IHDSC Seed Funding Fall 2011
IHDSC is pleased to announce that eight IHDSC Faculty Affiliates were selected to receive Seed funding for innovative and interdisciplinary pilot research.
Dr. Elise Cappella & Dr. Ed Seidman
Entitled “School Transitions and Early Adolescent Development: Secondary Data Analysis and Intervention Development”
Drs. Cappella and Seidman will conduct background research needed to understand the impact of the timing and structure of middle grade school transitions on disadvantaged youth. Their findings will inform promising middle grades policies and interventions that may support improved academic, psychosocial, and life-course outcomes. Using ECLS-K data, the research team will articulate the precise questions that the data set will allow them to address and conduct preliminary analyses for a subsequent grant proposal submission to NICHD or the Spencer Foundation.
Dr. Dohoon Lee
Entitled “Temporal Patterns of Parental Influence and Child Educational Attainment”
Dr. Lee will employ data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and its mother-child supplement (CNLSY) to examine how distinct patterns of parental influence (i.e. poverty status and home environment) over time impact child educational attainment. Dr. Lee will use the results of this initial research to prepare an R03 application to NICHD to further investigate temporal patterns of other domains of parental influence, including family structure, maternal employment, and parental mental health, and their impacts on child development.
Dr. Marjorie Rhodes
Entitled “The Role of Generic Language in the Development of Essentialism”
Dr. Rhodes and her co-PI, Dr. Sarah-Jane Leslie (Princeton University) will conduct pilot research on the role of language in the development and stereotyping and prejudice. Their project, which is taking place at Dr. Rhodes’ onsite laboratory at the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, will experimentally test whether parent’s essentialist beliefs causally influence their production of generic language for social groups.
Dr. Pat Sharkey & Dr. Josh Aronson
Entitled “Harnessing the Power of Social Networking Technology to Reduce the Effects of Stereotype Threat”
Drs. Sharkey and Aronson will use online social networking websites to pilot an intervention using targeted advertising available through Facebook as a way to encourage students to visit a webpage and conduct a series of exercises that have been shown to counteract the effects of stereotype threat. Using an experimental design, they will then design a rigorous evaluation of the intervention to identify the effects of the intervention on aggregate student academic outcomes.
Dr. Diana Silver & Dr. James Macinko
Entitled “Assessing State Public Health Laws to Improve Children’s Health and Safety”
Drs. Silver and Macinko will conduct background research to better understand the variation in state policy environments and how divergent state policy environments affect children’s health and safety. Seed funds will be used to obtain and code health law data, pilot test a set of measures of the health policy environment for children and families, and perform preliminary analyses as inputs into an R21 proposal to NIH.
The Institute of Human Development and Social Change represents a dynamic collaboration of New York University's Schools of Arts and Sciences, the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The Institute provides support for NYU faculty to conduct multidisciplinary research on human development and changing social contexts. A central goal is to bridge the longstanding disconnect between research in human development across the lifespan and policies and practices that affect children, youth, adults, and families.
Below, awards are listed by faculty member, NYU unit, grant application title, and amount awarded, followed by a brief description of each investigator's research study.
IHDSC Seed Funding Fall 2010
Aber & Morris (Steinhardt)
Entitled "School Reform and Beyond 0-3: Strategies to Improve the School Readiness of Low-Income Infants and Toddlers"
Aber and Morris will conduct background research necessary to identify the most promising interventions targeted to low-income infants and toddlers and their parents in order to support a R01 application. The birth to three project is part of a larger, multi-disciplinary, multi-university effort to close achievement gaps through a set of integrated, synergistic interventions that span birth through grade five.
Adolph, Tamis-LeMonda, and Karasik (FAS & Steinhardt)
Entitled "Infants in Transition: Effects of Posture and Locomotion in Infants' Actions with Objects and People"
Adolph, Tamis-LeMonda and Karasik propose a short-term longitudinal study that examines multiple measures of infants' interactions following motor transitions in children 5 to 7 months old through 11 to 13 months old in the natural settings of their homes. The study seeks to advance the literature on developmental cascades by examining the interplay between postural and locomotor transitions and changes in specific aspects of infants' object and social engagements.
Morris (Steinhardt)
Entitled "Income Volatility and Child Development"
Morris will work with an inter-disciplinary team to continue her examination of the impact of income volatility on children's academic and behavioral outcomes using three data sets-the Survey of Income and Program Participation, the National Longitudinal study of Youth, and the New Hope evaluation. Specifically, Morris will examine the premise that regularly changing income levels, particularly if unpredictable, may be as or more detrimental to the stress and development of young children than chronically low income.
Wu (FAS)
Entitled "Pre-Marital Sexual Activity and Fertility"
Wu proposes to work with colleagues to develop and estimate a formal behavioral model of the decision by a young woman to initiate sexual activity and her decisions following sexual onset concerning contraception, abortion, and fertility, including how potential decisions might influence future outcomes. Wu's research is motivated in part by the insight that premarital first births typically occur in a demographic "dense" period of the life course characterized not only by transitions in the domains of schooling and work, but also by changes in sexual behavior, romantic relationships, union status, and fertility.
IHDSC Seed Funding Spring 2010
Wiswall (FAS)
Entitled "Household Choices and Child Development"
Wiswall will employ the Panel of Income Dynamics dataset to examine relationships among parental time allocation in wage and non-wage activities, income, household labor choices and child outcomes.
IHDSC Seed Funding Fall 2009
Halkitis (Steinhardt)
Entitled "HIV and Aging"
Halkitis seeks to explore the ways in which individual psychological, developmental and contextual processes impact the life experiences, risk behaviors, life perspectives and journeys of HIV-positive MSM ages 50 and over. IHDSC funding will allow Halkitis to launch a pilot study to explore the individual experiences of these men and the larger public health, economic, and societal implications of this growing population of aging seropositive men.
IHDSC Seed Funding, Fall 2008
Conley (FAS)
Entitled "The Significance of Timing of in Utero Impact of PM and PAH on Child Development: Using 9/11 as a Natural Experiment"
Conley is studying the impact of in utero exposure to airborne toxins on the birth, health, educational, and general health outcomes of elementary-aged children during and after the events of the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center (WTC) tragedy. Conley proposes to use econometric approaches in his analyses of EPA and NYCDOE data when estimating the impact of such toxins on child outcomes.
Wu (FAS)
Entitled "Non-Marital Fertility
Wu's project seeks to better understand the processes underlying first births to young women that occur prior to a first marriage. His work will be undertaken with the recognition that such pregnancies are resolved in different ways, in heterogeneous social contexts.
IHDSC Seed Funding, Fall 2007
Hughes (Steinhardt)
Entitled "Relations Between Ethnicity, Context, and Parenting Processes in Diverse Families: A meeting of the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity"
Hughes, in cooperation with the Study Group on Race, Culture, and Ethnicity, will puruse a pilot and data management work for a large-scale pooled data meta-analytic study that examines cultural and contextual influences on important dimensions of parenting and on relationships between parenting and youth outcomes. The group consists of 12 scholars, representing major U.S. universities and a range of disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, and social work, has been in collaboration for over 10 years examining cultural and contextual influences on child and adolescent development.
IHDSC Seed Funding, Summer 2007
Doucet (Steinhardt)
Entitled "A Critical Analysis of Institutional Discourse about Parent Involvement in a Head Start Program Serving Caribbean Immigrants"
Doucet's application outlines the hypothesis that recently immigrated parents' support of children's development in school contexts may be legitimated by school personnel in some cases, and marginalized by school personnel in other cases.
Ellen & O'Regan (Wagner)
Entitled "Residential Decisions and Neighborhood Economic Transitions in Cities and Suburbs"
Ellen and O'Regan's research questions focused on families' decision-making regarding entry and exits into and out of neighborhoods, using an important new data set (the internal files of the American Housing Survey). Project marked by strong interdisciplinary foci.
Ginsburg & Rapp (FAS)
Entitled "Cultural Innovation: The Changing Social Context of Learning Disabilities"
Ginsburg and Rapp's research questions focused on the heterogeneity of cultural, legal, and neurological standards used by school systems to make important educational decisions for children exhibiting learning disabilities. Reviewers were impressed by the multidisciplinary research team and by the team's hypothesis that the very definitions used to classify children in educational contexts are themselves undergoing rapid transformation, due in part to the actions and advocacy of parents, themselves
O'Connor (Steinhardt)
Entitled "The Effects of Child and Classroom Characteristics on Children's Behavior Problems"
Reviewers responded very favorably to the interdisciplinary nature of her research questions, examining changes in children's developmental trajectories within a framework that considers changing social contexts of classroom quality.
IHDSC Seed Funding, Fall 2006
Way, Yeung, Yoshikawa, Guthrie, Kahana-Kalman, Tamis-LeMonda, Fong, and Chen (Steinhardt & FAS)
Entitled "Human Development in the Changing Social and Economic Contexts of China"
The aim of the project is to examine the ways in which the proximal contexts (e.g., family, peers, school, and parent's work) and distal contexts (e.g., economic reforms; changes in health care, education, child care, and residency permit policies) of development are affecting children's development in China.