Project Description
Midlife Health Inequities in the Rural South: Risk and Resilience (Midlife HIRS) aims to recruit residents of eastern North Carolina (NC), with particular focus on residents living in what has historically been referred to as Black Belt Counties of NC, to participate in a baseline survey and short follow-up surveys about health and life experiences. The goal of this study is to understand risk and resilience related to health and well-being during the midlife years (30-55 years) for residents living in rural, eastern NC.
This study builds on the work of the Great Smoky Mountains Study (GSMS, located in western NC), a study originating at Duke, and now currently following participants in the Great Smoky Mountains Study of Rural Aging (GSMS-RA). GSMS began when participants were 9-13 years of age, and has continued participant engagement for more than 30 years, with participants now in their early 40’s. With the initiation of Midlife HIRS, our goal to is have GSMS-RA and Midlife HIRS to run concurrently, helping us to better understand the course and processes of aging across rural geographies of NC.
Project Goals
The objective of our study is to develop a new data resource focused on residents of the Black Belt counties in NC to capture the full arc of a life and what it means to be living and aging in a rural context—now focused in eastern NC.
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The University of Vermont
The University of Chicago
The University of Michigan
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Project Description
In the U.S., food insecurity (FI), or the inconsistent access to food of the quantity or quality needed to fuel a healthy life, is an important source of socioeconomic and racial inequality in youth outcomes. Decades of research finds that FI undermines youths’ physical, socioemotional, and cognitive development, and their academic outcomes as a result. Food insecurity is unequally suffered in the U.S.: while 15% of all households with children experienced FI in 2020, nearly one third of low-income households with children did so, with even higher rates in rural areas and among communities of color. Federal food assistance programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly Food Stamps), do reduce food insecurity among those who receive it, but as these rates of food insecurity make clear, socioeconomic and racial inequality in food security persists.
In many areas, schools and nonprofits partner to provide additional nutrition to students through local “Backpack” food programs. “Backpack” programs offer an additional source of food assistance for low-income families that could optimally complement federal programs. First, because backpack programs typically operate in schools, they have a ready point of information about and access to assistance for youth and their families. Second, because these programs provide food directly to families, they do not rely on grocery stores that can hamper the effectiveness of SNAP benefits in food deserts.
This project will work with a backpack program that provides fresh food, including fruits, vegetables, meat, and dairy, with accompanying recipes to be cooked and consumed by the whole family. The program faces challenges to becoming a scalable model for school-based food assistance due to under-utilization.
Project Goals
This project will explore two key issues that prevent the target backpack program from serving as a scalable model due to under-utilization, substantial administrative and systemic hurdles that place the burden of participating on families. Utilizing both an intervention and qualitative studies, this project aims to
- Reduce known administrative burdens and support participation through tools to increase take-up.
- Investigate systemic barriers to engagement that hinder participation.
Project Description
Across the United States, news stories have profiled sales of rental housing causing the displacement of families, many of whom are poor, Black, or Hispanic. For families with children, this displacement can portend disruptions to child development, school stability, and academic achievement. While a robust literature demonstrates negative associations between housing mobility and a range of negative school outcomes, no study has examined how rental housing sales might cause residential mobility, school switches, or poor school performance. This project will fill that gap by creating an innovative and novel data linkage between real estate sales data and public-school student records covering all residential building sales and student records throughout the state of North Carolina from 2010 to 2019. This research will provide new, compelling evidence of the causes of school mobility and its consequences for racial-ethnic inequality in school achievement.
Project Goals
This study aims to answer the following questions:
- Do poor, Black, or Hispanic children experience higher rates of displacement due to building sales compared to wealthier or White children?
- Is displacement associated with lower rates of stability and success in school, and is this association stronger for Black and Hispanic children compared to White children?
- How do the distance of moves or the socioeconomic composition of new neighborhoods mediate the association between displacement and educational outcomes? Is this mediation stronger for Black and Hispanic children compared to White children?
- Are displaced children more likely to be identified as homeless by schools under the McKinney-Vento Act, and how does homeless identification mediate educational outcomes?
Project Description
Nearly one in 6 children and youth in the world live in a conflict zone. Exposure to the traumas associated with war and armed conflict is linked with depression, anxiety, and poor physical health. This project will pilot a daily diary study of youth in Ukraine and Poland to develop a state-of-the art assessment tool for measuring within-person changes in coping and adjustment related to the war in Ukraine.
The project will first pilot a daily diary study with three groups of youth: those in Ukraine, those who have been displaced from Ukraine to Poland, and Polish youth in Poland. Following the 7-day pilot study with these three groups, the project’s researchers will meet with small focus groups of pilot participants to improve the study protocol.
Project Goals
The pilot study and focus groups will result in a high-quality assessment tool that will be used to measure within-person and between-person changes in mood, behavior, and well-being.