Family and Child Well-Being Research Network

We propose that Greg J. Duncan continue to serve as a Principal Investigator in the NICHD Family and Child Well-being Research Network. Duncan has been a very active contributor to the Network's research and public outreach activities during its first five-year cycle and proposes here to continue these activities through innovative studies of effects of context on child development; public outreach; and cooperative network research activities. Collaborating with Duncan on the proposed research projects are Kathleen Mullan Harris of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and associate director of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health: James Rosenbaum, a colleague of Duncan's at Northwestern University and long-time analysis of the Gautreaux residential mobility quasi-experiment; Johanne Boisjoly, sociologist at the University of Quebec at Rimouski and long-time collaborator, and Jay Teachman of Washington State University, a Network PI during its first cycle. Two individual research projects are proposed. The first involves interrelated analyses of neighborhood effects using quasi- experimental data from the Gautreaux residential relocation program. The second consists of a series of contextual analyses of data from the national Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Two cooperative research projects are proposed. The first includes analyses of family process and child development in low-income families from a series of randomized experiments, most of which are being carried out in the context of welfare reform. The second is a series of studies of environmental processed based on insights from behavioral genetics.