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Current and Past Family Research Scholars

Professor and Department Chair, Sociology
Care, Work and Family Policy Network
Family Research Scholar, 2006-07

Research:

Michelle Budig's research interests focus on gender, employment, labor markets, earnings, stratification, and family. Her research has appeared in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Social Problems, Gender & Society, and numerous other professional journals. Currently she is working on an NSF-funded project using multi-level models with cross-national data to estimate the effects of work-family reconciliation policies on the motherhood wage penalty. She is a past recipient of the World Bank/Luxembourg Income Study Gender Research Award and the Rosabeth Moss Kanter Award for Research Excellence in Families and Work.

As a Family Research Scholar, Budig worked on two projects which investigated how work-family reconciliation policies affect women's family formation patterns across twenty-two countries. Governments have enacted many of these policies to slow or reverse fertility decline, but little research has directly examined the effects of policies, such as paid maternity leave, publicly subsidized day care, or leave targeted for fathers, on women's fertility. The second project investigated the growing differences in family formation patterns among social groups in the United States. This research suggests that socioeconomic opportunity and race shape the “opportunity costs” associated with childbearing.

Associate Professor, Political Science and Public Policy
Family Research Scholar, 2006-07

Research:

Brenda Bushouse's research interests include early childhood policy, nonprofit governance and policymaking processes. In her 2009 book, Universal Preschool: Policy Change, Stability, and the Pew Charitable Trusts, she analyzed the creation of state-funded preschool programs in six states and explored the impact of foundation funding in state policymaking processes. 

In 2008, she was hosted by the New Zealand Ministry of Education through an Ian Axford Fellowship in Public Policy to study early childhood policy in New Zealand, which led to the publication of Early Childhood Education Policy in Aotearroa/New Zealand: The Creation of the 20 Hours (Free) Program (2008). She is currently exploring the use of network methodologies to understand how nonprofit organizations elevate policy ideas.

Professor, Psychological and Brain Sciences
Director of Faculty Equity and Inclusion, College of Natural Sciences
Family Research Scholar, 2006-2007 & 2012-2013

Research:

Nilanjana Dasgupta's research focuses on prejudice, stereotyping, and the self-concept, with special emphasis on the ways in which societal expectations unconsciously or implicitly influence people's attitudes and behavior toward others and, in the case of disadvantaged groups, influence their self-concept and life decisions. She has examined these issues in relation to race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, age and nationality.

She is particularly interested in identifying how implicit bias might be reduced by changing the structure of local environments and, in contrast, how such bias might get magnified by specific negative emotions. Recently, one strand of her research has begun to identify what factors help members of disadvantaged groups become resilient to negative stereotypes and successful despite those stereotypes versus what other factors make them vulnerable to negative stereotypes.

In her second year as a Family Research Scholar, Dr. Dasgupta developed a grant proposal for the project entitled, "The impact of same-sex peers on adolescent girls' interest in science and math." This grant proposal built on her prior work where she argued that although individuals' choice to pursue one academic or professional path over another may feel like a free choice, it is often constrained by subtle cues in achievement environments that signal who naturally belong there and who do not. Dr. Dasgupta used her theoretical model, the Stereotype Inoculation Model, to test whether contact with same-sex peers in science and math classrooms function as "social vaccines" who inoculate girls' academic self-concept against stereotype threat and increase their confidence and interest in science, technology, engineering and math (or STEM). This project particularly focused on adolescent girls in middle school and tested whether attending a single-sex school versus a co-ed school had different effects on adolescent girls' interest in STEM, their identification with it, self-efficacy, performance and career aspirations. She also compared whether girls of color versus White girls responded similarly or differently to same-sex learning environments in STEM.

Associate Professor, Clinical Nursing, Emory University
Family Research Scholar, 2006-07

Research:

As a 2006-2007 Family Research Scholar, Jennifer Foster wrote proposals for a two phase project to reduce maternal mortality in the Dominican Republic. The project included an assessment of barriers to acceptable quality prenatal care during the first phase, followed by prospectively testing the public health midwifery intervention of case management with linkage to delivery provider in a sample of adolescent pregnant girls in one province in the Dominican Republic. Dr. Foster is currently serving as a public health nurse-midwife with a PhD in cultural anthropology. Prior to her academic career, she practiced clinically as a nurse and nurse-midwife in medically underserved areas of Guatemala, Mississippi, Maryland, Hawaii (Molokai), and Massachusetts. Foster joined the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing at Emory University as an assistant professor in 2006, and has since become a fellow in the Center for Research for Maternal-Newborn Survival. She is currently conducting a NINR/NIH supported community based participatory research (CBPR) project with maternity nurses and community workers in the Dominican Republic. This study has trained nurses and community workers as researchers to hear and interpret community perceptions about the quality of maternity health services. Foster is also a member of the Collaborative Alliance within the Pan American Health Organization to Improve Maternal-Newborn Health in the Americas by Strengthening Nursing and Midwifery.

Associate Dean, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (Faculty Development)
Professor, Sociology
Family Research Scholar, 2006-07

Research:

A social demographer with an emphasis on race and ethnic stratification, family formation patterns and immigration, Dr. Jennifer Lundquist evaluates racial disparities along a variety of demographic outcomes, including marriage, family stability, fertility and health. Her work in this area extends to an exploration of the neighborhood effects of residential segregation as well as a re-evaluation of race relations from a social contact hypothesis perspective.

Lundquist's research seeks to uncover the relationship between U.S. community racial segregation and racial disparities. She also explores the socioeconomic similarities and differences between white and black women who are childless, mothers of only children, and mothers of two or more children.