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Editor:
Tonya Allen
allen@pop.psu.edu
PRInformation
Spring 2009
New External Research Funding
Daily Diary Evaluation of the Health Benefits of a Workplace Intervention
Dr. David Almeida, professor of human development and family studies, Dr. Ann C. Crouter, dean, College of Health and Human Development, Dr. Laura Klein, associate professor of biobehavioral health, and Dr. Susan M. McHale, professor of human development and family studies, and director, Social Science Research Institute and Children, Youth and Families Consortium, represent Penn State in a multisite collaboration known as the Work, Family, Health Network (WFHN). The Network is comprised of six collaborating centers: University of Minnesota, Portland State/Michigan State, Harvard, RTI, Kaiser Permanente, and Penn State. In total, the WFHN was awarded $30 million dollars from NICHD for the next five years to assess the effects of a workplace intervention designed to reduce work-family conflict and thereby improve the health and well-being of employees, their families, and the workplace. The purpose of Penn State's diary component is to study a subsample of employees and their children in more depth to test whether the effects of the intervention spill over to improve employees' daily family processes and health and cross over to improve daily family processes and health in children.
Explaining the Education Effect and the Demography of Risk: Comparing Unschooled and Schooled on Everyday Reasoning and Decision-Making Skills about Health Behavior
Dr. David Baker, professor of education and sociology, and Dr. Paul Eslinger, Penn State College of Medicine, received funding from the National Science Foundation for two years for a multidisciplinary project combining cognitive science and the psychology of decision-making with cross-cultural sociology of education to test how formal schooling influences reasoning and decision-making skills for navigating everyday health risk. While most demographers and health researchers acknowledge the persistent and significant association between formal schooling and positive health outcomes, why education exerts this influence is not understood. The investigators hypothesize that schooling, through the teaching of subjects like mathematics, enhances reasoning and thus improves risk assessment and decision-making skills that schooled individuals bring to everyday health risk.
Friendship Networks and Emergence of Substance Use
Dr. D. Wayne Osgood, professor of crime, law and justice and sociology, and Dr. Mark Feinberg, senior research associate, Prevention Research Center, received funding from NIDA for four years for a project intended to advance knowledge about the role of peer influence in substance use and other problem behaviors through an extensive longitudinal study of adolescent peer networks from 6th through 9th grades, the primary period of emergence for substance use. These data are being collected in an ongoing, large-scale prevention trial involving 28 communities in two states (the PROSPER project). The datasets of this study include sociometric nominations and a variety of self-report measures for all individual students in two grade cohorts at 28 schools, measures for the families of a representative subsample of those students, and measures of school and community-level characteristics.
Immigration and Metropolitan Residential Segregation
Dr. John Iceland, professor of sociology and demography, received funding from NICHD to document patterns of residential segregation using census data. It is commonly thought that differences in residential patterns across racial and ethnic groups reflect social divisions and distance. Very high levels of black-white segregation, for example, illustrate deep, historically-rooted racial fissures in the United States. Moderate declines in black-white segregation in recent decades likely indicate some change in racial attitudes and stronger enforcement of antidiscrimination laws. In contrast, Asians and Hispanics have experienced no change or small increases in residential segregation in recent decades. It is thought that high levels of immigration may be affecting patterns of segregation for Asians and Hispanics, as new immigrants often settle in ethnic enclaves even as longer-term residents disperse into outlying areas. However, there has been no direct test of this proposition, in part due to data constraints. This project will use restricted data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses to document patterns of residential segregation among native- and foreign-born people of various racial and ethnic groups, and examine the interplay between race and nativity in producing observed patterns. In doing so, this study aims to shed light on the aptness of the spatial assimilation model in explaining residential patterns of groups composed of many immigrants, as opposed to models that stress the overarching role of race and racial conflict in determining where people live.
The Residential Patterns of Mixed-Native Households and the Racial Identity of Hispanic Immigrants
Dr. John Iceland, professor of sociology and demography, received funding from the US Census Bureau and SABRE Systems, Inc., for a one-year project comprising two main components. First, the project examines the residential patterns of mixed-nativity households using Census 2000 data to discern whether such households are more likely to share neighborhoods with the native-born population than households with foreign-born members only, as well as whether households that are both mixed-nativity and mixed-race/ethnicity have particularly low levels of segregation from others, and how the particular ethnic combination of the spouses affects residential patterns. The second component of the project focuses on the racial identity of Hispanic immigrants, and how this identity varies by length of time in the US and country of origin, with the goal of helping the Census Bureau collect better data on race and Hispanic origin in future surveys.
Volunteer Service as a Developmental Opportunity
Dr. Constance Flanagan, professor of agricultural and extension education, Dr. Leslie Gallay, research assistant, and Dr. Nicole Webster, associate professor of agricultural and extension education, received funding from the Corporation for National and Community Service for a three year project to undertake secondary analyses of Serving Country and Community: A Longitudinal Study of Service in AmeriCorps, with particular attention to the differential motivations, opportunities, and outcomes of voluntary service programs for youth from disadvantaged as compared to those from advantaged backgrounds. Intense service programs in young adulthood are conceived as a new model for the social incorporation of younger generations into the body politic.
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