Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Demography

Events 2012

23.10. Cumulative Risks of Foster Care Placement for American Children by Race/Ethnicity and Sex, 2000-2009
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
Time: 3 - 4.30 p.m., Room A 300
Christopher Wildemann, Yale University, New Haven
Lecture

First estimates will be presented of the cumulative risk of experiencing foster care placement by age 18 for American children by race/ethnicity and sex for the years 2000 to 2009. Data are used from the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) and synthetic cohort life tables. Results provide support for three conclusions. First, many children will experience foster care placement at some point. About 5 per cent to 6 per cent of children will experience foster care placement by age 18, far greater than the less than 1 per cent of children who are in foster care on any given day. Second, there are vast racial/ethnic disparities in this risk. Asian children had the lowest risk at 2 per cent to 3 per cent, with whites (about 4 per cent) and Hispanics (about 5 per cent) slightly higher.
The risks for African American and Native American children were dramatically higher, however. African American children had risks in the 9 per cent to 12 per cent percent range, while Native American children had risks of between 12 per cent and 15 per cent. Finally, sex differences in the cumulative risk of foster care placement were negligible. Taken together, results demonstrate that more children will experience foster care placement at some point than typically thought and that these risks are unequally distributed enough that they may have consequences for childhood inequality.

The WZB provides child care during the lecture. If you are interested, please respond by October 11, 2012, indicating the number of children and their age.
To register, please reply by October 18, 2012, to Marie Unger: marie.unger@wzb.eu, fax: 030/25491-680.

22.10. Combining Descriptive and Causal Methods to Study Inequality
Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB)
Time: 1 - 5 p.m., Room A 310
Christopher Wildemann, Yale University, New Haven
Workshop

Christopher Wildeman will show how descriptive methods - especially life tables - and several types of tests for individual-level effects can help us understand consequences of social inequality. These descriptive methods are simple yet underutilized. To illustrate this method, he constructs a life table estimating the cumulative risk of paternal imprisonment for American children and then combines these demographic estimates with point estimates of the effects of paternal imprisonment on children‘s behavioral and mental health problems, as well as their risks of homelessness and infant mortality. By combining these data, it can be shown how far-reaching the consequences of mass imprisonment may be for childhood inequality. This back-of-the-envelope method provides a simple first step through which we can better highlight how much the individual-level effects we test for could shape social inequality.
In this workshop, examples are used from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods, and the Surveys of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities.

The WZB provides child care during the lecture. If you are interested, please respond by October 11, 2012, indicating the number of children and their age.
To register, please reply by October 18, 2012, to Marie Unger: marie.unger@wzb.eu, fax: 030/25491-680.

Christopher Wildeman is an assistant professor of sociology, a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), and a resident fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Demography from Princeton University in 2008.

04.05. Biosociology: From Proteins to People (and Back)

An enormous body of literature documents the salience of social structures - such as race, class, gender, and even birth order - to health and developmental outcomes. Likewise, a voluminous research tradition shows the importance of biological traits and conditions at various points in the life course to socioeconomic outcomes. This bidirectional relationship holds at all units of analysis: individuals, families, neighborhoods, even entire societies.
This workshop will investigate how biological processes and society are linked. Some key questions are: How does social status affect (and is determined by) health status both within and across generations? How do geography, physical environment, and health affect countries‘ trajectories of economic development over the course of centuries? How do genes and environment interact to produce outcomes - and more importantly, how might social scientists go about studying this? How could we integrate the central dogma of molecular biology (DNA RNA Protein) into social analysis?

03.05. Three Puzzles in Gene by Environment Interactions

Sociologists are fond of claiming that the effects of genes depend on social context. While providing descriptively rich findings, in all studies supporting this claim environmental conditions are potentially endogenous to the unmeasured genetic characteristics of the subjects and their families. Thus, however appealing the contingency of genetic effects on social environment is to sociologists, individual gene-gene interactions cannot be ruled out.
A second problem with respect to G x E interactions relates to estimating narrow-sense heritability: When genes and environment co-vary in the same direction (i.e. more related individuals share more similar environments) by an amount we cannot measure, models for genetic effects remain underspecified. Third, what do we actually mean by environment: do the very genes of those around us – the metagenome – form part of the social environment over-and-above the behaviors (phenotypes) of these socially-salient peers?  
We offer a map out of this empirical morass. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and a candidate gene approach, we examine how genetic variation in the serotonin transporter (5HTT or SERT) interacts with exogenous prenatal environment to affect likelihood of depression; how this locus may act as a phenotypic capacitor (i.e. affect the variance in outcomes, not just the mean); and how it may be subject to frequency dependent selection (i.e. how the metagenome may matter). Finally, also examining depression, we deploy the natural experiment of genetically misclassified twins to interrogate the equal environments assumption (EEA) of classic behavioral genetics research.

Dalton Conley is Dean for the Social Sciences and University Professor at New York University. Conley’s research focuses on the determinants of economic opportunity within and across generations. He holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Columbia University, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Biology at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology at NYU.

Guests 2011/12