Seminar Series

Kevin Lewis discusses how Big data is increasingly used to answer longstanding social scientific questions and how "digital footprints" of human interaction often provide unusually nuanced information on an unprecedented scale that often obscures as much as it illuminates. Lewis draws on the example of online dating to illustrate a few basic fallacies in how big data are often framed for social science research, and suggests some alternative (and potentially more constructive) paths moving forward.

Christina Kamis looks at the long-term consquences of parental mental health, specifically how childhood stressors influence adult mental health and well-being. Jessie West discusses the impact of disability on quality of life, examining disability influence over different stages of the life course.

The Hidden Information in Names

Colter Mitchell discusses his recent work on the biosocial correlates of social disadvantage and child development. In particular, Mitchell reviews the effects of cumulative disadvantage as well as how the timing of disadvantage exposure influences child development.

Paige Harden discusses her research on childhood executive functions (EFs) in the Texas Twin Project, an ongoing study of a child and adolescent twins and multiples in central Texas. EFs are supervisory cognitive processes that modulate goal-directed cognitive operations and include inhibition, switching, updating, and working memory abilities. She also looks at her new philosophical work on the ethical and political implications of sociogenomic research linking genetic differences between people to phenotypes, such as EFs, that are relevant for social inequality. In particular, she considers how genotypes and genetically-influenced phenotypes can be understood within the framework of the philosophy of luck, and discusses how the concept of "genetic luck" can be useful for understanding the compatibility of sociogenomic research with a broad spectrum of political values and ideologies.

Robert Moffitt discusses how he used data from 1996 through 2008 to analyze the effects of 1990s welfare reforms on family structure categories that incorporate the biological status of the male, finding that most policies did not affect family structure, but that some work-related reforms increased single parenthood and decreased marriage to biological fathers. He posits that these effects of work-related welfare policies on family structure stem from their effects on increased labor force participation and earnings of single mothers combined with factors special to biological fathers, including a decline in their employment and wages.

Duke University's Emma Zang discusses the effect of intra-household property rights on women's well-being. She examines the gendered consequences of the 2011 Chinese divorce reform, a policy that transferred ownership to the registered buyer—most often the husband—following a divorce. She looks at how the elimination of property rights led to a decrease in the women’s well-being, particularly those with low social status.

As the global population ages, older decision makers will be required to take greater responsibility for their own physical, psychological and financial well-being. Duke University's Gregory Samanez-Larkin discusses the effects of ageing on decision making and associated neural circuits. He also examines how “affect-integration-motivation (AIM)” framework helps clarify how motivational circuits support decision making, and reviews recent research that sheds light on whether and how ageing influences these circuits.

Gastric cancer is the second deadliest cancer in the world, and incidence and mortality rates are highest in East Asia. Duke’s Meira Epplein discusses how she utilized new H. pylori multiplex serology to increase numbers of sero-positive results to six H. pylori proteins offered a possible new biomarker panel for gastric cancer risk in among urban men living in Shanghai, China.