News

Recently installed as the 140th president of the American Historical Association (AHA), Duke historian and DUPRI scholar Thavolia Glymph says she came to her deep interest in the field when she was a youngster. In an interview with the AHA newsmagazine, Glymph shares thoughts on her influences, the power of historical research and the challenges of writing about people who left behind little documentation.

An applied economist at Sanford and DUPRI, Lisa Gennetian has new ideas about how government can reduce child poverty. She argues that to help families, we need updated policies that build on employment, two-parent households and safety nets.

DUPRI Scholar Jennifer Lansford, along with Genevieve Hunter at DGHI, has received funding from the HHS Office for Population Affairs for a Grant titled "Advancing Equity in Adolescent Health through Evidence-Based Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs and Services." This project expands reach, builds capacity, and scales up evidence-based programs offering positive youth development and sexuality education to address health disparities in the most vulnerable areas across rural Eastern North Carolina. The project partners with interdisciplinary professionals to connect with youth most in need within community-based organizations, juvenile justice, foster care, and supportive school settings. The project uses a mixed methods approach to monitor and evaluate implementation, scale-up, and sustainability from the perspective of different key stakeholders, including adolescents, parents and guardians, youth service providers, and agency leaders. This grant aims to reduce teen pregnancy and improve adolescent health in high-risk rural communities in Eastern North Carolina by strengthening operational and programmatic capacity for evidence-based programs that focus on positive youth development, pregnancy prevention, healthy relationships, and mental health.

DUPRI has joined the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAHPS) as an institutional member.

Race and ethnicity are notoriously difficult to measure in the U.S., and health scholars have shown over the last two decades that the common, large racial/ethnic categories of “Black,” “Asian,” and “Hispanic” mask considerable heterogeneity within groups, often based on country of origin. Recent work by Jen’nan Read (with Scott M. Lynch and Jessie S. West) found that the “White” racial category masks just as much or more heterogeneity in health as these other common categories, in part because recent “white” immigrants from the Middle East and North Africa differ substantially from white immigrants from Europe and native (i.e., 3+ generation) whites in the U.S. As a consequence of this and other studies in recent years by Dr. Read, Dr. Read has been consulting with the Census Bureau in redesigning questions measuring race/ethnicity in upcoming censuses.

DUPRI’s Charlie Nunn went to Madagascar to study its unparalleled natural environment. But it’s the questions about human health that keep him returning.

A recently-published paper in Children and Youth Services Review by a team of authors, including DUPRI's Hedy Lee and Chris Wildeman, examines the geographic and racial/ethnic variation in child welfare system contact. Prior estimates of the cumulative risks of child welfare system contact illustrate the prominence of this system in the lives of children in the United States (U.S.). However, these estimates report national data on a system administered at the state and local levels and are unable to detail potential simultaneous geographic and racial/ethnic variation in the prevalence of these events. Using 2015–2019 data from the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System and Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the authors use synthetic cohort life tables to estimate cumulative state- and race/ethnicity-specific risks by age 18 of experiencing: (1) a child protective services investigation, (2) confirmed maltreatment, (3) foster care placement, and (4) termination of parental rights for children in the U.S.

Three DUPRI Scholars are represented in the 2023 edition of Clarivate's Highly Cited Researchers list: Avshalom Caspi, Jane Costello, Terrie Moffitt. William Copeland, a DUPRI external affiliate who has a secondary appointment at Duke and is an investigator on the Great Smoky Mountains Study, was also named in the list. The scholars are among the over 7,000 authors on the global list. According to Clarivate, highly cited researchers have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple highly cited papers over the last decade. These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field or fields and publication year in the Web of Science.

DUPRI's Lisa Gennetian has published two opinion pieces that explore different aspects of families who struggle with poverty.

On September 22nd, Lisa Gennetian organized a one-day workshop, "Cash Transfers in the U.S.: The Science of Impact," which brought together an interdisciplinary group of scholars specializing in U.S.-based randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate evidence and scalability of the impact of unconditional cash transfer programs. The discussions touched on topics such as the interaction of cash transfers with hardship and stress, the design and implementation of these programs, considerations of external validity and selection into studies, and the future of direct cash support for poverty alleviation in the U.S. The workshop featured early career scholars from the Triangle area, including from Duke University, North Carolina Central University and UNC-Chapel Hill, who presented on healthcare consumption, food insecurity and nutritional intake, housing quality, and family structure. The workshop was funded by a P2C development grant and advances DPRC’s goals by aiming to understand how early life policy interventions influence lifelong health.