Director's Welcome

August 2009

Welcome to the Maryland Population Research Center !

I am pleased to announce that Joan Kahn, Associate Professor of Sociology, has been named Associate Director of MPRC. Dr. Kahn received her PhD in Sociology from the University of Michigan in 1985. She joined the University of Maryland in 1987 after spending two years as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She has been affiliated with MPRC and its predecessor, the Center on Population, Gender and Social Inequality, since they each were formed, in 2002 and 1988, respectively.

Kahn's main areas of interest are in the fields of social demography, aging and the life course, and work-family dynamics. Much of her earlier work examined fertility behavior in the United States, especially among teenagers and immigrants. More recently, her work has focused on health disparities, caregiving, and the long-term impact of work and family careers on well-being at older ages.

Joan will take responsibility for the training activities in MPRC, including the Demography Certificate and the Interdisciplinary Training Program in Population Studies (with Judy Hellerstein, Economics). Joan will be working with Judith Freidenberg to lead the Working Group on Immigration. She will also lead efforts to develop emphases on health and aging in the Center. Please contact her directly if you have interests in these areas.

New Associates

In the spring of 2009 Mady Segal, Professor, Department of Sociology, BSOS, joined the Center. Mady is Associate Director of the Center for Research on Military Organization. Her recent research has focused on military personnel issues, with particular attention to military women, military families, and race / ethnicity in the military. Along with David Segal, Mady is a pioneer in research on military families in the U.S. A full biography is available in her listing in our MPRC People section.

Another new faculty associate is Jinhee Kim, Associate Professor, Department of Family Science, and Family Finance Specialist with Maryland Cooperative Extension. Her research focuses on family consumption and financial education. A recent paper focuses on financial socialization of children using new data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. For more information go to her entry in MPRC People.

As a result of adding 20 new Faculty Associates in 2008-09, the MPRC roster has grown to include 63 Faculty Associates, 11 Faculty Affiliates, and 42 Student Research Affiliates drawn from the Departments of Sociology, Criminology, Economics, Anthropology, African American Studies, Women’s Studies, Family Science, Epidemiology and Biostatistics, the Joint Program in Survey Methodology, School of Public Policy, Human Development, Public and Community Health, Information Studies, Agriculture and Resource Economics, and Urban Studies and Planning.

Research

MPRC Faculty Associates submitted 45 investigator-initiated research proposals totaling almost $19 million during calendar year 2008, and about $1.8 million in new funding was procured on these proposals.

Two major research grants led by MPRC faculty were funded in 2009:

• Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman have been awarded a new grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) for a project entitled, "Transition to Adulthood in India." Desai and Vanneman, in collaboration with the National Council of Applied Economic Research in New Delhi, completed a multi-sectoral survey of 40,000 households across India that provides a rich resource for research on the relationship between poverty, gender inequality and public policy, on the one hand, and human development on the other. The researchers will develop a youth supplement to the India Human Development Survey (IHDS-Y) focusing on a nationally representative sample of about 17,000 adolescents aged 14-18 across India. The substantive innovation of this research comes from a focus on adolescent life transitions during which families and communities must balance two competing and sometimes conflicting demands: providing adolescents with sufficient personal skills to cope with potentially risky situations while at the same time minimizing the likelihood that they are exposed to these risks.
• David Segal has been awarded a major grant by the U.S. Army Research Institute entitled, “Social Trends and Social Change in the United States: Impact on Army manpower, personnel and operations.” The proposed research, which builds upon work Segal has done under contract to the Army Research Institute during the past 13 years, will examine quantitative and textual data on social trends and social changes in America and their impact on the Army. The data, interpreted in the context of sociological theory, will reflect changes in the demographics of the American population, labor force, and armed forces.

MPRC has actively promoted research on Crime and Population and on Time Use through sponsorship of workshops and conferences for researchers.

The Crime and Population Dynamics Workshop was held June 1-2, 2009 at the Maritime Conference Center near the Baltimore / Washington airport again this year. Seventy-four faculty and students from across the U.S. participated in this conference, which was cosponsored by MPRC and the University of Pennsylvania Population Center.

A third American Time Use Research Conference attended by more than 90 faculty and students was held on the University of Maryland campus on June 25-26 2009, to continue to provide a venue for scholarly work on aspects of time. Cosponsored by the Joint Program on Survey Methodology (as well as the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Economic Research Service, and the Minnesota Population Center), it followed a workshop to train new researchers on analysis of time use data. This highly successful conference highlighted new U.S. work in family and household sociology, demography, economics, and psychology that has been developing as a result of the availability of data on time use from the American Time Use Study and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement.

Coming Events

We have some exciting activities planned this coming academic year, 2009-10.

We plan to start our Mentored Grant Workshop again in September. This workshop met regularly last year and led to several new grant proposals. Please send me an e-mail if you are interested in joining our group. We will set dates once I find out participant schedules. If you are interested in submitting a grant proposal, please submit the form available on our web site to let Barbara Hillinger, Center Administrator, know about your plans with plenty of lead time.

Working groups in the areas of Health; Immigration; and Gender, Work, and Family will again meet throughout the year. Meetings of the working group on Immigration are scheduled for September 17, October 22, November 19, all from 12 to 2 pm in the MPRC conference room. The first organizational meeting for the Gender, Work, and Family working group will be held Thursday Sept 24 at 12 noon in the MPRC conference room.

On October 17, 2008 we hosted a planning meeting for a workshop on Fathers to be held in spring of 2010. Themes focusing on employment, family, and health will form the basis for a two-day workshop in the Washington area to discuss findings from research and to develop an agenda for future research and public policy issues. Jeff Evans at NICHD is the lead on this project, which also involves Linda Mellgren, Department of Health and Human Services, and Vivian Gadsden, National Center on Fathers and Families at the University of Pennsylvania. MPRC will cosponsor this workshop along with the National Center for Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University and NICHD.

This fall we will have a set of seminars by leading demographers who are visiting campus from across the U.S. and abroad, starting with John Hisnanick of the U.S. Census Bureau and Sonalde Desai and Reeve Vanneman of the Department of Sociology at Maryland.

We are also planning a number of occasional methodological seminars suited especially for graduate students and junior faculty. Last year Kevin Roy (Family Science) gave a seminar on qualitative research and Yeats Ye (MPRC) gave a workshop on multiple imputation using SAS. Please contact me if you have ideas for methodological seminars.

Organization

The Center has four primary goals, to:

• Draw together leading scholars from diverse disciplines to support, produce, and promote interdisciplinary population-related research of the highest scientific merit.
• Encourage scholars from allied fields to engage in population-related research through research support, training, and mentoring.
• Train new population scholars by providing a rich intellectual environment for cross-disciplinary training of graduate students from a number of academic departments.
• Capitalize on our proximity to Washington DC to develop strong ties with the Federal statistical and policy community, thus enabling scholars to access under-utilized or restricted-use government data in their research.

MPRC’s research focuses on four broad areas:

1. gender, work, and family – including marriage, parenting and intergenerational relationships;
2. social and economic inequality;
3. health processes and aging; and
4. data and methods for population research.

Our executive committee this year consists of the following individuals (elections will be held to fill three positions) :

Our Center is funded by an infrastructure grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Center funding is designed to support grant recipients in their research. Please see me if you have suggestions for activities that can better help you submit a successful grant application or that can support funded research. You can reach me by e-mail at any time.