Events

On March 2-3, 2022, the National Institute on Aging’s Division of Behavioral and Social Research will convene a workshop with subject matter experts to discuss gaps, opportunities, and strategies for adapting individual behavior change interventions to leverage social network dynamics. The workshop will focus on how social network interventions can be leveraged to promote healthy aging, slowing of cognitive decline and prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementias (AD/ADRD), and improved care for persons living with AD/ADRD and their care partners. March 4 will be a closed session for workshop speakers and NIH staff.

DUPRI will be hosting an Introduction to R virtual workshop. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) will introduce you to the R programming language for statistical computing. The class is suitable for beginners who have never used R and is geared toward users of Stata/SAS/SPSS. To attend this event, you must RSVP to laura.satterfield@duke.edu no later than Monday, February 14.

The Department of Medicine announces that Tyson Brown, PhD, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director of the Center on Health & Society, Duke Social Science Research Institute and Inaugural Duke Presidential Fellow (2021-2022) will be the featured speaker at the annual Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Grand Rounds. His presentation is: “Toward Racial Health Equity: Critical Population Health Perspectives" and will be held on Friday, January 14, 2022, at 12:00 pm via Zoom.

DUPRI will be hosting a workshop, Multilevel Modeling in R, on December 3. This 4-hour training will cover the basics of running multilevel models in R, including specification and syntax, interpretation and displaying of results, and model checking and comparison. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

DUPRI will be hosting a workshop, Generalized Linear Models in R, on November 19. This 4-hour training will cover the basics of running GLMs in R, including specification and syntax, interpretation and displaying of results, and model checking. We will examine binary, count, and categorical models. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

Asian American youth are outperforming all other race groups in the United States, including whites, on measures of academic achievement. What does this portend for the process of ethnic assimilation? In this talk I present findings from a study of a well-off suburban community with a large and growing Asian American population. Parents mobilize their resources to bolster their children's achievements in both academics and extracurricular activities, with Asian parents tending to prioritize academics and white parents tending to prioritize extracurriculars, especially sports. I show how tensions over the 'right' way to parent develop when Asian American youth catapult ahead of their white peers academically. That is, rather than whites and Asians assimilating, either by Asians adopting dominant 'white' parenting practices or whites adopting the strategies of Asians, parents engaged in moral boundary making to defend their parenting, despite well-known stereotypes about Asian parents being too demanding and white children being outsmarted by their Asian American peers. Ultimately, both white and Asian families alike benefit from the class segregation that keeps working class and poor families out of their town altogether, through policies designed to maintain residential segregation, and more.

Springboard To Opportunities launched The Magnolia Mother’s Trust in 2018, creating an initiative that provides $1,000 cash on a monthly basis to low-income Black mothers in Jackson, Mississippi—no strings attached—for one year. Now in its third cohort, the Magnolia Mother’s Trust program has supported more than 200 families. While there had been several initiatives for a guaranteed income worldwide, this was the first that specifically targeted extremely low-income families headed by Black women living in affordable housing in the United States. Preliminary findings show significant increases in participants’ ability to pay all bills on time without support, budget more money for food and household costs, save money for an emergency, and purchase health insurance for their family. Since its founding in 2017, the Economic Security Project (ESP) has been at the forefront of the national conversation around guaranteed income. ESP’s support helped launch the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration, the first ever mayor-led pilot in the nation that provided 125 Stockton residents with $500 monthly payments for two years. This pilot laid the foundation for the creation of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income and similar guaranteed income initiatives in cities across the country. ESP has also fought for meaningful cash programs in the policy arena through its work advocating for expansion and modernization of the Earned Income Tax Credit, recurring stimulus checks during COVID-19, and codifying the temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Learn more from Foster and Nyandoro about how findings from their work provide the foundation to make permanent the Biden Administration’s expansion of the Child Tax Credit, and how that could be a stepping stone for a full federal guaranteed income program.

Research has demonstrated a strong link between student characteristics (e.g., gender, social class) and fields of study at the undergraduate level. This research shows that students are often constrained in choosing fields of study, such that they are encouraged to choose fields that are “practical” (in the case of social class) or “feminine” (in the case of gender). But to what extent is stratification in fields of study undergirded by widespread cultural beliefs about what students should study? In this paper, we use data from a large, nationally representative survey experiment (N ~ 5,000) that captures Americans’ beliefs about what students with different backgrounds should study in college. Findings reveal key social cleavages in how Americans think about college on account of students’ gender, social class, and college funding, including disparate beliefs about what higher education is for and should be.

The Graduate School launched the Race and Bias Conversations in fall 2020 to help the Graduate School community better understand the many facets of systemic racism and bias and to keep those issues at the forefront of the community's consciousness as it works toward making Duke a more inclusive and supportive environment. Last year's series included six events featuring graduate students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, exploring topics such as desegregation of higher education in the South; policing and communities; racial economic inequality; and obstacles and opportunities for diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in higher education. Tyson H. Brown, Associate Professor of Sociology, will lead the conversation.

During this talk, Tiffany Green will discuss ongoing research investigating the links between structural racism and the ability to achieve intended births. This research studies the prenatal and early pregnancy period with a novel preconception cohort of users who track menstrual cycles and pregnancies using mobile device applications. In turn, these georeferenced data are linked to area-level information on markers of structural racism in housing: residential segregation and mortgage denial. We demonstrate that achieving intended births takes significantly longer for Black people than for white people and that structural racism appears to lengthen the path to parenthood for Black adults in the U.S.