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Editor:
Tonya Allen
allen@pop.psu.edu
PRInformation
Spring 2009
Articles of Interest
2009 National Symposium on Family Issues
The 17th annual National Symposium on Family Issues, entitled "Biosocial Research Contributions to Understanding Family Processes and Problems," will be held October 8-9, 2009. Please see the National Symposium on Family Issues web site for schedule and registration information.
2008 De Jong Lecture in Social Demography
The third annual De Jong Lecture, entitled "Was Welfare Reform a Success? How Minority Families are Faring," was held October 3, 2008. Dr. Andrew J. Cherlin (Johns Hopkins University) reported on results from the "Three-City Study," a study of over 400 low-income families in Boston, Chicago, and San Antonio, most of them African-American or Hispanic, to assess their well-being in the post-welfare-reform era. At the start of the study in 1999, the families were receiving welfare; but all of them had left the welfare program by the end of the study in 2005. Dr. Cherlin traced their economic pathways during the six-year period and showed the difference that employment, race, and ethnicity made in their strategies to respond to welfare reform. Discussants were Dr. Lisa Gennetian of the Brookings Institute and Dr. Paul Amato, Arnold S. and Bette G. Hoffman Professor of Family Sociology and Demography.
Public Release of First Wave of National Survey of Fertility Barriers (NSFB)
April 1, 2009 marked the first public release of data from the National Survey of Fertility Barriers (NSFB), a NICHD-funded nationally representative telephone survey conducted between 2004 and 2007 which includes completed interviews with 4,712 women age 25 to 45 and 936 of their partners. A collaborative effort of researchers at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Penn State, Alfred University, the University of Connecticut, and The University of Nebraska Medical Center, the study utilized data collected by Penn State's Survey Research Center and UNL's Bureau of Sociological Research. Following the retirement of Dr. Lynn K. White (UNL), Principal Investigator for the first two years of the project, Dr. David R. Johnson, professor of sociology, human development and family studies and demography, assumed the PI role.
The survey focuses on biomedical fertility barriers, including subfecundity, repeated miscarriages, health conditions that preclude childbearing, and sterilization regret. In addition, investigators consider infertility due to absence of a male partner, to allow differentiation between the consequences of biomedical infertility and circumstantial infertility. A second major focus of the study is on helpseeking for fertility impairment, investigating why some women seek medical and other types of aid for this issue and others do not.
The data being released constitute the first wave of a prospective study. Investigators are currently in the field re-interviewing respondents three years following their initial interview. Field work on this second wave is expected to be completed at the end of 2009. The data, descriptions of the study methodology, copies of the survey interview schedules, and codebooks are available on the PRI Website.
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