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The field of social demography research at the Population Research Center covers a broad range of human activity, divided below into the following five areas of study: 1) Sexual Behavior; 2) Parents, Children, and Work; 3) Youth and Achievement; 4) Children, Welfare, and Inequality; and 5) Demographic Trends/Methodology.
The PRC has an extensive history of research on sexual behavior and its relationship to reproductive and general health. Federally funded opportunities for social scientists to study sexual behavior first emerged at a December 1986 meeting of the Directors of the NICHD Population Research Centers. There, at Johns Hopkins University, Wendy Baldwin and Florence Haseltine announced that NICHD's Demographic and Behavioral Sciences Branch of the CPR would be initiating RFPs for research on sexual behavior related to AIDS. The PRC in conjunction with NORC's survey research group responded to that invitation in January 1988 with the first "design contract" of what became the Gagnon-Laumann-Michael collaboration on the National Health and Social Life Survey (NHSLS).
Collaborations like the one that produced NHSLS are an excellent example of the value of the PRC. In order to craft and field NHSLS -- which was conducted in 1992 -- clean and analyze the data and, in October, 1994, publicly release the study, various grants and contracts were solicited. These supported dozens of graduate students of sociology, public policy, economics, and anthropology, and the funding also helped produce campus workshops, public lectures, and publications, and made it possible for the data sets themselves to reach the public domain on CD through Sociometrics only 18 months after they were first available to the research team.
The privilege of having the infrastructure support of a population center carries with it the obligation to offer the sort of leadership and agenda-setting that our team of researchers on sexual behavior has provided. For example, in 1988, as our three-person team was initially designing a survey instrument on sexual behavior, the PRC and NORC pressed for a very brief sexual-behavior module for NORC's General Social Survey (GSS). That 11-question, self-administered module, administered at the end of the GSS interview and paid for by NORC, was the first national data of sexual behavior obtained from a random sample of adults. The same 11-question NORC-funded module was also fielded in the 1989 GSS and, in 1990, the Rockefeller Foundation paid for the module for the following two years. It has been administered in all subsequent GSS surveys. (For more information on GSS, visit the NORC web site.)
The initial data sets have been explored thoroughly, leading to three books ("The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States," University of Chicago Press, 1994; "Sex in America," University of Chicago Press, 1994; and "Sex, Love, and Health in America," University of Chicago Press, 2000) as well as articles in professional journals, such as "Journal of the American Medical Association," "American Journal of Public Health," "American Sociological Review," and "Sexually Transmitted Diseases." The diversity of outlets in journals with very different approaches demonstrates the respect with which this work has come to be regarded.
The data for Chicago Health and Social Life Survey, a survey of 2,114 people in Chicago, was released in 2002, and is now available here online at the PRC web site (see Projects). Based on a purposive sample of community contexts, this study used network models to identify persons at risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections and key bridge persons who were considered most efficient at transmitting infection to wide segments of the population. The study linked these individuals to the underlying social processes that organize their risky behavior: their early sexual learning experiences, social networks, partnering-opportunity structures, and the cultural scenarios and interpersonal scripts that give meaning to their behavior. Finally, interviews with institutional actors in the study described how persons at risk interact with social, religious, legal, and health organizations, and how their behavior and related outcomes are viewed and treated by these institutions. This research facilitated the identification of classes of persons to target for intervention and informed the process of crafting effective venues and messages for various at-risk groups.
Data from another large survey, completed in 2002, concentrated on sexual behavior in China. Led by William Parish and Edward Laumann, with collaboration from Myron Cohen at North Carolina, Chinese Health and Family Life Survey added biomarkers (urine) for half of the 9,000-person national sample. The biomarker work provided both a check on the validity of survey responses about sensitive behavior and data on asymptomatic sexually transmitted disease outcomes from risky sexual behavior. The study included special subsamples of STD clinic patients and migrants, which allowed for a more detailed analysis of the determinants of STD transmission. The rapid pace of change in China and its extreme regional variations provided a large range of opportunities to examine the determinants of risky sexual behavior, STD transmission, sexual dysfunction, sexual satisfaction, and bargaining among sexual partners. The survey included an hour-long, computer-assisted interview, with respondents typing sensitive responses to questions presented both visually and by audio. Data from this study will be made available to the public at the end of 2003.
Edward Laumann is also the principal investigator of another study, Socio-Cultural Effects of Aging and Gender on Sexual Dysfunction, launched in 2002. In this counterpart to an earlier survey of the role of aging in sexual dysfunction, Laumann explores non-biological effects of aging and gender on sexual performance. Using extensive Pfizer data on self-reported health and medical conditions from men and women across 11 countries, the study controls for health-related risk factors. In this manner attention focuses on the emotional problems and features of relationships between sex partners which themselves are key risk factors for sexual dysfunctions, such as gender differentials in exposure to stressful events and "gender gaps" about expectations regarding sexual practices and beliefs. (For more information, see Projects.)
Several other researchers are working on important projects even as they await funding. Shelly Clark, for example, is studying HIV risk in the context of the broad partnership choices and circumstances of adolescent and adult men and women. The project, Sexual Behavior and Risk in the Context of Partnerships, examines the role of partnership status in determining risk profiles and protection strategies. A primary objective of the study is to identify intervention points and behavior changes which reduce the risks of STIs and to focus on policy implications for public health practitioners, counselors, parents, and individuals.
Funded by a three-year, renewable grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Center of Parents, Children, and Work utilizes interdisciplinary approaches to examine the issues facing working parents and their children, calling upon faculty from psychology, sociology, economics, child development, human development, and public policy to collaborate on its work. Besides investigating the role full-time working parents play in the moral and social development of their children, researchers examine how characteristics of work such as autonomy, flexibility, cognitive demand, intensity, and compensation influence the quality of relationships and the socialization of children in the working family.
A data collection effort, led by Barbara Schneider and Linda Waite, of the center's 500 Family Study (see "Contemporary Families and Experiences of Work" under Projects) has recently completed, and a picture of the lives of today's dual career families is emerging. Building off the 1992-1997 Sloan Study of Youth and Social Development, the new longitudinal survey focused on 300 families with teenage children and 200 families with children in kindergarten. Researchers examined how parents and children spent their time during a typical week and how they felt when interacting with co-workers, friends, and with each other. One of the data collection techniques employed, along with surveys, interviews, and diaries, was the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), where participants wore watches which signaled them at random moments to answer questionnaires.
The results of the study point to a conflict between work and family. The overwhelming majority of parents report that work and family sometimes or often conflict. When work and family conflict, family is more likely than work to suffer. Twenty-six percent of mothers and 36 percent of fathers reported that family relationships are more likely to suffer while 15 percent of parents indicated job performance suffers most when conflicts occur. Many parents -- 48 percent of fathers and 40 percent of mothers -- reported guilty feelings about spending too little time with their families.
Analyzing the work schedules of mothers and fathers, researchers found that 40 percent of mothers but less than 10 percent of fathers worked fewer than 38 hours per week. Thirty percent of fathers but less than 10 percent of mothers worked more than 50 hours per week. Mothers gave greater priority to family needs than fathers when making job choices: they were more likely to choose work schedules that allowed them to take care of family members, they were more likely to work close to home at jobs that were more flexible. Reported stress levels of parents were only .56 on a scale from 0 to 3, where 0 indicated "not at all stressed." Parents with higher stress levels spent substantially more time working at home on weekends and in the evenings than those with lower stress levels. Working long hours at home contributed to higher stress levels among working parents.
Sloan Center researchers will return this year to collect data longitudinally from the families who participated in the data collection efforts. They plan to identify which strategies working parents have used to cope with stress and to balance work and family demands.
Chicago is home to the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97). Much like its predecessor (NLSY79, at Ohio State), this survey will become the standard national resource for the study of school-to-work transitions and the maturation of youth over the next two decades. Assuming continued funding, the study will provide repeat interviews of 9,000 individuals, over the next two decades who were between 12- and 16-years-old at the end of 1996. The new survey is expected to have a substantial impact on domestic social policy by contributing to our understanding of the labor market; the role of human capital in earnings; the importance of race, gender, and age in occupation and wage determination; and other areas. It provides insights about wage paths, job mobility, labor supply patterns, returns to schooling, and gender and race differences in wages and employment. Fieldwork was conducted by NORC in collaboration with the Center for Human Resource Research at Ohio State. (For more information, see the U.S. Department of Labor web site.)
A collection of papers on the survey edited by Robert Michael, Principal Investigator of NLSY97 from 1995 to 1998, has already been published in "Social Awakenings: Adolescent Behavior as Adulthood Approaches" (New York, Russell Sage Press, 2001). The survey's second and current PI, James Walker, Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is studying geographic wage and welfare benefit differentials on life cycle migration decisions.
Research on earlier rounds of NLS from the 1960s and 1970s reveals that the early career is a time of continual change and complex interactions -- a key stage of the life cycle that is ever more complicated by economic, social, and environmental changes. Today's youth face more challenges than their predecessors did in the move from adolescence to adulthood. The NLSY97 offers the detailed information that allows us to explore how the experiences of today's youth differ from those of their counterparts in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.
The NLSY97 was conducted as a face-to-face interview in the home. It included an hour-long interview with the youth, a half-hour interview with an adult in the household regarding the family's structure and history, and another hour-long interview with the youth's parent. Questions asked in the NLSY 97 cover topics pertaining to education and work experiences, family background, health status, personal behavior, and expectations of achieving personal and professional goals in the future.
Other PRC members, like Barbara Schneider, are also studying youth and achievement issues. The ESR Student Achievement Data Set Analysis grant, funded from July 2000 through September 2002 by the NSF, allowed Schneider to address the multiple problems in building a data set to provide in-depth information to link specific reforms at the state, district, or urban level to individual growth in achievement. Her recent research on Chicago schools has also illuminated pressing youth and achievement issues. Her and Anthony Bryk's "Trust in Schools" (New York, Russell Sage, 2002) explains how social relationships affected the reorganization of 12 Chicago elementary schools. The Spencer Foundation, which supported the first two years of that study, also funded Schneider's work in 2000 on the Study of Jewish Schools in Chicago.
Susan Mayer, Dean of the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies and a PRC member, coordinates several research projects concerned with economic inequality in America. Her current grant from the Russell Sage Foundation, Social Consequences of Economic Inequality, is part of a broad effort by the foundation, along with the Carnegie Corporation, to fund research on how social inequality affects children, both in terms of critical issues, such as educational opportunities, health care, and housing, and issues with a less obvious but still significant impact on economic equality like access to the internet. Mayer has recently written how inequality is associated with greater economic segregation, which in turn is associated with a higher probability of infant death.
Ariel Kalil and Thomas DeLeire, also both affiliated with the Harris School, have received several research grants to study poverty in America. Their collaborative working papers last year ranged from subjects like families adjusting to a parent's job loss to the spending habits of cohabitating couples with children. DeLeire is on leave this year to work on labor, education, health, and welfare policy as senior economist for President Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. His most recent grant, Allocation of Nutrition within Poor American Families, from the Joint Center for Poverty Research, helped fund research that last year led him and colleagues to conclude that existing social programs were not addressing certain specific needs of poor families. Unlike better off families, for example, poor families consume fewer calories during unusually cold weather, because they reduce food expenditures as they increase spending on fuel.
Kalil is currently at work on a five-year grant, Consequences of Parental Job Loss for Adolescents’ School Performance and Educational Attainment, funded this year by NAE and the Spencer Foundation and for the next fours years by the W.T. Grant Scholars Award. She's employing quantitative methodology to analyze large data sets like NLSY97 and qualitative research methods in a new study to explore questions of a small number of families in greater depth. Beginning by measuring changes in adolescents’ school performance and outcomes like high school completion and college attendance, Kalil next examines the mechanisms through which parental job loss is associated with adolescents’ school performance and educational attainment. The overarching objective of the project is to understand whether and how the impact of parental job loss differs in black and white families.
Last summer Derek Neal received funding for his Measuring Black-White Wage Inequality Among Women grant from the NSF to research patterns of racial difference in the labor force among women. The continuing five-year grant will allow Neal to explore black-white wage gaps among women. By using NLSY data on wages over the 1988-92 period, Neal developed imputation rules to construct estimates of black-white gaps in both mean and median wages. The results so far suggest that the measured black-white gap in wages among working women understates the absolute magnitude of the black-white gap in potential wages among women. His research will address how robust these initial findings are and how changes over time in racial differences in selection patterns affect the measurement of trends in the black-white wage gap among women. In addition he's exploring how racial differences in patterns of selection affect racial differences in wage growth over the life-cycle among women.
Patrick Heuveline's work on demographic trends is currently supported by two grants, the Hewlett Foundation-funded Training Program in International Demography and Cambodia: Between the Khmers Rouges and the Red Plague?, funded by the NICHD. The former grant supports the integral training mission of the PRC (see Training), and the latter supports research that first aims to clarify conflicting results on current levels of fertility and child mortality from the 1998 census. This will involve the collection of quantitative and qualitative data on past reproductive behavior and the prospective follow-up of the demographic dynamics of a population of about 13,000 people in rural Cambodia. Data collection and demographic analysis will provide several indicators of the quality of the existing census and survey data. Secondly, through interviews and focus group discussions, the unusual features of recent Cambodian demography should provide unique insights on the long-standing theoretical debate on the impact of mortality changes on marriage and reproduction. The final aim of the study is to lay the foundations for longitudinal studies of the demographic and social impact of the HIV epidemic by testing a low-cost structure for demographic surveillance that could be maintained indefinitely.
Recently completed research by Kazuo Yamaguchi on his NSF-funded Some Latent-Class Models for Controlling for Selection Bias in Covariate Effects in Event-History Analysis grant has provided event-history models which control for selection bias in and out of the states of a covariate of the hazard odds of event occurrence. Selection bias in the effects of endogenous covariates -- such as whether men’s entry into marriage causes a decrease in the rate of unemployment or rather uncontrolled characteristics of men who become and remain married at a given age predict a lower rate of unemployment -- is a central issue in the analysis of nonexperimental data. Yamaguchi has identified three new groups of regression models, each involving latent classes for the purpose of measuring quantities that are not directly observed and for reflecting on specific aspects of unobserved population heterogeneity. One group consists of multinomial logic latent-class regression models with special contrasts among the dependent latent-class categories for the analysis of intrasocietal group comparisons of social mobility. The second group consists of some regression extensions of the mover-stayer model, which is a special case of the two-class model, for the panel data analysis of stability and change in public opinions. The third group of models, "latent-choice models," assumes a pair of dichotomous latent-class variables as covariates of an observed dichotomous dependent variable.
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Last modified: May 8, 2008.
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