Summer Research Fellowship Projects

Team Advisor: Candis Watts Smith, Ph.D. (Political Science)
Kyshan Nichols-Smith: graduate fellow

Evolving Black Politics in an Era of Democratic Backsliding

While Black politics is best known for its overwhelming support for the Democratic Party, there has always been diversity in political ideology and policy preferences within the group. Scholars have largely predicted that the veneer of political homogeneity will persist as long as Black Americans believe their opportunity structure is strongly influenced by their racial group membership. Recognition of living in a racialized social system has led Black Americans to be vigilant in ensuring that dynamics in the American criminal legal system, as well as access to education and healthcare, do not worsen for the group as a whole. In doing so, Black Americans have served as guardrails against democratic backsliding. However, demographic shifts, such as generational cohorts increasingly distant from the long era of overt racial terror and the immigration of those in the global African diaspora, may increasingly challenge the historical ties that bind. 

Relying on empirical analysis of survey data across decades, this project offers a reading of the pulse of Black American political attitudes, partisan attachments, and policy preferences. Here, we seek to ascertain whether contemporary demographic shifts among Black Americans are producing a new politics that may ultimately further fray the quality of democracy or perhaps continue to bolster it, as inequities across many domains of American life continue to remind group members of the role of race in their life chances and opportunity structure.

Team Advisor: Anna Gassman-Pines, Ph.D. (Public Policy)
Shuyi Qiu: graduate fellow

This team will be working on two projects this summer.

Project 1: The team will collaborate with co-primary investigators Rebecca Ryan (Georgetown) and Natasha Pilkauskas (University of Michigan). Federal food assistance programs, particularly SNAP, reduce food insecurity among the families who receive them, but these benefits do not fully meet low-income families’ nutritional needs. Specifically, SNAP benefits do not typically last families the entire month, with food insecurity spiking at the end of the SNAP month for many recipients. The consequences of these economic shortfalls are severe: children’s test scores decline, their behavior problems in school increase, and crimes – particularly theft from food stores – rise at the end of the SNAP month.

The team will use data from surveys of a national sample of SNAP recipients to investigate the following questions:

• What is the pattern of daily food insecurity throughout the SNAP month? How does this vary for child-level and household-level food insecurity?
• What are the patterns of children’s wellbeing throughout the SNAP month? Do these patterns vary alongside child- or household-level food insecurity?
• What are the psychological mechanisms that help explain links between the timing of the SNAP benefit cycle and children’s wellbeing?

This project will not only inform the SNAP program in a meaningful way, but it could reveal how economic strain more broadly affects low-income families. 

• to assess the impact of an administrative and behavioral intervention on enrollment by comparing treatment and control group enrollment rates at the start of two program years
• to assess the impact of a behavioral intervention on engagement among enrolled families over the course of two years
• to estimate the effect of the PPP program on children’s academic and behavioral wellbeing

Team Lead: Hedwig Lee, Ph.D. (Sociology)
Michael Cao: postbaccalaureate fellow
Erin Smith: undergraduate fellow

This team examines variations in the impact of police-involved deaths for Black infant health, which fits within the Cook Center’s pillar on Health Equity.

Team Advisor: Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Ph.D. (School of Medicine)
Latesha Harris: postdoctoral fellow
Ivy Boyd: undergraduate fellow

Despite the availability of effective treatments and disease management strategies, complications related to diabetes and other chronic conditions remain pervasive. Among Black individuals, chronic disease progression is associated with more than twice the risk of mortality following an initial myocardial infarction, as well as higher rates of chronic kidney disease and lower-extremity amputations. Black women, in particular, experience disproportionately high rates of obesity and cardiometabolic risk factors, which contribute to accelerated disease progression and worse health outcomes compared with women of other racial and ethnic groups.

These inequities are largely driven by non-biological factors—often referred to as social determinants of health — including barriers to healthcare access, inadequate community resources, exposure to interpersonal and structural trauma, and persistent systemic inequities.

This project addresses these disparities through two interrelated but distinct aims

• To conduct a scoping review of culturally tailored interventions for Black patients
  aimed at preventing chronic disease progression, with a focus on diabetes-related
  complications and lower-extremity amputations.
• To examine the relationship between Black women’s experiences of interpersonal
  and systemic trauma and the development and progression of chronic health
  conditions, particularly cardiometabolic diseases.

Team Advisor: Christopher Wildeman, Ph.D. (Sociology)
Garrett Baker: postdoctoral fellow
Jerry Eiswerth: graduate fellow
Catalina Giraldo: undergraduate fellow
Eva Jarvis: undergraduate fellow
Tyler Rogers: undergraduate fellow

This team will work on a series of projects related to the criminal justice system, families and
inequality.

The first project is in the conceptual stage, and includes putting together a proposal to the North Carolina Adult Department of Corrections to undertake a large randomized controlled trial (RCT) in state prisons in North Carolina. A prior national survey revealed that many Americans give hundreds of dollars per month to their incarcerated family members in the form of commissary accounts, phone calls and specific gifts or packages. Building on this descriptive evidence, we will be working on a proposal to offer some sort of financial assistance and financial literacy programming to imprisoned adults and their family members in the months leading up to, and following, their release from prison. 

By setting this up as an RCT and pairing it with various surveys and administrative records, our research team will be able to analyze whether this pre-release financial support improves health and wellbeing, benefits familial relationships and ultimately reduces recidivism.

This RCT proposal will be supplemented by a number of ongoing projects that undergraduate fellows will have the opportunity to work on. These include multiple administrative data projects in Wisconsin and Denmark on parental incarceration’s impacts on child safety and schooling, a large-scale literature review on intimate partner violence, and a project on the lives and employment of prison wardens.

Team Advisor: Sarah Gaither, Ph.D. (Psychology & Neuroscience)
Mohammad Wiswall: graduate fellow
Eliana Brown: postbaccalaureate fellow
Olivia Jackson: undergraduate fellow
Jayden Moore: undergraduate fellow

Asian Americans are often stereotyped as high-achieving, but this stereotype obscures important realities, including significant economic inequality, mental health disparities and experiences of hate. This team’s research will challenge the invisibility created by grouping diverse populations under a single ‘Asian’ label by disaggregating data to better reflect the varied lived experiences of Asian American communities.

Sarah Gaither: “The goal of this project is to develop a framework for understanding how Asian American racial prototypicality contributes to both interpersonal and institutional misperceptions—and, ultimately, inequality. By challenging overly generalized views of Asian Americans, this work takes an important step toward addressing disparities and improving representation.”

Team Advisor: Keisha Bentley-Edwards, Ph.D. (School of Medicine)
Latesha Harris: postdoctoral fellow
Fatima Fairfax: graduate fellow
Victoria Ayodele: undergraduate fellow
Heyweté Casimiro: undergraduate fellow
Haynes Lewis: undergraduate fellow

Technology in healthcare has developed rapidly over the past few decades. Medical education has needed to adapt to prepare healthcare practitioners to use new and constantly evolving technologies in their future practice. A few surveys and case studies have indicated an increase in AI and technology-based curriculum in the US medical education system, however, very few studies have systematically examined how the use of healthcare technology has been integrated into healthcare education in the US. 

This project is particularly focused on nursing curricula, and will involve original data collection using content analysis.

Key questions we will answer include:

• What technologies are being included in medical training?
• How prevalent or consistent are these teachings across institutions?
• Are these teachings integrated into the main curriculum, or as electives?
• Is there a focus on ethics in healthcare technology use?
• What is the sentiment around these technologies? (E.g., excitement? concern?)

Team Leader Fatima Fairfax:

"I think nursing is an understudied population in medical sociology, at least in my sphere of research. Nurses interface with as many patients as doctors, and often for longer periods of time. They do a lot of intake and data entry, so understanding how training occurs for both physicians and nurses feels important to understand the integration of these technologies into healthcare.

"I'm interested in all the human aspects that have to do with healthcare technology use. So, who is creating and programming them, who is using them and how, and who is receiving care? Understanding how providers, who are integral in the integration of these technologies into the healthcare system, are being taught around these technologies feels like an important piece of the puzzle. Ultimately, I think having this information may help illuminate where healthcare is heading with the next generation of providers, and give a better understanding of what ethics and safeguards are being taught alongside training in use of these technologies."