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(Updated January, 2007) These studies focus on families at risk and efforts to address their problems as well as the changing structure of families and family life. All of these projects stress the critical role of context and settings while maintaining a focus on the way that ethnicity and culture frame our conceptualizations of institutions and the behaviors and attitudes of individuals. Project List 1. The New Hope Study: Working Poor Families and Children Weisner participates in a longitudinal assessment of New Hope (NH), a community-based experimental intervention intended to provide meaningful supports for working poor parents and children. The intervention was based on this premise: if parents work, families should not be poor and children should not be at further risk, and hopefully at less risk. New Hope was a work-based program in Wisconsin, offering rather substantial assistance (vouchers for child care, health care, income supplements and jobs if parents did not have work) if parents worked 30+ hours a week. The impact of the NH intervention was assessed using a random-assignment experimental longitudinal design. New Hope did increase overall earnings and employment hours by 10 – 15% compared to controls. NH families used formal childcare significantly more often (41% vs. 29% in controls), and boys are doing somewhat better in school. Although there were impacts, the pathways through which the program features affected families varied. An extensive ethnographic study of 44 families, in both program and control groups, was an integral part of this project and the evidence from those families provided insights into the processes, mechanisms, and experiences of families in the study. Two books have resulted from this work. One is co-authored with Greg Duncan and Aletha Huston: Higher Ground: New Hope for working families and their children. The other is an edited book with Hiro Yoshikawa and Edward Lowe: Making It Work: Low wage employment, family life, and child development. 2. Families with Children with Disabilities Project Child is a collaborative longitudinal study of teens with disabilities at clear risk for developmental, school, or community troubles. This is the first such study to include data from the teens themselves, assessing their experiences. These data are linked to longitudinal developmental assessments, family adaptations, and parent reports. Family adaptation is associated primarily with the ways the child impacts the family daily routine of life, rather than the cognitive ability of the child. More effective adaptation by families to delay is not primarily accounted for by parental socioeconomic status, nor by the assessed cognitive abilities of children, but rather is related to the values and goals of parents, to ecocultural opportunities and constraints, and the ability of parents to organize a meaningful, sustainable routine of everyday life that meets their goals. Teens vary widely in how they think about their own disabilities. Friendship patterns of teens are evaluated more positively by teens themselves than by parents or researchers, and teens with disabilities have their own definitions of friendship that focus largely on continuity of contact and familiarity. School experiences show a similar pattern: teens weigh school activities and acquaintances more positively than others weigh them on behalf of the teens. Longitudinal assessments of teen outcomes (ages 3 – 17) show that cognitive assessments over time do not predict adolescent or parent subjective well being, but socioemotional and daily routine measures do. Child assessments are stronger predictors of subsequent family accommodations than family accommodations are as predictors of later individual child measures. 3. The Head Start Early Literacy Study Children and parents in Head Start are from working poor families and face many problems when making the transitions from Head Start to kindergarten and first grade. Weisner participates in an NSF-funded study of a new curriculum and family support program for Head Start centers and families intended to enhance early literacy experiences for children and parents. The questions include: can the curriculum be effectively implemented and can it improve children’s competencies in pre-literacy? Can family visits further support parent involvement and child outcomes? We are analyzing interviews and home visits to parents done before and after the curriculum and family visits are done. What did parents believe and what did they practice with regard to home literacy? What was their experience of this intervention and how did it affect their practices and beliefs, if it did? Data from this experimental intervention, with both a curriculum and family arm, are currently being cleaned and analyzed. 4. Mixed Methods and Theory Weisner edited Discovering successful pathways in children's development: New methods in the study of childhood and family life which argues for the value of integrating qualitative and quantitative methods in human development for both basic research and for applied and policy work. He has collaborated on funded mixed methods studies with MDRC and others, including directing a core facility in the MR Center here at UCLA. He continues to work in the general field of culture and human development and has written papers on analyzing settings, on theory, and on methods in these fields. 5. The Local Knowledge/Evidence Framing Study With Naihua Duan, Richard Kravitz, and Saskia Subramanian, Weisner is collaborating in a study of how local knowledge might be brought together, and made readily available to practitioners for use in their clinical practices. This study, which has just been launched (October 2006), will use focus groups, in-depth qualitative informational conversations, and ethnography. 6. Family Obligation and Assistance among Adolescents from Mexican Backgrounds This proposal will focus on family obligation and assistance within Mexican immigrant families, which is a key aspect of family life among this population. The nature and changes in family obligation and assistance across the adolescent years will be examined, as will the implications of these issues for adolescents’ psychological, behavioral, and educational adjustment. Both parents and adolescents in 540 families will complete daily checklists for two weeks across the four years of high school in order to examine how parental experiences shape adolescents’ involvement in family assistance, and how adolescents balance their family obligations with other aspects of their lives. In addition, a stratified, randomly selected subset of these families will participate in in-depth, qualitative interviews that focus on the activities and routines of their everyday lives. 7. The Fieldwork and Qualitative Data Research Laboratory Weisner and Dr. Eli Lieber provide advice and services related to the collection, maintenance, and analysis of qualitative and mixed methods data. Currently, the Lab actively works with nearly every project being undertaken in the Center for Culture & Health, including the following: methods and data analysis collaboration for Browner’s studies of clinical research; the use of EthnoNotes for the Edgerton/Tucker study of mid-life adults with (with Dr. Cathy Matheson); interview content for the recent Latino Schooling study led by Professor Ron Gallimore; and database support and analysis for Cameron Hay’s study of UCLA clinic encounters. All of Weisner’s studies employ the EthnoNotes system for data analysis (e.g., New Hope, Early Literacy, and the Child study of disabled children). The fieldwork lab is working in the area of methods development and implementation of EthnoNotes, a web-based database system for the preparation, storage, coding, analysis and output of qualitative and quantitative data. This work includes making the EthnoNotes system widely available and accessible at low cost, consulting on the use of the system for a wide range of social science research studies, and disseminating information on its use. The Lab currently is funded by NICHD as a core facility within the MRRC. Weisner has ongoing collaborations across the Semel Institute with the Center for Community Health, with Naihua Duan (in the Center for Health Services), and the MRRC (Fieldwork lab core facility). Weisner is on the executive committee of the Culture, Brain, and Development program (CBD) housed in Anthropology and Psychology at UCLA (Patricia Greenfield, director) and has served on the research, education, and training committees of the CBD. He also has coordinated the core seminar of the CBD, and participated in conferences sponsored by the Foundation for Psychocultural Research. He participates in Anthropology Department activities as a joint appointment, including seminars and training activities there. External to UCLA, Weisner is a member of the research advisory board of Public/Private Ventures, a policy research organization based in Philadelphia. He also has participated as a member of the advisory group for several NIH-funded grants over the past five years, such as studies of family adaptation to mental health concerns in youth, effects on children and parents of moves out of poverty neighborhoods, and immigrant cultural communities’ children in middle schools in New York City. Weisner has served or now serves on advisory committees for research grants at a number of Universities and research institutes, including Northwestern University, Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation in NYC, Florida State University, UC Berkeley, USC, Harvard/MIT Joint Urban Center, NYU, and Vanderbilt University. Weisner has made presentations at NIMH, NIDA, and NICHD research conferences and training meetings (e.g. K-awardees, study section meetings on reviewing mixed methods studies and cultural research) the past five years, and has served on special study sections. He recently participated in developing NIDA recommendations for evaluation criteria for proposals emphasizing cultural issues and mixed methods. He prepared a course on integrated qualitative and quantitative methods for the CDC, and presented this course there. He is a Senior Program Advisor to the William T. Grant Foundation, and in that capacity works on grant reviews, program planning and Foundation initiatives, particularly in the areas of research on social settings and context, and culture. He is currently President of the Society for Psychological Anthropology, and as part of that role, is involved in the activities of the American Anthropological Association. He has been nominated as a candidate for President of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). |
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