PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – In one of many efforts to support population research, the PSTC has recently granted PSTC Faculty Research Seed Awards to four faculty associates for their projects. The Center’s seed fund program is supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and Brown University.

The following projects have received Faculty Research Seed Awards this year:

• Housing and Health: An Analysis of the American Housing Survey, 1997-2013, Elizabeth Fussell, Associate Professor of Population Studies and Environmental Studies
• (Research)
• Pilot Survey of Young Adults, Jimma Longitudinal Family Survey of Youth, David Lindstrom, Professor of Sociology
• Exclusionary Discipline: Racial Disparities in How Educators Evaluate and Sanction Misbehavior, Jayanti Owens, Assistant Professor of Sociology and International and Public Affairs
• Every Household Is Its Own Local Government: Infrastructural Deficiency, State Complicity, and Entrepreneurship in Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith, Professor of Anthropology

Fussell’s project—in order to better understand the potential association of housing with health—investigates the health-related features of housing units and their neighborhoods in the U.S. housing stock and residents’ demographic characteristics using data from the American Housing Survey (AHS) from 1997 to 2013. She aims to evaluate the many different types of hazards that can cluster together in housing units and neighborhoods and may be related to socio-economic status, making these a social determinant of health. Fussell’s collaborators for this project include Associate Professor of Epidemiology Gregory Wellenius and Postdoctoral Fellow in Environment and Society Kate Weinberger.

Lindstrom is conducting a pilot follow-up survey of a random sample of 100 young adult subjects from the Jimma Longitudinal Family Survey of Youth (JLFSY). The purpose of the pilot is to develop and pretest survey questionnaires and field procedures for a round 5 survey, and to estimate the response rate and the cost of locating and interviewing the 2,094 subjects originally enrolled in the study. JLFSY focuses on policy-relevant research on adolescent life, physical and reproductive health, and risk taking, with the goal of improving the lives of the next generation of Ethiopian citizens. Lindstrom is working with collaborators Craig Hadley, the Winship Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology at Emory University, and Professor of Human Nutrition Tefera Belachew and Assistant Professor of Human Nutrition Mulusew Gerbaba at Jimma University in Ethiopia. Gerbaba was a visiting scholar at the PSTC in 2015.

Owens aims to address racial disparities related to classroom discipline by fielding a new pilot survey experiment containing several short video clips of trained actors of different racial/ethnic backgrounds and skin tones committing identical misbehavior. A geographically diverse sample of teachers will be randomly assigned to view the vignettes and rate the behaviors of students from particular racial backgrounds in an effort to investigate stereotyping and its potential consequences. She is working with a team of sociologists and psychologists.

Smith’s project on households as governments examines the ways that Nigerians develop technologies, businesses, social networks, political ties, and other cultural strategies to cope with infrastructural challenges in the domains of water, power, transportation, security, communication, and education. Comparing informal economic and entrepreneurial strategies and processes across multiple arenas of infrastructure, the study will investigate and explain not only the consequences for human welfare, but also the effects on political culture, state-society relations, and government capacity.

The seed funds are awarded with the intention that they will allow the researchers to develop their projects and obtain future funding. Last year’s recipients included economist Bryce Steinberg, public health scientist Abigail Harrison, and sociologists Zhenchao Qian and Margot Jackson.