News

A group of researchers, including DUPRI's Dana Pasquale, Manoj Mohanan, and James Moody, and with pilot grant support from DUPRI, released an article in Socius titled "Visualizing COVID Restrictions: Activity Patterns Before, During, and After COVID-19 Lockdowns in Uttar Pradesh, India." Globally, restrictions implemented to limit the spread of COVID-19 have highlighted deeply rooted social divisions, raising concerns about differential impacts on members of different groups. Inequalities among households of different castes are ubiquitous in certain regions of India. Drawing on a novel data set of 8,564 households in Uttar Pradesh, the authors use radar plots to examine differences between castes in rates of activity for several typical behaviors before, during, and upon lifting strict lockdown restrictions. The visualization reveals that members of all castes experienced comparable reductions in activity rates during lockdown and recovery rates following it. Nonetheless, members of less privileged castes procure water outside the household more often than their more privileged peers, highlighting an avenue of improvement for future public health efforts.

NextGenPop is an undergraduate program in population research that aims to increase the diversity of the population field and nurture the next generation of population scholars. The program includes a 2-week, in-person, on-campus summer experience and subsequent virtual components focused on research and professional development. This summer 2023, 15 undergraduate students will be hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, June 4 – 18. Participants will receive a $1,000 stipend as well as funds to cover all travel and living expenses. Classroom instruction and hands-on applications will address contemporary social and policy issues in population research, including race and income inequalities, health disparities, immigration, and family change. For more information, please see the attached flyer, website, and application. Please consider applying or sharing with others who might be interested!

Clarivate recently released their annual list of most cited scientists, and three DUPRI researchers—Avshalom Caspi, Jane Costello, and Terrie Moffitt—are among the nearly 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.

In a new paper, DUPRI’s PhD student Allison Stolte, Giovanna Merli, UNC’s Ted Mouw and coauthors interviewed a representative sample of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham Area before and after the onset of the COVID-19 outbreak in the U.S. to show a rise in reports of anti-Asian discriminatory experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and how immigrants’ stress responses to these experiences added to the mental health burden of their acculturation process and of other stressors related to pandemic worries.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has announced it will award Kenneth Dodge of Duke University a MERIT Award worth more than $8 million, to study how to prepare families and children for kindergarten readiness and well-being beginning at the stage of pregnancy of the child. Dodge is the William McDougall Distinguished Professor of Public Policy Studies, a leader in early childhood development and child/family policy.

After repeated pandemic-related delays, the NIA-supported Animal Models for the Social Dimensions of Health and Aging Research Network (R24 AG065172, under the direction of DUPRI’s Jenny Tung, Kathie Mullan Harris [UNC], and Alessandro Bartolomucci [University of Minnesota]) was pleased to host its first in-person full network meeting in Minneapolis on September 22-24th, 2022.

In a paper recently published in Nature Aging, Carol Brayne (University of Cambridge) and DUPRI's Terrie Moffitt discuss the potential limitations of large-scale volunteer databanks (LSVD) in tackling ongoing global health challenges and inequalities.

Two new papers, authored by teams headed by DUPRI's Jennifer Lansford and using data from the Parenting Across Cultures study, examine the effects of pre-pandemic predictors on individuals' compliance with COVID mitigation strategies and vaccine hesitancy and with their mental well-being and substance use. Both papers also explore how confidence in government handling of the pandemic influences these behaviors.

The National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) was recently renewed as the one Administration for Children, Youth, and Families-funded repository for data on child abuse and neglect, as well as Child Protectives Services contact.