The Child Development Supplement (CDS) is an integral and on-going component of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families that began in 1968. With data collected on the same families and their descendants for 41 waves over 52 years (as of 2020), PSID is a cornerstone for empirical social science research in the U.S. Through its long-term measures of economic and social wellbeing, and based on its weighted representative sample of U.S. families that now includes two major immigrant refresher samples, the study has advanced research on the dynamics of social, economic, demographic, and health processes and their interrelationships. Five waves of CDS have been conducted: three on the original cohort of children born between 1985 and 1997 (in 1997, 2002/2003, and 2007/2008) and two waves (in 2014 and 2019) on the next generation of PSID children who were born between 1997 and 2019.

This project has two specific aims. The first is to design and field a follow-up wave of CDS in 2021, collecting re-interview data on children aged 2-17 years who participated in CDS-19, through interviews with primary caregivers and older children aged 12-17 years. The second specific aim is to process, document, and distribute the new CDS-21 data, with scale composites, generated variables, and individual-level links to detailed school data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The 2021 wave of CDS will, in conjunction with data from CDS-14 and CDS-19, provide unique and valuable prospective panel data to study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown, and recession. The study will provide comprehensive and rich information on a large, nationally representative sample of children that includes an over-sample of African Americans and a new refresher sample of children in immigrant families. These data will be available free of charge through the PSID Online Data Center, which provides customized extracts and codebooks, detailed study documentation, and comprehensive user education and support.

Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias are estimated to be among the most costly health conditions in America, with the bulk of the costs stemming from the provision of long-term services and supports: that is, help with everyday activities, such as bathing, dressing, grooming, using the toilet, eating, and moving around. Family and friends provide most of this care, often at great financial, emotional, and physical expense to themselves. A strong support system — a cohesive network of family and friends coordinating and communicating to provide support to both the caregiver and the care recipient – can somewhat alleviate the burden, yet to date there is little research examining these support networks. This is surprising given that stronger networks are consistently associated with better health outcomes. This may be particularly true for caregivers: because social networks change along with life transitions, caregiving potentially puts caregivers at risk of social isolation and worsened health. The handful of prior studies on this topic have significant limitations: namely, they focus on populations outside the U.S. or on older adults. This will be the first study to collect data on the social networks of family caregivers in a nationally representative online panel study of adults in the U.S., age 18 and older.

Our aim is to identify family caregivers across the age spectrum to increase representativeness, measure extended perceived caregiver networks, and capture greater detail on caregiver network composition and structure (e.g. ‘weak’ ties, negative ties, frequency of contact, emotional closeness, or type of ties). We will examine common types of networks and their associations with a variety of measures of physical, mental, and social well-being, and we will test for potential mediating factors, including the caregiving context and care recipient health. Finally, we will examine how caregivers’ social networks change and how this change is associated with caregiver health over the caregiving cycle.

This work will help researchers and policymakers identify the network characteristics of caregivers that matter most for a variety of health and well-being outcomes over time. It is also a critical first step for collecting empirical data that can inform the development of caregiving interventions. These include technology-based interventions that provide personalized network visualizations to trigger strategies for altering networks (e.g., dropping ties, connecting disconnected ties, or spending more time with supportive network members) to improve the health and well-being not only of adults with dementia but also of their caregivers.

The intergenerational persistence of poor health and poverty and the quest to understand underlying processes underscore the importance of rich multigenerational data. Very few existing datasets contain comprehensive information on social, environmental, and biological factors over the life course and across generations; lack of such data has seriously limited attempts to identify the processes shaping health disparities, economic inequalities, and causal linkages between the two. The Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FF) is the longest running birth-cohort study in the U.S The study is based on a national probability sample and follows parents — both mothers and fathers — and their children who were born in 1998-2000. Based on birth statistics, the children in FF are now having children of their own. We are expanding the FF study by conducting a perinatal survey on the health of this third generation of children, early parenthood experiences of the second generation. We are examining the characteristics of households and families into which the third generation are born, as well as collecting biological specimens from the new children and their non-FF parents. The augmented data will have many unique and valuable features, including:

1. extensive data on three generations of families: children, parents, and grandparents;
2. data on siblings and half-siblings (in the third generation);
3. three generations of exposures and genetic and epigenetic data;
4. genetic data on trios (third generation children and both of their parents); and
5. comprehensive data on perinatal health (pre-pregnancy, prenatal, delivery, neonatal, and postpartum factors including breastfeeding and postpartum depression) and circumstances in the second and third generations.

The Fragile Families Third Generation study will facilitate novel and important analyses of intergenerational transmission of health, intergenerational relationships within families, and gene-environment effects on health. It will also provide an essential foundation for future third generation data collection at subsequent developmental transitions including school readiness and emerging adulthood.

The long-term goals of this research are to capitalize on existing investments in the Monitoring the Future (MTF) study – the only annual survey with measures of spanking and hitting a child – to rigorously surveil trends in parental physical violence and to examine risk factors for violence over time. The overall objectives in this project are to (1) examine trends in parental physical violence, including through the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) investigate whether concurrent or prospective risk factors for violence have remained constant or changed across recent decades, including during the pandemic. The total sample (n~18,300) will include parents from 29 consecutive cohorts, followed longitudinally, who reached the age of 35 year from 1993 (1st cohort) to 2021 (29th cohort). This project has three aims:

1. Examine the long-term trends of parental physical violence, using Joinpoint models;
2. Identify parental characteristics associated with the greatest risk for physical violence toward children, using longitudinal regression and path models; and
3. Determine whether – and in what ways – risk factors for violence have changed over time, using time-varying effect modeling. The successful completion of this R03 will contribute significantly to the field’s understanding of current trends and risk factors for violence.

This study is all-the-more timely due to the COVID-19 pandemic; the inclusion of data through 2022 will enable examination of changes in trends or risk factors associated with the pandemic.

Across the past five decades, data creation investments in the U.S. and Western Europe have spurred dramatic breakthroughs in the social and behavioral sciences. The creation of large scientific studies of human behavior and social experience in the general population form a crucial cornerstone of these investments. Because the data from these studies are so important for the construction and evaluation of public policies and programs to improve the health and wellbeing of the population, NICHD places a high scientific priority on research educational tools that significantly expand the scientific use of such data. The primary limitation of these research education efforts thus far is an exclusive focus on data from the U.S. population. This greatly restricts the ability to test the external validity of key findings, raising the possibility that even within the U.S. population findings from any particular study population may not apply to important sub-populations. Research education on data resources from populations living under circumstances quite different from the U.S. and Western Europe are urgently needed so that social and behavioral scientists can quickly and easily test the breadth of external validity of key findings as well as to advance understanding of these different populations.

We will leverage NICHD’s long-term investment in the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) in Nepal to achieve this high priority objective. We will implement a series of educational, research tool construction, and continuing education activities designed to significantly increase the quality and quantity of international population science. The CVFS is an excellent international population science training resource, featuring a 24-year whole-family panel study with many important characteristics. These include dynamic measures of child health, contraceptive use, mental health, and community context with both DNA and migrant interviews for all family members. We will use this special resource to launch a new multimedia educational program focused on international population science. The program will feature an integrated set of topical short courses, web-based access to those courses, education on high priority longitudinal research tools, innovative “always available” learning tools, and archived tutorials. The importance of international population research continues to grow as interconnections across populations increase. Dynamics of migration, commerce, digital media use, and violent conflict all increase the need for thorough scientific understanding of population dynamics in far-away settings. Our program will supply training in international population research skills to enable higher quality and quantity of research. The tools can be applied to advance science using repeated cross-sectional surveys, surveillance data, longitudinal panel studies, or random control trial studies. Our educational program will feature illustrations with the NICHD Population Dynamics Branch’s (PDB) highest scientific priorities: studying contraceptive use and non-use, health across the life course, and the role of genetic factors.

As international labor migration becomes a more common livelihood strategy globally, this widespread population and social change has profound demographic and health consequences, including for young children left behind by migrating parents or family members. Many children left behind receive remittance income from migrant parents or family members. However, identifying the effects of this additional income on children’s health is difficult in light of other important, concurrent migration-related household changes, such as changes in living arrangements due to parental absence. Moreover, prospective identification of children’s likelihood of having a migrant parent or family member and receipt of remittance is necessary to understand the population of children at risk, which has important implications for child health policies and programs. Studying the links between migration, remittances, and children’s health requires detailed measures over time. Therefore, the objective of the proposed research is twofold: first, to examine children’s risks of having a parent or household member migrate for work and receive remittance income, and second, to examine how remittance income affects the health of children in migrant-sending households while accounting for changes in household composition and wealth over time.

This project uses data from a panel study in a migrant-sending area that includes data on individuals, households, and communities. The availability of detailed migration, remittance, and child health data over time provides a unique opportunity to study these questions in three specific aims. The first research aim will use prospective data about children and their parents, households, and communities to estimate children’s risks of parental migration and receipt of remittances. This aim will build knowledge about how children in migrant-sending and non-migrant households differ, informing both public health programs in migrant-sending areas and studies of migration and child health. The second research aim will improve upon prior estimates of the effects of remittance income on the health of children left behind by appropriately accounting for individual and household-level factors that shape the relationships between migration, remittances, and child health over time. The third research aim will investigate the whether and how the relationship between remittance income and child health varies over time and by gender in early childhood. These analyses will use advanced epidemiologic methods and event history modeling to study this complex phenomenon.

Migration and its related social, demographic, and economic changes are increasingly important considerations for policymakers and others seeking to improve children?s health. This research will enhance our understanding of the mechanisms through which parental migration shapes the health of children left behind, in particular, remittance income; identify promising avenues for future research in this area; and generate rigorous evidence for effective child health interventions.

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) was founded at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research in 2019. The mission of CID is to: produce cutting-edge research on social inequality, especially wealth inequality, train the next generation of inequality scholars, and build data infrastructure and increase data accessibility. We pursue these aims as an interdisciplinary group of social scientists working in a collaborative space. Our team includes experts on topics such as wealth and income inequality, economic mobility, economic history, economic sociology, and housing. Together, we examine how between-group inequalities are shaped by geographic, political, and institutional contexts.

This project will continue the collection of data on children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that is currently funded under NICHD Grant R01HD52646. The existing grant supported the PSID Child Development Supplement, which followed a cohort of children in PSID families who were 0?12 years of age in 1997 through three waves of data collection and focused on understanding the socio-demographic, psychological, and economic aspects of childhood in an on-going nationally-representative longitudinal study of families. By 2014, all of the children in the original cohort will have reached adulthood, and a new generation of children will have replaced them in PSID families. Our goal is to collect information in 2014 on all children aged 0?17 years in this new generation, shifting the orientation from a cohort study to one that obtains information on the childhood experiences of all children in PSID families, who will become primary respondents in the Core PSID when they form their own economically-independent households. These new data will support studies of health, development, and well-being in childhood; the relationship between children?s characteristics and contemporaneous family decisionmaking and behavior; and the effects of childhood factors on subsequent social, demographic, economic, and health outcomes over the entire lifecourse for these individuals as they are followed into the future as part of PSID. The specific aims are to: (1) Design and field a new PSID Child Development Supplement (CDS) in 2014, collecting data on approximately 6,800 children aged 0?17 years through interviews with primary caregivers (typically the mother) and with older children themselves (aged 9?17 years); (2) Collect weekday and weekend time diaries and obtain saliva samples (for subsequent genetic analysis) for all children and their primary caregivers; and (3) Process, document, and distribute the new CDS data, with scale composites, time diary recodes, and links to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) and Private School Survey (PSS). The new CDS will provide rich data on a large, nationally-representative sample of children that includes an over-sample of African American children and a representative sample of immigrant children. CDS data will be available free of charge through the PSID Online Data Center, which provides customized extracts and codebooks using a cross-year index of variables across all waves as well as other variable-selection options.

The Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA) promotes new research on the demography and economics of aging across four signature themes: chronic disease and disability; life course determinants of late-life health and well-being; aging, genetics, and social science; and economics of savings and retirement. The Center also promotes the wide use of Michigan’s key aging-related data collections, notably the Health and Retirement Study and the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. In addition, the Center fosters national and international collaboration through coordination of several research networks, funds pilot projects, distributes research findings by affiliates, and supports a secure statistical enclave for access to restricted aging-related data. The Center provides coordinating support to all NIA Centers and collaborates with the Population Reference Bureau to widely disseminate all Centers’ research findings.

The overarching goals of this project are:  (1) to promote scientific inquiry into late-life disability trends and dynamics, their antecedents and correlates, and disparities therein and (2) to advance study of the social and economic consequences of late-life disability for individuals, families, and society. To achieve these aims, project has the following goals: Collect data in person from the original NHATS cohort annually in 2014-2018 (Rounds 4-8), including enhanced disability protocol and supplemental questions on consequences including subjective and economic well-being, living and care arrangements, and quality of end of life; biologic samples, some to be assayed to foster study of the link between disability and frailty, and others to be stored for future use; use of rehabilitation services and its link to disablement, and the service environment and related amenities that support older adults in retirement and senior community settings; and add modules submitted by the broader research community that provide additional innovative content and opportunities for harmonization.