GIST Fall 2007

The social science magazine of Duke University Sponsored by the Social Science Research Institute fall 2007, volume 1, issue 2

gist f ro m t h e M i l l

hanging out and hooking up Faculty Fellows Study Romance

Why women succeed In a Male-Dominated Field

Faculty Couples Dual-Career Couples Face Particular Problems

gr e eti ngs from th e co-di r ectors

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Duke University Photography

Y

ou will see that this, the

second issue of Gist from the Mill, has been expanded in size and scope.

Our first issue was a resounding success, largely through the extraordinary work of our Communications Manager, Courtney Orning. As a result of that success, SSRI has joined forces with Duke News & Communications to bring you this newly enhanced version of the Gist. The new Gist is approximately twice as large and now covers research and teaching broadly across the social and behavioral sciences at Duke, including SSRI, its affiliates and other departments and programs in the University and Medical Center.

The expansion of Gist reflects the continued growth of SSRI as well as the social and behavioral sciences at Duke. At SSRI, we are developing an increasingly large and effective staff designed to serve all scholars across the campus interested in the social or behavioral sciences. In this issue, for example, we present articles on the growth of our grants office, information about the development and uses of the SSRI shared server, exciting additions such as the arrival of Professor Sandy Darity and his Center’s joining with SSRI-affiliate REGSS, the introduction of the new PARISS Fellows, and the announcement of the new Faculty Fellows for 07/08. These are just the first reflections of SSRI being named one of the seven “Signature Institutes” in Duke’s new strategic plan.

As SSRI enters this new era, it is far more than an administrative body. With the University’s continuing support, we are beginning to implement our new strategic plan. In part, this involves expansion of our current facilities and programs. For example, the DIISP lab is building further its psycho-physiological measurement equipment and is developing a research participant pool in departments outside of Psychology and Neuroscience. Our Faculty Fellows Program now can afford to invite

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conte nts

Wendy Wood and John Aldrich

faculty external to Duke University. This year’s program features a visiting scholar from South Africa and a variety of shorter visits by distinguished faculty, many offering public lectures during their visits.

Alexandra Cooper, the founding administrative director, has seen the demands of her job become the equal of essentially two FTEs. We are pleased to report that she is taking the position of Associate Director for Education and Training, and thus will take over leadership of these and other initiatives. Also, we are happy that Dr. Jules Heisler is joining us as Associate Director to lead the grants office and cover administration within the Institute. Professor Rick Hoyle is providing leadership to develop a new data core at SSRI that will provide a variety of services to large data set users in the social and behavioral sciences at Duke. Be sure to look for announcements of those new services in the coming months. Professor Hoyle also has been working closely with the Department of Economics and the University administration to secure the future of the Triangle Research Data Center, one of the few Census Data Centers in the country, so that it continues to meet research needs across the Triangle community.

As SSRI develops further its signature status, we look forward to working with you to bring to the social and behavioral science community other new programs and resources. Stop by Erwin Mill and see what the social and behavioral scientist community is up to at Duke.

3 Jennifer Hochschild 4 Hanging Out and Hooking Up 6 CGGC: Globalization Gets Real 7 William “Sandy” Darity 8 Two Duke Researchers Explore the Economics of Identity 9 A Meeting of the Minds 10 Why Women Succeed 12 Social Sciences Shared Server 13 Duke and Peking U Team Up to Understand Healthy Aging 14 How Can the SSRI Grants Office Help You? 15 Mark Leary on Social Rejection 16 Faculty Couples 18 New Faculty Fellow Shares Expertise in Southern, African-American History 19 Denise Kall

que stions

JENNIFER HOCHSCHILD Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and Professor of African and African-American Studies, Harvard University As part of the REGSS Colloquium, the professor of politics and public affairs at Harvard recently visited Duke to present her lecture on “Unstable Boundaries: Skin Color, Immigration, and Multiracialism in the American Racial Order.” She gives her answers to some of the questions we’d all like to ask.

Q: Was there a specific event that made you interested in race and ethnic issues?

A: I grew up in the 1960s, and anyone who was sentient had to recognize that the racial order was one of the most fascinating and important issues in American society.

As a teenager, I just couldn’t understand why some people weren’t allowed to vote, marry who they wanted, swim in a local pool etc.—until my parents were slightly ostracized for being the first to take a casserole to the black family that moved into our neighborhood.

Q: Some people assume that Caucasians cannot understand what it is like to encounter racism. As a white woman, do you find it difficult to be taken seriously

when you explain your research on race and ethnicity?

A: The debate about privileged knowledge of insiders vs. broader understanding of outsiders is, literally and metaphorically, ancient history—and the balance of public approbation swings with each generation, roughly. I try to develop credibility by paying extensive and careful attention to what the subjects of my study say about themselves and their society—my books are crammed with quotes—but it is important not to give up my own vantage point and try to “go native.” That doesn’t work.

Q: American history shows that there is always a group of people who are considered at the “bottom.” Instead of banning together, ethnic groups sometimes seem to gang up on one another. U.S. history gives examples of African-Americans, Asians, Irish, and so on. You talk about the current tension between African-Americans and Latinos— has there always been such tension?

A: Yes. Nor is it unique to the United States; Pharisees and Sadducees fought each other bitterly during and after the Babylonian captivity.

Harvard University News Office

Q:There has been an increase of immigration from Mexico in the last 10 years. Do you think these immigrants face the same issues that other ethnic groups encountered before them?

A: Roughly speaking, yes: How much of our culture do we have to give up? Will American society change to accommodate us? How can we get a foothold in the economy and polity that allows for the mobility we came here to find? How do we deal with our children who are becoming

Americanized too fast? Can we become white, and do we want to do so? If we become American citizens, must we stop being XXX (whatever we were before migrating)? Of course, laws, economic structure, and culture have changed a good deal over the past century, so these questions might generate different types of answers.

Q: To Americans, people of color are African-Americans. But recently, we have learned that Latinos with lighter colored skin receive better wages and are treated better. Do these effects of skin color differ for men and women?

A: The evidence is mixed with regard to labor market, political office-holding, and education. It is pretty clear that skin color matters more for women than for men in the arenas of popular culture, marital desirability, self-image, media portrayals, and advertisements.

Q: Is skin color an American subject or a more global issue?

A: Global. There is scattered but consistent evidence that Japanese prize white skin, that Nigerians occasionally sicken themselves with skin bleaches, that Israelis denigrate Ethiopian Jewish immigrants (who themselves denigrate darker-skinned lower class Ethiopians), that Brazilians “become” more white as they become richer, and so on. There are a few counterexamples, where darker skin is more prized—but not many.

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i n novations

by Karl Leif Bates

Hanging Out and Hooking Up 2006-07 faculty fellows embark on studies of romance in a variety of settings

American Families have evolved markedly in our lifetimes. Ward and June Cleaver are still around, but they’ve been joined by a growing number of singleparent families, blended families, mixed-race adoptions, assisted reproduction, and same-sex couples.

“The demographics of marriage and family have changed pretty dramatically in the last 25 years,” said psychologist Kenneth Dodge, who directs the Center for Child and Family Policy. “There has been a decoupling of marriage and parenting.”

Across time and in different social settings, the behaviors of pairing up, settling down and raising children are considerably different than they were in 1957 when the Cleavers first appeared on television screens. What’s behind those changes?

Are they symptoms of something? What do they portend for the future?

Sociology department chairman S. Philip Morgan, who has written much about changes in human fertility, wanted to use the 2006-2007 SSRI Faculty Fellows Program to take a deeper dive on questions of family formation. His initial pitch was simple enough: Let’s do something about family diversity and change.

“It began as a ‘what do we know and what do we need to know’ kind of project,” Morgan said.

“Phil’s proposal sounded like an intriguing idea,” Dodge said. “We shared an interest in using multiple disciplines to address issues of contemporary concern dealing with family formation.” He signed

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on as co-convener and soon the group was on its way.

This fall, after a year of developing their ideas, the fellowship group will embark on a detailed examination of what can best be termed mating behavior and relationship formation in three starkly different settings: the college campus, the military, and lowincome neighborhoods.

The fellowship is a bottom-up process, Dodge explained. It doesn’t start out with a singular problem to ‘solve,’ but rather brings together a handful of faculty who are interested in the same broad area. In this case, it was something to do with romantic bonds, marriage, and parenting. “That’s broad, but that’s what brought eight or nine people together.”

SSRI faculty fellows are given release time from their home departments to participate in weekly half-day meetings and half-day study sessions. “It allows you to go from not even knowing each other to submitting a joint proposal,” Morgan said.

The 2006-07 group turned out to be not only a mix of academic disciplines, but academic seniority as well, featuring endowed chairs, full professors, and fresh-out-ofthe-box assistant professors. Their process started with a lot of discussion, trading

information about research interests and experiences, and shared readings.

“The questions sort of grew from that,” Dodge said.

A focus began to form around a specific aspect of families—how it is that they come to be in the first place.

For Dodge, who has spent his career investigating how adolescents become antisocial and destructive, it becomes a question of the earliest environmental influences on a child.

Biologist Susan Alberts was intrigued by an evolutionary perspective on families.

She has studied how behavior affects individual fitness in baboons and elephants, but humans are another large mammal that has some pretty interesting questions in this area.

Sociologist Linda Burton, who recently joined Duke from Penn State, is an ethnographer of the families and culture of inner city America, who herself had managed to escape the teenage motherhood prevalent in Compton, Calif., where she grew up.

Labor economist Peter Arcidiacono has been studying education and discrimination, two spheres directly influencing relationship formation and mating behavior.

Developmental psychologist Nancy Hill has been working on longitudinal studies of young children to measure parental involvement and other predictors of school performance.

Psychologist Christina Gibson-Davis focuses her work on the well-being of low-income families, including how they form marriages.

Historian Felicia Kornbluh is an authority

on American anti-poverty programs and welfare, and how these policies have changed the notions of childcare and family.

Sociologist Suzanne Shanahan served on Duke’s Campus Culture Initiative and views her field as one that “questions and explains that which is most taken for granted and seems least in need of explanation.”

“So you can see that this project really did emerge from the separate interests of the group,” Morgan said. But regardless of their starting points, it all comes back to the family. “Families do a lot. Good families are good for adults too,” Morgan said.

The three social settings chosen by the group include young residents of poor communities, military base culture, and university students, notorious perhaps for their freewheeling, noncommittal “hookup” culture.

Durham will be the base for the low-income study, starting with a small cohort of 14- to 15-year-old boys. Fort Bragg, a sprawling U.S. Army base in Fayetteville, N.C., will be the home of the military study, and Duke and nearby North Carolina Central University will be the source of college students.

Morgan is also interested in exploring the romantic culture of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., which is both a military culture and a college campus.

Its students ­the corps of cadets—are high achievers, like those at Duke, but the regimented, hierarchical and closely chaperoned social life is dramatically different.

“Is there a hook-up culture at West Point?” he asked.

Initially, the study will employ surveys

just to get the rough outlines of the schemas governing these behaviors. Then, with smaller groups, they can perform more in-depth interviews throughout the school year. Participants will also keep time-use diaries to log what they’re doing, and when.

In each setting, there are social schemas that frame how people are expected to behave, and there are the resources to carry those expectations out, or not, as the case may be.

In college, low-commitment physical relationships are seen as harmless fun. In a poor community, such behavior is viewed as potentially destructive.

“We’re trying to understand decisionmaking about marriage and family,” Dodge said.

“Does hook-up culture affect their relationships down the road; does it affect their attitudes toward commitment?”

Morgan wondered.

“How do college students learn the hook-

up culture?” Morgan added. “There aren’t actually that many participants in it, but everybody knows the schema.”

The researchers expect to find contrasts that will be enlightening. “Some of us will be surprised if we look across these three settings and the behavior isn’t different,” Morgan said.

Through tax policy and welfare rules, “government today spends a lot of dollars promoting marriage,” Dodge said. “This is predicated on the idea that marriage is better than non-marriage, but do we really know which is better?”

“You know, this is both an intellectual opportunity and a recognition that the practical solution to problems isn’t defined by disciplines,” Dodge said.

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Duke University Photography

Profi le: Affi liate DUKE

UNIVERSITY

CGGC: Globalization Gets Real

by Frith Gowan

Governments, companies, and individuals can only make decisions as sound as the information on which they are based.

At Duke’s Center on Globalization, Governance & Competitiveness (CGGC), an SSRI affiliate, researchers and educators are doing nothing less than improving our understanding of how the world works and empowering intelligent decisions.

On such wide-ranging topics as entrepreneurship, immigration, education, technology, multinationals, and public health, CGGC creates a framework for understanding globalization and its impact on society, challenges common assumptions, and provides useful data—all while garnering lots of attention in business magazines, the popular press, and in the halls of government.

But the world changes fast, so if you thought you understood what globalization meant five years ago, you can be sure that pretty much everything has changed. We asked Gary Gereffi, professor of sociology and director of the center, for his take on some popular myths that have dogged his field.

Myth: Immigrants make a marginal contribution to innovation and high-technology growth in the U.S. economy.

Reality: In a recent study, Gereffi worked with Vivek Wadhwa from the Pratt School of Engineering and other researchers to study engineering and technology start-up companies between 1995 and 2005. They discovered that 25 percent of key founders were foreign-born, showing that immigrants make significant contributions toward creating new jobs. In addition, 96 percent of these immigrant founders held bachelor’s degrees and 74 percent master’s or Ph.D. degrees, underscoring their high education level and ability to lead innovation. But while the U.S. depends increasingly on these educated immigrant entrepreneurs to maintain a global edge, many highly educated immigrants—particularly from India—are leaving as they face difficulties in securing the green cards or permanent immigrant status that would allow them to build a life in their adopted country. It’s a reverse brain-drain, Gereffi says, when immigrants come to the U.S. for higher education, and return to their home countries in increasing numbers.

Myth: There’s no future for “traditional industries” such as textiles and furniture in advanced industrial economies like the U.S. Reality: While Gereffi says that traditional industries have taken a big hit in places like the U.S., don’t sound the death knell yet.

“Technology and technological innovation is the future,” he says.

Marry traditional textiles with advanced technology, and you get high-technology textiles with special properties that are revolutionizing countless industries, including the auto, biotech, construction, and defense industries. As part of CGGC’s “North Carolina in the Global Economy Project,” researchers looked at the state

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Gary Gereffi, Director of CGGC

as a microcosm of the U.S. economy, and are studying how North Carolina has pushed advanced technology, retrained workers, and prioritized education to offset losses in furniture, textiles, and tobacco, and bring technology to traditional industries. The state, with a solid labor force, attractive cost of living, and policies that are amenable to business, is fast developing a high-technology textile industry. In fact, it boasts production and sales facilities for Freudenberg, the world leader in nonwoven textiles.

Myth: China’s bilateral trade deficit with the U.S. is a good gauge of each country’s relative economic power.

Reality: In today’s complex global economy, the value of a product imported from China doesn’t necessarily reflect the profit China makes or its role in global production. Many components of imports, like Apple’s iPod, are made in other countries and assembled in China. “China is alleged to create a big trade deficit with the U.S. because they’re being assigned a higher value of the exported item when in reality they’re only responsible for a small fraction,” Gereffi claims. On the U.S. side of the equation, we’ve outsourced the production of so many goods that we don’t have much to export that’s not already being made somewhere else, or else restricted because it’s related to defense technologies. Says Gereffi, “Globalization has redefined how industries work and how U.S. competitiveness is defined.”

Myth: The development of China and India as emerging superpowers challenges U.S. economic superiority.

Reality: If China is the world’s factory and India is the world’s back office, the U.S. remains the leader in innovation, design, and branding — it still retains many high-value activities, which are critical nodes of global value chains. While both China and India are developing full-package production facilities capable of handling all these areas, they don’t really challenge the U.S.—yet.

“They’re moving in that direction,” Gereffi warns.

Myth: Because many science and technology jobs are moving offshore, these fields are a losing proposition for U.S. students.

Reality: It’s hard to fight the draw of high-paying jobs in the legal and medical professions, so students need to be intrinsically motivated. Still, innovation and technology are the future. What the U.S. really needs, Gereffi says, is a big program on the scale of the space program in the 1960s. “That motivated a whole generation of engineers to get into the field,” he says. “I think today we need similar big goals. We have to create and highlight big programs in areas like the environment or global health that spark the imaginations of a new generation of students.”

profi le: facu lty

William “Sandy” Darity:

Idealism Makes the Big Time

by Frith Gowan

Why does inequality exist between

tion on alternative histories of the South, including what might have happened if the South had won the Civil War or if African Americans actually had been given 40 acres and a mule after the war. For Black History Month, plans are in the works for a conference on the impact of hip-hop, and for the spring, a conference on caste and color in India and the U.S. It’s all part of his big vision. And don’t tell, but even after a career that has spanned nearly 30 years so far, William Darity might still be something of a starryeyed idealist.

“I entered economics as a field because I was primarily interested in why some people are subjected to poverty and some people are not, with the idealistic hope that if I could figure it out, I could come up with answers,” he says. “That’s been the absorbing and demanding question of my life.”

Duke University Photography

groups of people? It’s a deceptively simple question. For William Darity, the search for answers has driven his entire career, inspiring research in topics including stratification economics, financial crises in developing countries, social psychology and unemployment exposure, reparations, and schooling and the racial achievement gap.

After seven years working half-time at Duke and at UNC-Chapel Hill, Darity, known as “Sandy,” has joined the Duke faculty full-time. In addition to his appointment as Arts & Sciences Professor of Public Policy Studies, he’s a professor of African and African American Studies and Economics, and head of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality, a program at the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the Social Sciences (REGSS), an SSRI affiliate.

At REGSS, he’s found a natural base for much of his work and access to colleagues studying similar issues from the viewpoints of varying disciplines, while SSRI provides workspace, logistical resources, and support for his research.

His research explores some of the most salient divides in our world. And if all researchers dream of seeing their work have a measurable effect, Darity can point to at least one instance. He and Karolyn Tyson, a sociology professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, studied the participation of black, Latino, and Native American students in gifted and talented curricula in North Carolina public schools in 2001. They found that while 20 percent of white students were identified as gifted and talented, other racial groups were grossly underrepresented. “Simply making it known that there was this glaring underrepresentation led some school

systems to do some modest reassessment of how they identified talent in the first place,” he says. “I’m fairly convinced that the report we did had some effect on moving the proportion up from 2.5 percent to close to 5 percent of all black kids in elementary school being identified as gifted and talented.”

Darity harbors ambitious plans for engaging REGSS faculty and researchers in programs and enticing them to join the research teams that will form to explore new projects and apply for external funding.

“I’m looking forward to getting the research network growing,” he says. In the fall, he’s planning a conference focused on race and wealth. He’ll also be collaborating with the Institute of African American Research at UNC on several initiatives, including a youth and race conference and a conference called “Speculating on the South.” The latter will address specula-

William “Sandy” Darity

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r e search

Two Duke Researchers

Explore the Economics of Identity

by Marla Broadfoot

Economists like to measure things— how much money you make, what kind of degree you have, what you are spending. The leading theories in economics are all driven by numbers like these, plugged into mathematical equations used to predict how people will behave in our economy. But the notion that all people are the same—that we would all make the same decisions given the same set of circumstances—is being counted out as two Duke economists begin to recognize the importance of one immeasurable quality: identity.

“Identity might be the most important economic decision you make. Who you are shapes everything you do,” says Rachel Kranton, who will be joining the economics department this fall after 14 years at the University of Maryland.

While Kranton’s training is in economics, she draws inspiration from outside the discipline. In her research she asks nontraditional questions—relying not just on mathematics but also exploring concepts studied in the social sciences—such as social relationships, networking and identity. Her desire to get intellectual input from scholars across various disciplines is what brings her to Duke University.

“At Duke, the approach is to not just focus on a specific question, nor just one disciplinary method, but to attack these problems from all angles,” Kranton says.

What drives us to do the things we do—to go to college or get a job, to save money or spend it on a new car—is what fascinates Kranton. She says that we frame these decisions in large part because of who we are: our identity, in particular, our race, gender and ethnicity. So while we think we are making these decisions entirely on our own, they stem in large part from what society tells us is appropriate or acceptable for us to do.

Pulling from the work of black scholars with her collaborator George Akerlof of UC Berkeley, Kranton has found that conversations among blacks can be very different from those among whites. They are often focused on what it means to be black, to act black, to “keep it real.” Articles in black women’s magazines discuss how to navigate a white-dominated marketplace and still stay true to who you are—indicating that black women may make very different choices than white women because they feel different societal pressures.

One way to address how these differences affect the jobs minorities take or the education they pursue is through affirmative action. Peter Arcidiacono, who has been with the Duke Department of Economics since 1999, studies affirmative action and higher

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education, as well as other controversial topics such as teen sex and the minimum wage.

“Affirmative action can create a social mismatch between underrepresented minorities and the rest of the people in college,” Arcidiacono says. “You identify with people with similar backgrounds, and those are the people you are more likely to interact with.”

While Arcidiacono recognizes the positives of affirmative action—giving black students the opportunity to attend better schools, and in effect increasing the diversity of those schools—he also says that the mismatch it creates in the schools can have negative implications.

The academic background of the last black admitted under affirmative action in a school year, Arcidiacono says, may be very different from that of the white majority. As a result, the black student is more likely to self-segregate with other blacks at the school than to interact with whites. However, if that same student had gone to a different school where he had similar SAT scores with the rest of the student population, then he would be more likely to interact with whites.

Affirmative action based on financial aid rather than on admissions diminishes the mismatch effect and encourages enrollment.

Arcidiacono’s research has shown that an increase in the fraction of blacks at schools where minorities have similar, but not lower, SAT scores to their white counterparts also leads to higher salaries in the long run. “So these interactions do matter—and interactions are more likely to occur when the backgrounds are similar,” Arcidiacono says.

Research into identity and self-segregation can be used to better understand issues that greatly affect society, such as the big gap between high school graduation rates between blacks and whites.

The graduation gap leads to lower college attendance rates, lower pay rates, and higher health problems among blacks.

Understanding why these discrepancies exist may one day direct better policies to address such inequality. Poor conditions and discrimination are not the only culprits—identity and self-segregation also play a role, say Kranton and Arcidiacono. They suggest that resources should be focused on creating an environment in the schools where blacks can thrive—either by training teachers to be sensitive to race identity concerns, or by encouraging interactions between different races.

Even if their work does not directly lead to new policies, it could change the way people think about the problem of race relations by shedding light on aspects of the issue that have been long ignored.

And that, ultimately, may be all that counts.

r e search

A Meeting of the Minds PARISS fellows cross boundaries to hone their work

by Angela Spivey

What happens when an economist, a sociologist, and a

Beck studies racial differences in patterns of marriage and in misbehavior and school achievement. “We know that there are substantial inequalities by race, and we think some of the ways that the inequalities are perpetuated is through, for example, the educational system, and the lower attainment of blacks as compared to whites,” Beck says.

Beck is now a postdoctoral fellow at The Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University. After serving in that two-year appointment, she will look for a faculty position.

political scientist share an office, and a psychologist is just down the hall? Boundaries fall, and ideas are honed.

“Social scientists don’t talk to each other enough,” says Brendan Nyhan, a Ph.D. candidate in political science and one of four 2006-2007 fellows of the Program for Advanced Research in the Social Sciences (PARISS). PARISS offers the fellowships to advanced Duke graduate students pursuing interdisciplinary methodological training.

The fellows formed a working group, in which they met every other week to critique some aspect of their work—whether a rough draft of a paper or a polished dissertation chapter. “It improves the clarity of your writing and the rigor of your methods to have people in other disciplines take a crack at it,” says Audrey Beck, who in spring 2007 received her Ph.D. in sociology.

Jeremy Burke, a Ph.D. candidate in economics, agrees. “A lot of my work crosses the boundaries between economics and political science,” Burke says. “It was a good opportunity for me to work with not only political scientists but also social psychologists.”

Michelle Sherrill, who is earning her Ph.D. in psychology, welcomed the chance to learn from other researchers using complicated statistical methods, such as those used to analyze dyadic interactions (interactions between two people). “I met a lot of great people who use statistics and use them in different ways.

It sparked my creativity in terms of how I might use other methods in answering questions in my own field,” she says.

Making those connections has helped Sherrill prepare for entering the academic job market this year. “Learning about research in other fields has made me much more capable of interacting with other researchers in the social sciences,” Sherrill says. “That will make me a better researcher and a better asset to a university when I start applying for jobs.”

Nyhan found it valuable to participate in PARISS’ Monday seminars in which invited speakers present their work. “When you see 30 presentations of research, it forces you to think a lot about the way to present your own research,” he says.

Following are more details about each fellow’s work.

Burke studies information economics—the characteristics of institutions and situations that make for the “optimal acquisition and use of information.” He uses game theory, which applies mathematical models to analyze how people will behave in certain situations. “The basic tenet of game theory is rationality. People respond rationally to the situation presented to them,” Burke says. “I look at, given that basic idea, how different institutional arrangements, such as the number of media outlets, will lead to different outcomes.”

Duke University Photography

Nyhan studies whether hard evidence can actually change beliefs. That research grew out of his coauthoring the blog, “Spinsanity,” which received national attention for its analysis of misleading statements by

politicians. “At Spinsanity, we argued that the media should be more aggressive about fact-checking politicians. We wanted to find out, if factchecking were more aggressive, would that correct misperceptions?” But he found just the opposite—people believe what they want. He and a colleague had undergrads read mock news articles that contained misleading statements by politicians. Some of the articles also contained corrections of those statements. But most of those participants still believed the erroneous statements, and, when the corrective information contradicted the students’ previous beliefs, the students’ misperceptions were actually strengthened. Nyhan is also writing a dissertation on presidential scandals.

Sherrill studies something most of us would like to have more of—self control. Her work expands on a theory originated by Roy Baumeister, now professor of social psychology at Florida State University, that “self control is like a muscle that can get fatigued or worn out,” says Sherrill, who will receive her Ph.D. in social psychology in 2008. “I’m looking at different cognitive and social factors that can influence that ability to exert self control; for instance how interpersonal context might influence that ability.”

Michelle Sherrill (center) discusses her research project with other students w w w. ss r i . d u k e . e d u

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Why women

succeed Duke University Photography

duke psychologists and the engineering school team up to discover why some women are successful in a male-dominated field

W

hen Nan Jokerst studied engi-

neering in the 1980s, being a woman meant being surrounded by men.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, says Jokerst, the J.A. Jones Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke.

“I had more dates than anybody. If you want to date a lot of people, go into engineering. There’s no competition,” she says.

Being in the minority didn’t hold her back socially—or professionally. Jokerst got a master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, was on the faculty at Georgia Tech for 15 years and is the first woman to hold a named chair at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering.

What makes someone like Jokerst succeed in a male-dominated field such as engineering, while others fail or don’t even try to break into the ranks?

Duke psychologists Laura Smart Richman and Wendy Wood want to find out.

With funding from a National Science Foundation grant, Richman and Wood are launching a study of successful women

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engineers at Duke and other universities in the Southeast to discover how they navigate their world.

Their overriding question: “What makes women excel in this profession, and what can we do to promote it?” Richman says.

It’s an ideal collaboration. Richman’s research focuses on how people react to perceived discrimination, Wood’s research addresses masculinity and femininity across cultures, and Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering is nationally known for success in recruiting and retaining female faculty.

“It struck me that, working together, we could do something very innovative,” says Wood, who is co-director of the Social Science Research Institute.

“This study is unique and well-suited to Duke,” says April Brown, senior associate dean for research at Pratt. “We have a reputation for being a good place for women.”

This success is one of former Pratt dean Kristina Johnson’s primary accomplishments in her eight years as leader of the school. Inspired by her friendship with Duke’s former women’s basketball coach Gail Goestenkors, Johnson created a coach-

by Sally Hicks

ing model in recruiting faculty, actively seeking out women engineers, improving the institutional climate so they want to stay and helping them advance through coaching and mentoring. Pratt has gone from having five women faculty in 1999 to 15 women faculty today, with some, like Brown, in key leadership positions.

“It really changed the culture and climate,” Brown says. “We’re on the cutting edge of that.”

These efforts have been supported by an NSF Challenge grant, which is designed to promote women in the sciences.

Richman and Wood’s study is part of this larger grant.

Johnson is, of course, a prime example of a successful women engineer. This summer, she was named provost at The Johns Hopkins University. But the gains she has made will not end when she leaves, says Rob Clark, who is replacing her as dean for the next year.

“There’s overwhelming recognition for what [Johnson] has done in that regard,” he says. “But I truly believe we will sustain that. I believe the environment Kristina

discove ry

l to r: Duke University graduate student Pae Wu, Prof. April Brown, Prof. Nan Marie Jokerst, and Assistant Prof. Adrienne Stiff-Roberts

“Environmental cues make people feel a sense of inclusion or exclusion,” Richman says.

In order to explore these issues, the Pratt school will host a conference in the spring that will bring in about 60 women engineers from throughout the Southeast. Before they arrive, they’ll fill out online surveys. At the conference, Richman and the research team will explore these issues in an experimental setting, and compare the results to that of

Duke University Photography

established will be one of the legacies here at the school.”

With the high number of successful women here, the Pratt School was fertile ground for Richman to collaborate with others to pursue her own research interest, which is how psychosocial factors affect health. She’s particularly interested in the psychological and physical consequences of perceived discrimination.

Researchers have found that people don’t necessarily have to experience overt discrimination in order for their minority status to affect them. One aspect of Richman’s work involves the study of how people cope with what’s called “stereotype threat,” which is the fear that their behavior may conform to a negative stereotype about a group to which they belong.

Stereotype threat can affect performance: Black students, for example, have been shown to do worse on SAT tests if they are asked beforehand to identify their race on a form. In addition, females in stereotype threat situations had increased heart rates and other physiological reactions.

The question in the women engineers study, of course, is how are the people who cope well with being in the minority different? Is it an internal mechanism that’s a characteristic of the individual?

Or an external mechanism that’s related to the environment?

“Somehow these women who have been successful in these environments have figured out a way to overcome these obstacles that seem to stymie other people’s success,” Richman says.

Some women may simply be less sensitive to being in a situation in which they are outnumbered by men, or they may not hold the view that women aren’t good at math and engineering. There also could be external factors, such as a supportive social environment or female role models and mentors, that mitigate discomfort, she says.

l to r: DiVE Director Rachael Brady, Postdoctoral fellow Nicole Huff, and Kevin LaBar, associate prof of psychology and neuroscience.

equally successful women in less male-dominated fields to learn more about what helps these women cope.

“What is stressful and what is protective?” she says.

That’s a question that the engineering school also hopes to answer. They hope to help translate their success into a model that others can use.

Jokerst says that faculty and administrators at the Pratt School have come up with successful techniques, including very intensive mentoring that starts, for some, at the undergraduate level. Jokerst says she talks to young women all the time about career options and even issues such as child rearing.

“It has been very informal so far, and we’re thinking of something more formal,” she says.

Brown says she has thought quite a bit about these questions in her career, but she’s looking for a more rigorous way of measuring her experiences.

“There’s a long period of denial that there are any issues at all. After some period, that goes away and you become aware of the issues,” she says. “And with awareness, you can think more about coping strategies. That’s something that hopefully this study will come up with.”

Some women may simply be less sensitive to being in a situation in which they are outnumbered by men, or they may not hold the view that women aren’t good at math and engineering. There also could be external factors, such as a supportive social environment or female role models and mentors, that mitigate discomfort. w w w. ss r i . d u k e . e d u

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tech nology

Social sciences shared server

by Nancy E. Oates

What gets Chris Kerr excited about the Social Sciences Shared Server (S4) he designed and built are the mega-terabytes of storage, the high-speed data architecture and the incredibly fast disk array.

“But no one cares,” Kerr said. “They just want to click and have it open.”

The social sciences researchers connecting to the S4 may not care about the underpinnings of the new shared server, but they are excited about having a place to stash their huge data files without receiving that inevitable “memory full” message. With a storage capacity 20 times bigger than a normal desktop computer and relatively few users, the S4 has been changing the way researchers view their computer work since the shared server became available at the beginning of the year.

Social science researchers generally need to store very large files of research data and hundreds of pdf versions of journal articles for reference. They are used to being told to limit their storage, said Kerr, the IT manager of the Social Science Research Institute. “We’re trying to change that mentality,” he said.

Public Policy Professor Jay Hamilton and his colleague Scott de Marchi analyze state records on voter registration and participation in elections. The data contain millions of voter records, and Hamilton’s research assistants had a hard time opening the 200 files (two files for each of North Carolina’s 100 counties) until they put the data on the S4. Now, Hamilton and de Marchi can begin analyzing the data.

“The S4 has lowered the transaction costs for us to do our research,” Hamilton said.

The S4 levels the playing field between large social science departments that have the funds to acquire extra disk space and smaller departments sidelined without access to sufficient memory to download multiple large files.

Last year, Kerr and Neil Prentice, computer project manager for the College of Arts

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Chris Kerr, SSRI IT Manager

Social science researchers generally need to store very large files of research data and hundreds of pdf versions of journal articles for reference. They are used to being told to limit their storage, said Chris Kerr, the IT manager of the Social Science Research Institute. “We’re trying to change that mentality,” he said. & Sciences, gathered together computer technology specialists from several of the social science departments to form the Social Sciences IT Committee. Their first project was to create the S4, an interdisciplinary shared resource. Funding came from the College of Arts & Sciences. The shared server provides significant storage capacity for data sets, pdf files and other research documents and acts as a Web interface for researchers to communicate with one another while collaborating on projects.

Kerr designed, built and implemented the S4, concentrating on making it user-friendly, and the rest of the committee conducted a technical review and analysis of the system. Researchers can create their own Web pages by pointing and clicking, dragging icons to the page instead of having to write programming text. The S4 requires no password registration or special training to use. Most social science staff, faculty and graduate students have an account through their departments to access the S4. Those who don’t can easily create an account by filling out a form on the S4 Web site, s4.ssri.duke.edu.

From the positive comments Kerr has heard from researchers, he knows his efforts are appreciated.

Pontus Leander received server space on the Hiltonsmith system when he joined the social psychology department as a graduate student. That space filled up in 2005, preventing him from backing up his data.

He and others in his department used their laptops to back up their data.

“But if those hard drives failed or the laptops disappeared [which happened to someone in his department], we were kind of in trouble,” Leander said.

He and his colleagues had to juggle what was stored on Hiltonsmith. The S4 came none too soon.

“The S4 is virtually unlimited space and not that many users,” Leander said. “The S4 drive gets backed up fairly regularly and it is off-site, so anything catastrophic that happens in our lab won’t necessarily affect the data on the S4 server.”

Similarly, if something happens to the files he is working on, he can pull down a new copy from the S4. Once he and Kerr mapped the drive, Leander was able to access the system from anywhere. Because everyone in his lab has access to the server, they don’t have to e-mail files to one another anymore.

Only about 30 user groups use the S4 at present, but the system can handle easily three or four times that many.

“I’d like people to know there is still tons of storage capacity available,” Kerr said.

“People should not feel inhibited about requesting large amounts of storage. That’s what it’s there for.”

coll aboration

Duke and Peking U Team Up

to Understand Healthy Aging

by James Todd

Professor Jama Purser and her colleagues noticed something intriguing when poring over health statistics on elderly people in China.

“Living in a rural environment seems to somewhat protect them from dependence [on care providers],” said Purser, an assistant professor in geriatrics who holds degrees in physical therapy and epidemiology. “What are the characteristics of rural environments that promote independence, even when similar levels of physical decline are present?”

Purser’s question is prompted by her work with the Duke-Peking University Joint Program for Interdisciplinary Studies of Healthy Aging. The program pairs Duke faculty with colleagues at PKU in Beijing to study various aspects of aging, such as demographic trends and care of the elderly. So far, its participants have met twice for workshops, once in Beijing last spring and again this spring in Durham.

The Healthy Aging program grows out of the work of Yi Zeng, a Duke professor of medicine and sociology. Zeng received his undergraduate degree in China and his Ph.D. in Belgium, plus post-doc training at Princeton University. He is the creator of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Study, a 10-year ongoing survey involving more than 20,000 Chinese adults over age 35.

Writing from Beijing where he is conducting research this summer, Zeng said colleagues at PKU “are very excited about the achievement of our study so far, and they have clearly shown their strong interests in the long-term collaboration with us in the study of healthy longevity, which is useful for both Chinese and American people.”

He points to the 100-plus academic papers published in English and Chinese journals based on the longevity data as evidence of the research opportunities available from collaborative study of the topic. Some of the findings about the Chinese population include: childbearing after age 35 is associated with better health and lower risk of death among women over age 80, men over 80 suffered less in dying than women of the same age, and people who are satisfied with their lives tend to live longer.

In her project, Purser is working with Zeng; Dr. Helen Hoenig, a geriatrician and fellow Duke faculty member; Qiushi Feng, a Duke sociology doctoral student; and Professor Wang Peiyu, chair of PKU’s Department of Social Medicine. The group has a goal of identifying ways Wang’s department can assess early signs of physical disabilities among elderly patients.

“If you can identify people with subtle physical performance limitations, you may be able to better predict who will go on to have much more serious problems. That in turn could promote more efficient targeting of interventions,” she said.

By working with data from the Healthy Longevity study—a key source of information for researchers in the Healthy Aging program—

Purser and her colleagues are also gaining insights into the cultural differences in aging.

“The physical capacity needed to maintain bathing and using the toilet may differ in China versus the U.S., for example, because of differences in the way these tasks are performed in different cultures and environments,” she said. “That may help to explain disability rates in different countries.”

Data from the longevity study are also what made Purser and her colleagues curious about why older Chinese people in rural environments seemed to be more physically independent than their urban counterparts.

Purser is not the only Duke professor who has been able to expand her research through the Healthy Aging program and the longevity study.

Duke sociologist Linda George worked with Zeng and Yuzhi Liu of PKU on a study of gender differences in the care of the elderly in China.

In a paper “Gender Differentials of the Oldest Old in China,” they found women over 80 are “seriously disadvantaged in activities of daily living, physical performance, cognitive function, and selfreported health, as compared with their male counterparts.

“The large gender differentials among the Chinese oldest old need serious attention from society and government,” they wrote.

Another Duke sociology professor, Kenneth Land, has begun a project with PKU colleague Dayuan Hu to explore how to adapt the concept of a “frailty index” used in American demographics to Chinese data.

Another factor in the Did you know? well-being of Chinese DuPRI - the Duke Population Research elderly is being addressed Institute, a new institute in developby Duke professor Kang ment at Duke University and an affiliate Liu: the news and enterof SSRI, is dedicated to the conceptual tainment media. unification of the demographic sciences.

In collaboration with Five centers make up DuPRI and in each PKU professors Yun Zhou center, important demographic research and Jianzhong Li, Liu work is being performed. The centers are said the group aims “to trying to explain male-female longevity offer a comprehensive and health differences in humans as well study of the relationship as in other species, including lemurs, between Chinese media baboons, and fruit flies. They also study and elderly population, and aspects of life, reproduction, aging, and make some comments and death right across the tree of life. suggestions to the relevant The goal is to establish Duke University, media organizations for through DuPRI, as an NIA Center on the providing better programs Demography of Aging and increase even for the elderly audience.” further the demographic research activities at Duke.

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13

grants

How Can the SSRI Grants Office Help You?

by Nancy E. Oates

First impressions matter. Sabina Sager and Diana Hanson, grant managers for the Social Science Research Institute (SSRI), know that sometimes a bad first impression can cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, if the person they’re trying to impress is a grant reviewer. Sager and Hanson have seen grants rejected because the font wasn’t uniform and the margins were inconsistent.

“If it looks like it was pieced together at the last minute with no thought to what it looks like, and there are typos, and the margins don’t match, and it’s all different fonts,” Sager said, “what is the reviewer going to think of this person’s organizational skills regarding projects?”

With nearly a decade of experience apiece in readying grants for submission, Sager and Hanson offer their expertise to researchers in Duke University’s social sciences departments. Grant applications can be exceedingly complicated, with compliance issues, human subject protocols, approvals and deadlines. Electronic submissions have their own peculiarities. As grant managers, Sager and Hanson work with researchers to ensure that the projects fit the sponsors’ criteria and the application complies with the guidelines of the sponsor and the university. They see to it that the grant follows all programmatic and formatting instructions, meets deadlines and has an intriguing title. They come up with the numbers for the budget and tell the sponsor where to send the check. And best of all, their help is free.

“We streamline the process and make the grant submissions as competitive as possible,” Hanson said.

Since SSRI came into being in 2003, an outgrowth of Duke’s Building on Excellence strategic plan, its grants office has been a small operation. Hanson’s joining the outfit earlier this year doubled the staff. Sager and Hanson operate with amazing efficiency, aiding researchers with about 60 grant applications during the past fiscal

Duke University Photography

Diana Hanson and Sabina Sager

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year and processing 24 awards. Their expertise is appreciated most by some of the smaller social sciences departments at Duke that don’t have staff well-versed in the grants submission process.

Sager and Hanson are familiar with many of the major sponsors. If they come across a new sponsor, they know what information to ferret out from the Web site or instruction manual. They attend grantwriting seminars, National Institutes of Health training sessions, and workshops by Duke’s Office of Research Support to absorb the learning curve on the latest requirements.

Kerry Haynie, associate professor of political science and associate chair of the department, contacted SSRI’s grants office about an electronic submission he was coordinating with two other universities. On top of the routine administrative details, he had the extra layer of matching grant proposals from different sites. Sager was particularly helpful in budgeting matters and keeping up with Duke’s internal submission guidelines, Haynie said. He told Sager what personnel, equipment and travel the study would involve, and she put in the right figures.

“With [Sager] doing the mechanics of the submission process,” he said, “it allowed me to do what I do best as a faculty member and researcher—focus on the substance of the research project.”

Researchers write the science and project goals; Sager and Hanson do the rest. They check the fit between the project and the sponsor. They justify the budget and make sure the submission asks only for expenses the sponsor is willing to fund. They calculate the facilities and administration rate (also known as the indirect), adding that to the project amount (the direct) to come up with the figure for the entire grant request.

Once the grant is awarded, Sager and Hanson make sure the researcher isn’t overspending or underspending, and they help with whatever financial or progress reports are required.

Sager and Hanson can point researchers in the right direction to get the best opportunity for funding.

“We can give them a venue to search, set them up with a structure and tell them who to contact and what’s the best way to look for funding,” Hanson said. “If the proposal is not what the agency is looking for, even if it’s a good proposal, it won’t get funded.”

Researchers may submit a request for grants assistance through the SSRI Web site (www.ssri.duke.edu/grants.php). The grants managers will schedule an initial face-to-face meeting in the SSRI office in the Erwin Mill Building near Ninth Street. Subsequent contacts can be made by e-mail, phone or fax.

“We can’t guarantee the success of the grant,” Sager said, “but we will give researchers the best possible chance of getting funded.”

a sk th e social sci e ntist

Mark Leary on Social Rejection

by Sally Hicks

Mark Leary is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of the Duke Interdisciplinary in self-processes, motivation and social emotions. His research focuses on how people’s behavior and emotions are affected by their concerns about others’ impressions, evaluations and acceptance of them.

Why do people care what others think of them? Human beings have a fundamental motivation to be socially accepted—a drive to establish connections with other people. A lone human being during evolutionary history was going to be a meal—we can’t run away, we don’t have claws, we can’t defend ourselves.

We survived only because we relied on the social group for protection. So natural selection favored people with a strong desire for social connections.

How do people respond when they lose that social acceptance? People who are rejected respond in many ways, but hurt feelings are the primary emotion that’s tied to the perception that someone is not accepting us as much as we would like. It’s the emotional equivalent of the physical sensation of pain, warning us of threats to our social well-being. Rejection also almost invariably lowers people’s self-esteem for a while. Decreased selfesteem is the feedback you get in your own mind when other people might be rejecting—it’s a signal that there’s something wrong that needs to be corrected.

Duke University Photography

Initiative in Social Psychology (DIISP). He is interested

Mark Leary

Do people try to correct the situation by winning back acceptance? Sometimes.

When people are rejected, we have two competing motives. One is to try to regain acceptance by working extra hard to be nice, ingratiating themselves, doing favors for the person. The other is to respond angrily and aggressively.

People can become quite violent when they feel rejected, as our case studies of school shootings showed. In fact, others’ research with romantic couples found that people who are highly sensitive to rejection paradoxically react to rejection in antisocial ways cause them to be rejected even further.

Are women more sensitive to being rejected than men are?

We don’t find it. They feel rejected by different things, and they react differently. Women are more likely to express their reactions in a vulnerable fashion, while men are more likely to express them angrily. But I think that’s because of social norms, not because of the way we are wired.

How do you study people’s reactions to being rejected?

In two ways. We often conduct lab experiments in which people exchange information about themselves with each other and then get feedback about whether the other person would like to get to know them or work with them later. In other cases, we use a “Survivor” paradigm in which some members are rejected from the group. These controlled experiments are buttressed by studies in which people describe real-life instances in which they were rejected and complete questionnaires about their reactions.

So is this a crushing experience for participants in the studies? The feedback is very mild, and we debrief them afterwards. We’ve found that you don’t have to give people very strong feedback for people to feel rejected. Often, just telling people that others feel neutrally about them will be perceived as rejection.

That’s one thing that’s been amazing to me—very small doses of rejection elicit strong emotional reactions. It shows how powerful this motive is.

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15

Li f e & Work

faculty couples Q: When is the “two-body problem” not always a problem? A: When the bodies are at Duke

by Jerry Oster

Two-career couples face particular problems when they have an academic career in common. A book exploring the dilemma, The Two-Body Problem: Dual-Career-Couple Hiring Practices in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins Press, 2003), reported that 40 percent of women faculty and 35 percent of men faculty have partners who are also faculty members.

That the problem is continually in search of a solution is evidenced by Cornell University’s Dual Career Conference. Held most recently in June, the conference has been an annual event for five years. Duke is planning a conference of its own, on dual-career recruitment, late this year or early next, thanks to an Alfred P. Sloan Award for Faculty Career Flexibility that recognized, among other work policies, Duke’s efforts in dual-career recruitment and retention. The Sloan Award, one of five awarded to national research universities, will also enable refinement of recruitment and retention policies developed at Duke in recent years.

“There is not a set policy for negotiating with faculty couples,” said Dr. Nancy Allen, vice provost for faculty diversity and faculty development, said via e-mail. “The provost, school deans, department chairs, and search committee chairs engage a variety of approaches when the need arises, and, in general, these have yielded good results, particularly in Arts & Sciences in recent years.”

Several faculty couples in social sciences departments – two of them brand-new to Duke his fall – talked with Duke Today recently about their two-body problems. The issues varied, but the couples agreed that Duke was unusually open-minded and progressive in its recruitment policies.

Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi

Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi, new professors of psychology and neuroscience, met at an academic conference in St. Louis, at a dance on a riverboat ride on the Mississippi River. “Fireworks went off at the moment the Cardinals won the World Series,” the couple recalled in an e-mail. Moffitt (a native of Randolph County, N.C.) was teaching at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Caspi (born in Israel and raised in Brazil and California) at Harvard.

“It took us a couple of years to end up at the same place— Wisconsin—so we could get married.”

Both winners of Distinguished Awards for Early Career Contributions from the American Psychological Association, Moffitt and Caspi spent the last 10 years at the Institute of Psychiatry, London. They are co-authors, with others, of numerous research papers on the origins of normal and abnormal psychological traits.

“At first we tried not to work together,” they wrote, “because

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all our senior colleagues, who had suffered through an era of nepotism laws when only half of a couple could be employed at a university, warned it would kill our careers. In the end, we gave up trying to work separately because it was so enjoyable for us to discuss our projects with each other. After we had made intellectual contributions to each other’s projects, it seemed dishonest to not share authorship credit on the resulting publications.”

And what attracted them to Duke? “Duke offers us a unique opportunity to maximize the two most important aspects of lives, according to Sigmund Freud: love, and work. For work, we wanted a prestigious university, with an internationally recognized medical school, a top-ranked psychiatry department, a strong psychology department with outstanding undergraduates and a clinical graduate training program, and a group of geneticists excited about working with us on genetic research into human behavioral disorders. This wish list was met in full by Duke.

Duncan Thomas and Elizabeth Frankenberg

Duncan Thomas and Elizabeth Frankenberg, new professors of economics and public policy respectively, come to Duke from UCLA. Though they had both done graduate work at Princeton, “we never overlapped at all,” Thomas said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles. The couple met as colleagues at the RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that uses research and analysis to improve policy and decision making. “Elizabeth was running a major new data-collection project in Indonesia,” Thomas said.

“I was hoping to begin a similar project in South Africa that didn’t work out. Elizabeth said ‘Why not come to Indonesia?’ So basically, she trained me.” “And Duncan made the project much better than it would have been,” Frankenberg added.

Thomas, a native of Zimbabwe, and Frankenberg, who grew up in Hillsborough, N.C., have co-authored, with others, papers on health and mortality, family decision-making, and developing economies in Southeast Asia. They’ve been able to work well together from the start. “We’ve generally looked for opportunities to take advantage of each person’s comparative advantage,” Frankenberg said.

“Being in different disciplines has been valuable for us,” Thomas added. “People see us as two people with quite different perspectives and views. But we also have a lot of overlap in our research interests, and that has been very constructive for us intellectually. That’s opened intellectual doors, but it’s also strengthened our personal relationship.”

Why has the couple come to Duke? “We are both impressed with Duke’s vision and its commitment to bring together people from

l to r: Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt; Elizabeth Frankenberg and Duncan Thomas; Keith Whitfield and Linda Burton

different perspectives in innovative ways,” Thomas said.

“It’s been gratifying that Duke has been very professional and treated us as two independent people who work together rather than as an academic couple.” Frankenberg, whose mother still lives in Hillsborough, added that with a 4-year-old, “being close to my mother and having our daughter know her grandmother is icing on top of the cake.”

Linda Burton and Keith Whitfield

Linda Burton, James B. Duke Professor of sociology, and Keith Whitfield, a professor of psychology and neuroscience, came to Duke in 2006 after long careers at Penn State University, where they met. “I was recruited for two positions—in human development and in biobehavioral health,” Whitfield said in an interview. “Linda was chair of the search committee in human development. I selected the other department, which subsequently allowed us to avoid a situation where it could have been said that she recruited her future husband. As it was, our friendship grew, and we started dating.”

Burton, an ethnographer born and raised in Los Angeles, focuses on the impact of poverty on urban and rural families; Whitfield, a developmental psychologist, was born to a military family in Fukuoka, Japan, and who “moved 20 or 25 times,” studies individual differences in the aging process.

They have done research together and separately.

“I’ve been able to learn Keith’s perspective and integrate it into my own work,” Burton said. “It opens the door for other interpretations of the data.

The couple has worked hard to negotiate issues of free time and division of chores. “The good part of having a partner who’s an academic,” Burton said, “is that we understand what’s expected of us in our jobs, which aren’t 9-to-5 jobs.

The downside, for me, is that sometimes I extend the work day much longer than I should.” In raising three daughters (one of whom went to Duke) and a son, “I was the bad cop on money, she was the good cop,” Whitfield said. “She was the bad cop on boyfriends, I was the good cop.”

The couple came to Duke with different goals. “Linda was looking for a place that had an intellectual environment that enhanced her research and facilitated the translation of her work into public policy,” Whitfield said. “I have some interest in administration, and had built a reputation at Penn State in terms of leadership and service. Coming to Duke meant, to some extent, starting over again. w w w. ss r i . d u k e . e d u

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profi le: facu lty f e llow

New Faculty Fellow

Shares Expertise in Southern, African-American History

by Beverly Schieman

The South was calling to Adriane Lentz-Smith. Though she

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had spent her years of undergraduate and graduate education in New England, attending both Harvard and Yale respectively, accepting an assistant professor’s position in Duke’s history department was a kind of homecoming.

Lentz-Smith came to North Carolina to conduct post-doctoral work at UNC. She has found the resources at both UNC and Duke to be unparalleled in the areas of her passions, Southern and African-American history, allowing her to delve into the topics she needed for her research on civil rights before the Civil Rights Movement.

Lentz-Smith has been interested in African-American and Southern history as long as she can remember. “Growing up a military brat and an African-American woman in the Reagan-era South, there are personal reasons that brought me to the topic,” she says. “But looking at AfricanAmerican history is an important and illuminating way to think about both American and world history, and America’s place in the world. Researching and teaching history were the only two things I could see myself doing forever. I had such an affinity and fondness for all of it.”

Though Lentz-Smith was courted by New England universities as well, she chose Duke not only because of the school’s Southern history collections, but also its academic culture.

Adriane Lentz-Smith “When I began thinking about what I wanted in a university,” she remembers, “One of the things that appealed to me about Duke was its tradition of doing really interesting work in African-American and Southern history. But it was also Duke’s commitment to interdisciplinary work and teaching; everyone I spoke to seemed genuinely invested in that. That kind of work is good for creative thinking.”

A home for creative thought is a necessity for Lentz-Smith, who is also an author. In her new book, The Great War for Civil Rights: African-American Politics, WWI and the Origin of the Civil Rights Movement, (Harvard University Press) Lentz-Smith portrays the experience of the African-American soldier, both at home and abroad, during WWI and its aftermath. Her research culls from a variety of sources, including military archives from the United States and France, soldier memoirs, autobiographies and even fiction. LentzSmith says the fiction of African-American authors of that time,

particularly works by female playwrights, constituted some of her most interesting research.

“They wrote about such topics as soldiers returning from a supposed “War for Democracy” to fight lynchings and racial oppression in their own country,” she says. “It allowed me to understand not only how people thought about the war and its problems but also what military service meant to African Americans on the home front.”

Lentz-Smith’s book follows soldiers to France and back, investigating their inner as well as their outer journeys as they struggled to find their political identities and their activist consciences as African Americans who had served for the United States.

“I believe this project reaches out and touches world history, military history and social reform and brings them together in an easily viewable picture,” Lentz-Smith says.

Though just starting out at Duke, LentzSmith has already been asked to bring her talents to SSRI’s Faculty Fellows Program, which pulls a handful of faculty from different academic areas to work together on a chosen topic or topics.

“This seminar is a wonderful opportunity to rethink about what I know of Southern history, and a really nice introduction to the intellectual milieu that is Duke,” she says.

“History straddles a unique place between social sciences and the humanities—it brings the disciplines a little closer together. My role, as a historian, will be to route any contemporary topics about the South back to the historical concepts that have made the region what it is today.”

Though Lentz-Smith will have her hands full with her new position, her role as a Faculty Fellow, and her new book, she hopes to fit in some time doing the other things she loves, including reading, biking and traveling with her husband (another new addition to Duke as a Fellow in the Sociology department). When asked if her travels have ever brought her to the battlegrounds of her subjects, she answers affirmatively with much reverence.

“When working on my dissertation, one of my committee members insisted that I had to go to France and ‘walk on the ground where your men have walked.’” she recalls. “You can’t help but be moved to stand there and imagine people fighting and dying in that spot, and how they must have been trying to imagine the morality that the world has come to.”

stu de nt spotlig ht Michael Brennan

Denise Kall

by Jshontista Vann

When her advisor told her about the SSRI Faculty Fellows Program, two things struck Denise Kall’s interest.

“Interdisciplinary research and the amazing people selected to be part of the Faculty Fellows this past year are the major things that interested me,” Kall said. “I really admired a lot of those professors and thought it would be great to see how they all came together to create an interdisciplinary project.”

The Faculty Fellows is a year-long program supported by the Social Science Research Institute which allows faculty from multiple departments and schools to come together and explore cutting-edge research questions. The goal is to create and communicate new knowledge through research publications and in the classroom.

Kall, 27 and a University of Delaware alumna, came to Duke in 2002 and is entering her sixth year as a sociology graduate student.

“I took an intro to sociology class while I was an undergrad and loved it. I had no idea what sociology was before that, but once I took the class, I realized that’s exactly how I analyzed everything and that’s what I wanted to do,” Kall said.

Phil Morgan, professor and chair of sociology, is Kall’s advisor and was the coconvener for the Fellows last year.

“We hired Denise to manage our meetings and to provide organizational support,” Morgan said.

When Kall worked for the Fellows this past year, her duties included taking notes, organizing meetings, getting articles and finding relevant information.

“My work with the Fellows has allowed me to learn how a group of interdisciplinary researchers work together,” she said.

“I was amazed at how they managed to come together with no research project in mind and by the end of the year have three distinct yet interrelated research projects.”

Her research interests are social stratification (the hierarchical arrangement of

social classes, castes and strata within society), environmental sociology (the study of societal-environmental interactions), medical sociology (the study of individual and group behaviors with respect to health and illness) and the sociology of education (the study of how social institutions and individual experiences affect educational processes and outcomes).

“There was one group in the Fellows that studied low-income families and that was the most relevant to my research interest,” Kall said.

Her broad range of interests has allowed her to collaborate on research studies and also complete an independent research project.

She has worked with the Center for Environmental Solutions, which is now part of the Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions, where she studied risks and the “precautionary principle” which resulted in a Risk Analysis publication with collaborators.

“The purpose of this study was to compare the precautionary principle between the United States and Europe,” Kall said.

“Who’s more precautionary on certain risks and why?”

The results showed no significant difference in relative precaution over the period 1970-2004, and the overall finding was a mixed and diverse pattern of relative transatlantic precaution over this period.

She wrote a paper with sociology professor David Brady that extended research on feminization of poverty by analyzing the variation in women’s, men’s and feminized poverty across affluent democracies from 1969-2000.

They concluded that the feminization of poverty was influenced by social security transfers, single motherhood, and the sex ratios of the elderly and labor force participation, and while power resources theory probably best explains women’s, men’s and overall poverty, structural theory may best explain the feminization of poverty.

She is currently working on projects with Clara Muschkin and Beth Glennie, research scientists at the Center for Child and Family Policy.

“These projects will focus on academic and behavioral outcomes, the institutional factors that shape them and their relationship to education policies,” she said.

Morgan said Kall’s most impressive characteristic is she’s a “can-do” person.

“She’s able to take a large task and manage it by breaking it into doable pieces,” Morgan said.

Her dissertation, “Environmental Risks to Cognitive Development in Children: The Effects of Lead, Mercury, Cadmium, and Cotinine on Children’s Educational Outcomes,” focused on embedding biological samples in social science research on children.

“The project examined the effect of environmental contaminants on children’s educational outcomes,” Kall said. “In my paper, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, I describe the details of data collection focused on five-, six- and seven-year-old children.”

Kall said collecting biological samples may have a significant effect on improving health and other life outcomes. Current educational policies don’t consider the effects of environmental factors on children’s education, but focus on aspects such as teaching that cannot address cognitive impairment caused by environmental factors.

“A closer analysis, such as this study, may provide a clearer understanding about why minorities and those of lower socioeconomic status lag behind due to impairments caused by disproportionate exposure of environmental toxicants,” she said.

When she has free time, Kall relaxes by traveling, hiking, camping, skiing, gardening and reading.

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upcom i ng eve nts

Social Science Research Institute Below is a list of workshops that will be offered this semester, sponsored by SSRI. Workshops are open to all.

Web-Based Surveys—Viewsflash Methods for Handling Missing Data in Social Science Research Introduction to Endnote Introduction to Multilevel Modeling Introduction to Classification Techniques Psychometric Scales: Evaluation and Development Introduction to Database Management For more information, please see: www.ssri.duke.edu/training.php

Events are free and open to the public, but registration is required on-line.

October 8-9 Community Prevention of Child Maltreatment Conference Sanford Institute, Room 04 www.childandfamilypolicy.duke.edu/calendar/ Conferences/childmaltreatment/index.html

Center for International Studies Global Governance and Democracy Speaker Seminar September 27 Daniel Nielson October 18 Peter Rosendorff November 1 David Singer November 15 Ethan Kapstein November 29 Chris Whytock

www.jhfc.duke.edu/ducis/GlobalEquity/schedule.htm

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Editor: Courtney Packard Orning Assistant Editor: Claire Cusick Designer: Regina Barnhill-Bordo www.bdesign-studio.com

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