton and Matthews recently received funding from NSF for a new project (Family Resource Allocation in Urban and Rural Communities) that will enable them to continue to develop their work on the integration of GIS and ethnography (geo-ethnography) by analyzing data from the Welfare, Children, and Families Study and from the Family Life Project.
PRI researchers are uniquely well positioned to examine the effect of rural versus urban contexts on various social issues. These projects include Community Context of Rural and Urban Child Neglect, P.I. Dr. David Johnson (Sociology, Human Development and Family Studies and Demography), which examines community effects on the incidence, identification and response to child neglect; and Experiences with Work: The Process of Leaving Poverty Behind (Dr. Jill Findeis (Agricultural, Environmental and Regional Economics and Demography), Dr. Leif Jensen (Rural Sociology and Demography), and Natalie Ferry), which is assessing the impact of public-private partnerships in facilitating welfare-to-work transitions.
Dr. Diane McLaughlin (Rural Sociology and Demography) is examining changes in income inequality at the county level, in a two-year USDA-sponsored project, Changing Income Inequality in a Period of Economic Expansion, 1990 to 2000. Using 2000 Census data, the project is documenting whether the factors that affected change in household income inequality across counties from 1980 to 1990 (industrial restructuring, changes in family structure, and changes in labor supply) had the same influence during the expansionary economy of the 1990's. The emphasis is on determining how these processes differ in nonmetropolitan and metropolitan areas.
As spatial analysis becomes increasingly integral to demographic research, training in GIS becomes crucial. In July, 2004 Matthews led a three-day workshop at the University of Cape Town to encourage tobacco researchers to integrate spatial analysis into their work. Funded by NIH's Fogarty International Center (P.I. Dr. Gary King, Biobehavorial Health), the workshop covered geospatial data resources, concepts, and spatial analytical methods. In recognition of the need to educate the next generation of demographers, Matthews was recently awarded a two-year NICHD grant to conduct training in GIS. Under the program, a collaboration with the Center for Spatially Integrated Social Science, young population scientists, primarily pre-doctoral students in demography, will receive standardized, intensive training through a series of workshops, and during the lifetime of the grant materials will be developed for web-based instruction.
In both research and training, PRI continues to intensify its contribution to the national effort to understand the interplay between context and individual and family outcomes, and to enhance the capacity of tomorrow's researchers to incorporate the theory, tools and techniques of spatial analysis. More information about the projects noted above is provided in this issue of PRInformation.
Leif I. Jensen
Director
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