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Research Programs
Virginia L. Parks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will study grassroots community resistance to ?big box? retail stores in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Parks and Warren argue that local conflicts over Wal-Mart and its high profile as a low-wage employer expose new cleavages in contemporary urban politics and obstacles to addressing urban inequality, including widening class divides within minority communities and increasing racial divides within working-class communities. In a project that uniquely combines urban politics and urban geography, Parks and Warren will compare campaigns in these three cities by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, public opinion polls, interviews, and descriptive statistics.
Shelly J. Lundberg, Castor Professor of Economics at the University of Washington, will complete a non-technical book on the economics of family behavior that applies economic reasoning to changing patterns in fertility, marriage, gender roles, and domestic life in modern industrial societies. Lundberg will address a variety of issues such as class divergence in family patterns and the converging economic lives of men and women from an economic perspective.
Samuel L. Popkin, Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego, will complete a book on the history of presidential campaign strategy and decision-making. Popkin will trace the history of critical campaign decisions from 1948 onwards. He has completed archival research for the book and has interviewed strategists and pollsters from all campaigns since 1960. Popkin will now analyze recurring patterns, questions, and challenges in campaign decision-making and will demonstrate links between congressional agendas and the fortunes of presidential campaigns. The book will also explore how new forms of media ? cable, internet, bloggers, etc. ? are changing voters? exposure to information and are also transforming power structures within political parties.
William T. Dickens, Professor, Northeastern University, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, James R. Flynn, Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, will form a working group to develop a multi-level model of intelligence that explains the role of genes and physiology along with the role of environment in making individuals intellectually able.. The group will use this new model to examine the historical improvement of IQ scores over the last 60 years, the transient affects of early education programs for disadvantaged youth, and the lower heritability of IQ among low socio-economic families. The group hypothesizes that while IQ is highly heritable, the environment also has massive effects. Genetic change from one generation to the next cannot account for the recent increases in IQ. These insights about the role of environment in the development of intelligence should contribute substantially to understanding what works and what doesn?t in early intervention and education, particularly for disadvantaged children.
Ingrid Banks, Associate Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will complete a paper on contemporary manifestations of racial segregation and integration in black beauty salons. Banks? preliminary data suggests that while black salon owners would welcome a more integrated clientele, segregation persists. Yet segregation in such black-owned private businesses is not viewed as a significant social problem ? in stark contrast to how segregation is viewed in public sector settings such as schools and workplaces. Banks will use this case study to explore broad questions pertaining to how cultural and racial barriers are at once contested and accepted in the early twenty-first century.
Krista M. Perreira, Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will synthesize six years of research into a comprehensive book on Latino immigration to the American South. Focusing on what we can learn about ?new? immigrant destinations, Perreira will assess the migration and acculturation experiences of Latino youth and their parents in the South. Perreira will also evaluate how non-Latino youth and their families are responding to the recent influx of Latino immigrants. In addition, Perreira?s book will probe how the social contexts of Latino immigrant reception are influencing the health and academic adaptation of Latino adolescents.
Robert A. Margo, Professor of Economics and African American Studies at Boston University, will complete a book on the historic evolution of racial differences in housing. Margo will analyze long-run trends in home ownership, property values, residential segregation, urban riots, and relevant legal and policy issues. Margo suggests that contemporary discourse on housing disparities lacks a crucial historical perspective, and that these trends defy one simple explanation such as government policy or the state of mortgage markets, and are instead the result of the complex array of factors enumerated above.
Katherine V. W. Stone, Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law, will undertake a comparative study of the changing nature of work and its impact on labor and employment regulatory systems in several developed nations. In recent years there has been a major shift away from stable long-term relationships between employees and firms towards more ?flexible? arrangements, often involving temporary workers and independent contractors. Stone posits that this dismantling of employee protections, combined with significant revisions to labor laws, will reshape labor relations for decades to come. Her work will focus on how countries have responded to similar pressures in different ways, and what positive approaches nations can take to combine flexibility with security.
Maya Bar-Hillel, Professor (retired), The Center for the Study of Rationality at The Hebrew University, Jerusalem, will write a book about rationality paradoxes and how they have influenced the development of decision theory. This will be the first comprehensive anthology of rationality paradoxes and will be accessible to a well-educated lay audience. Bar-Hillel plans to present a range of paradoxes and discuss how they?ve prompted influential conceptual developments in philosophy, economics, statistics, and psychology. The book will focus on the important role that these paradoxes have played in the history of thought about decision theory, game theory, and probability theory.
Robert H. Bates, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government at Harvard University, will write a book on the politics and economics of development in Africa during the second half of the twentieth century. Bates will draw on research he has conducted in 26 African countries, and will anchor his findings in both political and economic theory. The book will center on the idea of development as structural change ? the movement from an agrarian to industrial economy, as well as the shift from a society based on families and villages to one based upon towns and cities. Bates argues that the state plays a central role in this process.
Jonathan B. Oberlander, Associate Professor, Department of Social Medicine and Department of Health Policy and Administration at the School of Public Health, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, will use Oregon as a case study of state-led health reform, and consider the implications of his findings for health policy at the national level. Oberlander intends to focus on what Oregon can teach us about rationing medical care and controlling costs, as well as how political barriers impede progress. He suggests that Oregon?s attempts at providing universal coverage reveal a much broader story about health reform in America today.
Donna R. Gabaccia, Professor of History at the University of Minnesota, will write a book about how and why the U.S. came to consider itself ?a nation of immigrants.? Interestingly, other countries marked by similar demographic histories of immigration ? such as Argentina, Germany, France, and South Africa ? do not label themselves in this way. Gabaccia will trace this key metaphor of U.S. nation-building in comparative historical perspective. The book will inject new insights into the heated contemporary debate over immigration, which is often misleadingly characterized by a sense that the U.S. is exceptional as a nation of immigrants.
Hirokazu Yoshikawa, Professor of Education at the Graduate School of Education, Harvard University, will write a book about child development in low-income immigrant families. Yoshikawa will employ three years of survey, observational, and qualitative data from a birth cohort drawn from three immigrant groups as well as one native-born group to address several related questions. These topics include an understanding of how immigrant parents with restricted access to benefits make ends meet, as well as a consideration of how immigration-related factors, economic resources, and parenting processes shape the early learning and development of children in immigrant families.
Thomas A. DiPrete, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University, will write a book that seeks to establish why the gender gap in educational performance is larger for black students than for white students. Recent U.S. statistics reveal a gender gap favoring females in high school completion, college entry, and college completion ? and this gap is particularly large and growing among black students. DiPrete?s book will explore how differences in family structure, socio-economic status, and resource allocation in schools might contribute to this striking trend.
Albert H. Yoon, Professor of Law at the University of Toronto, will write a series of articles illuminating the relationship between legal representation and social inequality in the United States and Canada. Yoon hypothesizes that vast disparities in the quality of legal representation impose not only private costs on individual litigants, but also considerable costs on society as a whole, exacerbating and even creating social inequality along a number of dimensions. Yoon will combine qualitative and quantitative data, including extensive interviews with judges and lawyers. This data will allow social scientists to think structurally and institutionally about how to reduce disparities in both the civil and criminal context, and to consider how such measures will address broader areas of social inequality.
Harvey Molotch, Professor of Sociology at New York University, will complete a project exploring how New York City subway workers sense and respond to threat, and the corresponding implications for sociological questions of surveillance. Though their work is not formally related to security, these employees are the ?first responders? to a large number of social safety issues. Drawing on extensive interviews and field observations, Molotch will examine how workers handle the conflicting pressures of keeping themselves safe, adhering to formal regulations, and coming up with creative ad hoc solutions to the problems they encounter on a daily basis.
Virginia L. Parks, Assistant Professor, School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago, and Dorian T. Warren, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Columbia University, will study grassroots community resistance to ?big box? retail stores in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Parks and Warren argue that local conflicts over Wal-Mart and its high profile as a low-wage employer expose new cleavages in contemporary urban politics and obstacles to addressing urban inequality, including widening class divides within minority communities and increasing racial divides within working-class communities. In a project that uniquely combines urban politics and urban geography, Parks and Warren will compare campaigns in these three cities by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, public opinion polls, interviews, and descriptive statistics.
William T. Dickens, Professor, Northeastern University, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, James R. Flynn, Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, will form a working group to develop a multi-level model of intelligence that explains the role of genes and physiology along with the role of environment in making individuals intellectually able.. The group will use this new model to examine the historical improvement of IQ scores over the last 60 years, the transient affects of early education programs for disadvantaged youth, and the lower heritability of IQ among low socio-economic families. The group hypothesizes that while IQ is highly heritable, the environment also has massive effects. Genetic change from one generation to the next cannot account for the recent increases in IQ. These insights about the role of environment in the development of intelligence should contribute substantially to understanding what works and what doesn?t in early intervention and education, particularly for disadvantaged children.
William T. Dickens, Professor, Northeastern University, and Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, James R. Flynn, Emeritus Professor at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Richard E. Nisbett, Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor at the University of Michigan, will form a working group to develop a multi-level model of intelligence that explains the role of genes and physiology along with the role of environment in making individuals intellectually able.. The group will use this new model to examine the historical improvement of IQ scores over the last 60 years, the transient affects of early education programs for disadvantaged youth, and the lower heritability of IQ among low socio-economic families. The group hypothesizes that while IQ is highly heritable, the environment also has massive effects. Genetic change from one generation to the next cannot account for the recent increases in IQ. These insights about the role of environment in the development of intelligence should contribute substantially to understanding what works and what doesn?t in early intervention and education, particularly for disadvantaged children.
Phillip Atiba Goff, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, will complete a project on racial bias and diversity training in police departments. The Denver Department of Police has granted Goff full access to its force and use of force complaint records. Goff hypothesizes that several under-documented psychological factors help explain the real story behind police bias. For example, male officers find their masculinity more threatened by black men than white men, and, ironically, officers who are most concerned with being perceived as prejudiced are also the most likely to engage in biased policing.