In addition to the independent research being conducted by graduate students, our lab is currently involved in several ongoing research projects.
CURRENT PROJECTS
Collaborators: Dr. Naomi Duran, Research Scientist, Research and Policy Partnerships, NWEA, a division of HMH Education Company. Feiran Zhang, ME, Doctral student University of Illinois, Human Development and Family Studies.
Neighborhood Gentrification and Social Inequality: Implications for Children, Parents, and Community Well‑Being project develops ways to measure neighborhood gentrification using the 2000 and 2010 Census tract-level information from a national sample of kindergartners in 2009 using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, where we have survey data from kids, their parents, teachers, and school administrators. This will be the first study of its kind to provide a national snapshot of how many children may be living in gentrifying (or stagnated) neighborhoods and the implications for child development. In our project, we consider how neighborhood gentrification may influence the culture, opportunities, and structure of public schools as well as the important role race, ethnic background including citizenship status, and social class may play in the relationship between gentrification and child well-being. We also pay attention to children’s social-emotional development and behavioral outcomes, such as internalizing and externalizing problems, and ask how the uncertainty of neighborhood change shapes their developmental trajectories. We also investigate the role of families and parents, including parental stress, parenting practices, and family dynamics, in mediating the effects of gentrification on children. At the same time, we examine how school environments, through their resources, climate, and teacher perceptions, interact with neighborhood transformation to either buffer or intensify these effects.
Genetic Genealogy Inference Among Kassena Ghanaians and the African Diaspora Multiple Generations After the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Principal Investigator: Dr. LaKisha David (Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Collaborators: McKenzie Macon, Graduate student, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Gabriel Kugoriamo, kugoriamogabriel@gmail.com, Pikworo Slave Camp
This project examines how communities in northern Ghana interpret and engage with efforts to reconnect families separated by enslavement, as well as the ethical responsibilities involved in representing contested historical sites such as the Pikworo Slave Camp. Drawing on focus group discussions with Kassena participants in Nania village, on study examines how genetic genealogy is understood not simply as a scientific tool but as a practice of repair, in which African-descendant relatives in the U.S. are welcomed into existing systems of kinship, reciprocity, and moral obligation. In other work, we integrate oral histories, autosomal genetic data, digital archival records of transatlantic and intra-African slave routes, and critical analyses of historical and archival sources including the Slave Voyages database housed and maintained by Rice University. Our project seeks to advance an interdisciplinary, community-centered framework for reconstructing African diasporic histories. Together, these approaches highlight how descendant communities actively reclaim disrupted family narratives and call for ethical, decolonizing research practices that honor local knowledge, lived experience, and collaborative stewardship of memory and justice.
Our research at its core is about family finding family. It has been almost impossible for modern-day African communities to identify descendants of relatives taken during the TST so many years ago and vice versa, for members of the African diaspora to reconnect with their ancestral communities. However, with advances in technology such as direct-to-consumer genetic testing, the internet, and cellular telephones, Ghanaian families are engaging with specific biological relatives who descended from their ancestors taken during the TST. Since these emerging ancestral family forms consist of African (Ghanaian) and African diaspora relatives who share a common ancestor within the last ten generations, they provide a new context for the exploration of identity development within this unique “transnational” family context as well as identity development across the lifespan at multiple levels–individual, family, and community
Neighborhoods, Schools & Access to Opportunity Project combines nationally representative longitudinal student-level data from datasets like the ECLS-K and HSLS with neighborhood tract-level data from the Census to examine how the uncertainty associated with living in neighborhoods with higher levels of socioeconomic disadvantage influences social, emotional, and behavioral development. In this work, neighborhood disadvantage is operationalized using traditional indicators including percent poverty, unemployment, welfare, and single-mother households, as well as other factors including the extent of rent burden, overcrowding, and physical isolation of residents. In addition, we utilize information from ECLS-K and HSLS school and parent reports of social problems, fear, and safety in the residential and school neighborhoods. As part of this project, graduate research assistants Naomi Duran and So Young Park are working to develop measures of neighborhood context using the Census and alternate geographic-based sources of data.
Using Wearable Sensors and Affective Diaries to Document How Violence affects Public Life and Public Health (co-PI Dr. Ruby Mendenhall, Dean, UIUC School of Medicine) is an interdisciplinary pilot project that examines the physiological effects of exposure to nearby gun crimes such as shootings as a way to document the lived experiences of African American mothers. We have partnered with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) to explore the effects of short-term stress (reactivity to an incident, such as a gunshot) on heart rate variability and the effects of long-term stress, and the desensitization, if any, on the basal changes in heart rate experienced by African American mothers living in high crime neighborhoods. For additional information about this project click here
FORMER PROJECTS
The Role of ‘Uncertainty’ and Social Support in Healthy Child Development project, examines how children’s experience with uncertainty measured by changes in family socioeconomic circumstances influence their academic and behavioral development over time, and what role formal and informal sources of social support play in buffering the negative impact of uncertainty on child development. Utilizing longitudinal data collected from a nationally representative sample of kindergarten children beginning in 2010 (ECLS-K), surveyed annually through the fifth grade, we also examine how changes in household income and the depth, timing and duration of poverty affect children’s cognitive, social, and emotional trajectories, paying particular attention to the role race, ethnicity, region, and location (e.g., urban, rural, suburban), play in explaining between and within group differences.
The Great Recession and Child Development project examined how the recent economic recession affected young children’s cognitive, socioemotional, behavioral, and physical health over time within the context of their families, schools, and communities. For additional information about this project click here
The Family Conditions, Social Institutions, and Early Child Development project utilized a national sample of children from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-birth cohort (ECLS-B) sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education and statistical regression to examine how family structure and parental work conditions as well as the quality of daycare and the formal schooling experience affect the socioemotional, behavioral and cognitive development of young children. For additional information about this project click here
The Neighborhood Associated Toxic Stress and Prostate Cancer study is a cross-disciplinary project with Dr. Adam Murphy, Department of Urology, Northwestern which examines how exposure to neighborhood level stressors including high rates of violent crime, poverty, unemployment and vacant housing influences risk and aggressiveness of prostate cancer among men living in Chicago, IL. For additional information about this project click here