The Russell Sage Foundation is saddened to report the passing of Suzanne M. Bianchi, a former Visiting Scholar and co-author of several RSF books. Bianchi, who held faculty positions in sociology at the University of Maryland and UCLA, rose to prominence for her groundbreaking research on the changing dynamics of late-20th-century American families, and in particular, for her demographic surveys on “time use”—or analyses of where, how, and with whom people spend their time. Her influential findings included the discovery that working mothers in the 1990s spent as much time with their children as stay-at-home mothers of the 1960s, averaging a weekly twelve hours of hands-on, close-contact time.
At the Russell Sage Foundation, Bianchi was a member of the working group Care Work in the United States and additionally served on the advisory committee of the U.S. 2010 program. A Visiting Scholar at the Foundation during the 2010-2011 academic year, she worked in collaboration with Judith Seltzer and Joseph Holtz to assess three primary pathways through which families transmit advantage or disadvantage to subsequent generations: genes and biology, economic resources and skills, and social ties and family obligations.
Bianchi was also the co-author of several books published by the Foundation, including American Women in Transition, Changing Rhythms of American Family Life, and Balancing Act: Motherhood, Marriage, and Employment Among American Women.
The Foundation’s U.S. 2010 project has published a new report, “Residential Segregation by Income, 1970-2009,” by Kendra Bischoff and Sean F. Reardon. The paper describes the patterns and trends in family income segregation over the last 40 years. The main findings include:
- Family income segregation grew in every decade from 1970-2009. The proportion in poor or affluent neighborhoods increased by 4.1 percentage points in the 1970s, by 4.6 percentage points in the 1980; by 4.2 percentage points in the 1990s, and by 5.1 percentage points from 2000-2009. The rate of growth in segregation in the 2000s was faster than in any of the three prior decades.
- Segregation by income among black families was lower than among white families in 1970, but grew four times as much between 1970 and 2009. By 2009, income segregation among black families was 65 percent greater than among white families.
- During the last four decades, the isolation of the rich has been consistently greater than the isolation of the poor. Although much of the scholarly and policy discussion about the effect of segregation and neighborhood conditions focuses on the isolation of poor families in neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage, it is perhaps equally important to consider the implications of the substantial, and growing, isolation of high-income families.
This feature is part of a new RSF blog series, Work in Progress, which will highlight some of the ongoing research of our current class of Visiting Scholars.
In this first installment, we focus on the work of Visiting Scholar Kathleen Vohs, Professor of Marketing and Land 'O Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing at the University of Minnesota. In collaboration with Professor Roy Baumeister, Vohs will spend the 2013-2014 academic year in residence at the Russell Sage Foundation investigating the self-sufficiency theory of money, or the idea that money is a source of independence for people that has both negative and positive effects on their behavior. How do people behave after they’ve been exposed to money?
The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) released by the U.S. Census Bureau today (November 6, 2013) shows that the poverty rate for all persons was 16.0 percent in 2012, virtually the same as in 2011, 16.1 percent. A key finding in today’s Census release is that millions of people would have been poor in 2012 in the absence of our safety net programs. For example, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps) raised about 5 million people above the poverty line; the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and other refundable tax credits raised more than 9 million people above the poverty line.
The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) is important because, unlike the Official Poverty Measure (OPM) which counts only money income (e.g., wages and cash transfers from the government), the SPM also includes non-cash government benefits such as SNAP, the school lunch program, housing subsidies and the EITC. These noncash benefits have grown more rapidly than cash benefits in recent decades.
The Russell Sage Foundation congratulates Greg J. Duncan, Distinguished Professor at the UC Irvine School of Education, who recently won the 2013 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Prize for his extensive and influential research on the long-term effects of poverty on child development. For over 25 years, Duncan and his colleagues followed a sample of American families and their children to measure the correlations between poverty in early life and life circumstances as adults. The resulting data showed that children from poor families are less likely to finish school and go on to work, and that they earn less than their peers from higher income families. Duncan and his colleagues additionally found that childhood poverty during the first five years of children’s lives has a greater impact on their later lives.
A former RSF Visiting Scholar (2004-2005), Duncan is also the co-author or co-editor of several RSF books exploring the impact of poverty on children, including Consequences of Growing Up Poor, Higher Ground: New Hope for the Working Poor and their Children, Neighborhood Poverty Volume One and Volume Two, and For Better and For Worse: Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Children and Families. With Richard J. Murnane, Duncan most recently co-edited Whither Opportunity?: Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life Chances, which examines the corrosive effects of unequal family resources, disadvantaged neighborhoods, insecure labor markets, and worsening school conditions on children’s K-12 education.