News

Can cash transfers help break cycles of poverty across generations? This study, co-authored by DUPRI scholars Kenneth Dodge and Jennifer Lansford, explores the impact of a casino-funded cash transfer program on educational outcomes among American Indian communities. Utilizing a difference-in-difference approach, researchers found that children of mothers exposed to cash transfers for a decade scored higher in math and reading than peers whose mothers received shorter exposure and were also likelier to pursue higher education and delay childbirth. Findings suggest that substantial cash transfers could mitigate intergenerational poverty and enhance the quality of life in underserved communities, particularly when initiated early in parental life.

A new paper authored in Nature Mental Health by a team of scholars including DUPRI's Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt reports that primary-care doctors are seeing a surprisingly high volume of mental health conditions. The authors analyzed Norway’s nationwide administrative primary-care records, extracting all doctor-patient encounters occurring during 14 years for the population aged newborn to 100 years. They analyzed over 350 million primary-care medical encounters. The authors found that 1 in 9 doctor-patient encounters in primary-care settings (11.7%) involved a mental-health condition.

The Carolina-Duke rivalry is arguably one of the greatest, but when it comes to the population sciences, faculty are often close research collaborators and good friends. This was showcased September 6, 2024 as the Carolina Population Center (CPC) hosted friends from that darker blue institution down the road for Demography Daze 2024. The annual event – now in its 10th year – switches between CPC and the the Social Science Research Institute’s affiliated center, the Duke University Population Research Institute (DUPRI).

Monthly cash transfers reduce risk of poverty — and higher amounts do not lead to higher spending on tobacco or alcohol.

A new special issue of the International Journal of Psychology edited by DUPRI's Jennifer Lansford uses the Parenting Across Cultures Project to investigate how mothers' and fathers' individualism, collectivism and conformity values are related to parenting behaviours and child adjustment during middle childhood. The special issue contains 10 empirical articles, the first nine of which focus on a specific country that participated in the Parenting Across Cultures project. These country-specific articles allow readers to gain a deep understanding of how cultural values in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States are related to specific domains of parenting and child adjustment in a way that goes beyond cross-national comparisons to delve deeply into within-country analyses. The tenth empirical article then provides a cross-national comparison of the associations among cultural values, parenting and child adjustment to advance understanding of cultural similarities and differences in human development.

A team of DUPRI Scholars have received a 5 year grant from the NIA to study the health of Ghanaian immigrants in the US. The grant is titled "Dynamics of Ghanaian immigrants’ health in the US: Critical life-stage experiences, social networks, acculturation and selection (GMHeS)." It represents a collaboration among Scholars at Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Ghana. At Duke: M. Giovanna Merli (Contact PI), James Moody and Marta Mulawa. At the University of Pennsylvania: Chenoa Flippen (co-PI), Jere Behrman and Irma Elo. At the University of Ghana: Ayaga Bawah (co-PI) Patrick Asuming , Leander Kandilige and Pearl Kyei.

Tony Cheng has received an NSF Career Award for his project entitled, “The Pseudo-State Entities of Street-Level Bureaucrats” (abstract below). This is an impressive achievement that recognizes Tony’s unique and timely contributions to our understanding of policing—both at the macro, organizational level and at the micro, individual level. He has been on an upward trajectory since receiving the 21st Century Dissertation Prize at Yale University (2021), and we are so pleased to have him continue that journey at Duke!

A Duke study exploring how young people in the U.S. react to perceived slights, microaggressions and other indignities found, not surprisingly, that discrimination increased distress in all race and gender groups. But it also found the rate of increase was higher for whites than Blacks, suggesting that Black men and women develop early mechanisms of resilience.

NextGenPop builds a new, diverse generation of population sciences students. DUPRI hosted the program June 2-15, with 21 undergraduate students enrolled from 19 colleges and universities, and many DUPRI scholars and graduate student RAs participating.

A new study published in the Journal of Immigrant and Minority Health by DUPRI Scholar Jen'nan Read examines whether an immigrant health advantage exists among US Whites, a group often used as a reference category in research on racial and ethnic health disparities. Using recent data from the National Health Interview Survey (2019–2022), I disaggregate non-Hispanic White adults (n = 41,752) by nativity status and use logistic regression models to assess differences in six measures of mental and physical health. The analysis includes self-reported conditions (depression, anxiety, fair/poor self-rated health) and diagnosed conditions that require interaction with the healthcare system (hypertension, diabetes, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD). Foreign-born Whites have a significantly lower prevalence of each health outcome relative to US-born Whites. The immigrant health advantage remains significant for depression, anxiety, fair/poor health (i.e., self-reported conditions) and diagnosed hypertension, after adjusting for sociodemographic and healthcare characteristics. In contrast, the inclusion of these explanatory factors reduces the nativity gap in diagnosed diabetes and COPD to non-significance. Overall, the results indicate important variation in health among Whites that is missed in studies that focus on US-born Whites, alone. Scholars must continue to monitor the health of White immigrants, who are projected to grow to 20% of the US immigrant population in the years to come.