Distinguished Professor Greg J. Duncan Promotes Inter-disciplinary Research on Children’s Development
Distinguished Professor
Irvine, Calif., October 1, 2008
Greg J. Duncan arrived this summer from Northwestern University, where he was the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Human Development and Social Policy. An economist, Duncan has compiled a long history of research on poverty and welfare dynamics and their links to children’s and adult’s developmental outcomes.
For Duncan, the move to Irvine continues a long evolution from the economics of human capital to a much broader, truly inter-disciplinary perspective on children’s development. In his view, no single discipline monopolizes conceptual and methodological insights in this field of research, but there has been disappointing little collaboration among the relevant social-science disciplines.
Duncan’s formative interdisciplinary moments came over the course of his many meetings with the Social Science Research Council's Working Group on Communities, Neighborhoods, Family Processes and Individual Development. Launched in 1989 as part of SSRC's initiative on the underclass, this working group brought him into sustained contact with a stimulating set of developmental psychologists and sociologists. Group interactions forced him to explain and reflect on the economic and policy underpinnings of links between child development and neighborhood and family processes, and taught him approaches and insights from these other disciplines. Working with SSRC group members Larry Aber and Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Duncan co-edited the two-volume Neighborhood Poverty (1997).
An even more ambitious interdisciplinary network – the NICHD Child and Family Well-Being Research Network – was launched in 1993. Brooks-Gunn also belonged to this Network and joined Duncan in bringing together twelve groups of researchers working with 10 different data sets to investigate the effects of early childhood income effects on later attainment, behavior, and health. This work was published in Consequences of Growing Up Poor (1997).
Most recently, Duncan has worked with members of the Center for the Analysis of Pathways from Childhood to Adulthood (CAPCA), an NSF-funded Developmental Sciences Center housed at the University of Michigan, which has brought together investigators from 20 multi-disciplinary national and international longitudinal projects to work collaboratively on analyses aimed at resolving some of the key issues about how children's environments affect their development. Some of this work led to the article “School Readiness and Later Achievement,” which was published in a recent issue of Developmental Psychology and showed how important concrete kindergarten-entry math and reading skills were for later school achievement.
Duncan’s other current projects include re-interviewing families in the Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. In MTO, poor families from public housing projects in five of our nation's largest cities were offered a chance to enter a program that facilitates moves to low-poverty neighborhoods. A second project has added a developmental component to a randomized antipoverty experiment in Milwaukee called New Hope. Beginning in the early 1990s, New Hope offered low-income families in two poor areas of Milwaukee the chance of a "contingent social contract" — work 30 hours per week and receive a generous set of supports (a wage subsidy, childcare, health insurance and, if needed, a temporary community service job). Understanding how this program affects family functioning and child development has been the goal of an eclectic interdisciplinary group from the MacArthur Foundation’s Network on Successful Pathways Through middle Childhood.
As current President of the Population Association of America and incoming President of the Society for Research on Child Development, Duncan struggles to balance his teaching, administrative and research obligations. With regard to the latter two, Duncan says “the only thing I really want to run…are regressions.”
