Using Census and Survey Data to Estimate Poverty and Inequality for Small Areas (PDF) by Alessandro Tarozzi and Angus Deaton (June 2007, Princeton University Research Program in Development Studies)

Mothers’ Residential Mobility Following the Birth of a Child (PDF; Fragile Families Research Brief, Princeton Center for Research on Child Wellbeing)

The Effects of Work-Conditioned Transfers on Marriage and Child Well-Being: A Review by Jeffrey Grogger & Lynn Karoly (NBER Working Paper No. 13485, October 2007)

Providing information about public health and social services to poor populations may increase usage, according to a study conducted in India (Johns Hopkins Medicine press release).

Citation: Priyanka Pandey, Ashwini R. Sehgal, Michelle Riboud, et al. (2007). Informing resource-poor populations and the delivery of entitled health and social services in rural India: A cluster randomized controlled trial. JAMA 298:1867-1875. (Available online to the Penn State community)

The Kaiser Daily HIV/AIDS Report summarizes two recent PLoS Medicine articles examining the links between HIV/AIDS and development issues like poverty and food insecurity.

The Council of Science Editors organized a Global Theme Issue on Poverty and Human Development, in which science journals throughout the world simultaneously publish articles on this topic on October 22. 235 journals from developed and developing countries participated in the theme issue, including American Journal of Public Health, Health Education and Behavior, Journal of Adolescence, Reproductive Health Matters, and Science.

Penn State users can use the University Libraries Citation Linker to retrieve copies of individual articles.

Foreign-born Latino workers moved out of the low end of wage distribution into the middle between 1995 and 2005, according to an analysis of CPS data by the Pew Hispanic Center.

Citation: Rakesh Kochhar (2007, August). 1995–2005: Foreign-Born Latinos Make Progress on Wages. Pew Hispanic Center. (Available online)

Unnatural Causes, a 7-part documentary series about socioeconomic and racial disparities and health, will air on PBS in 2008 and will also be available on DVD. For more about the project and the documentary, see the Unnatural Causes Web site.

Low-income students who attend urban public high schools generally do just as well as private-school students with similar backgrounds, according to a study released today (AP). The study is based on analysis of the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988-2000 (NELS88).

Citation: Harold Wenglinsky (2007). Are Private High Schools Better Academically Than Public High Schools? Washington, DC: Center on Education Policy. (Available online)

Researchers are looking at racism and discrimination as an explanation for black men’s health disparities which cannot be explained by socioeconomic status alone, according to an article in the Baltimore Sun. Vickie Mays at the UCLA Center on Research, Education, Training and Strategic Communication on Minority Health Disparities has conducted research about the body’s physiological response to stress, such as that resulting from discrimination, and health. Other researchers, like George Howard of the University of Alabama Birmingham’s biostatistics department, say that while racism plays a role in health disparities, socioeconomic status is the primary cause.

Citations:

Vickie M. Mays, Susan D. Cochran, and Namdi W. Barnes (2007). Race, race-based discrimination, and health outcomes among African Americans. Annual Review of Psychology, 58, 201-225.

George Howard, Darwin R. Labarthe, Jianfang Hu, Sarah Yoon, and Virginia J. Howard (2007). Regional differences in African Americans’ high risk for stroke: The remarkable burden of stroke for southern African Americans. Annals of Epidemiology, 9, 689-696.

In a new book, a Princeton University sociology professor and graduate student examine the challenges faced by the near poor—working families and individuals who are above the poverty line and thus unqualified for most government aid, but struggle to pay for necessities—and recommend policies to help them. The scholars say that this “missing class” has been ignored by research, except by research on the medically uninsured. (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Citation: Newman, Katherine S. and Victor Tan Chen (2007). The missing class: Portraits of the near poor in America. Boston: Beacon Press.

The following new reports on education research supported by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation are available online:

• A child’s-eye view of social difference

• A review of research on the links between education and poverty
• Children researching links between poverty and literacy
• Educational relationships outside school
• Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage
• Mapping the alternatives to permanent exclusion
• School exclusions: Learning partnerships outside mainstream education
• The impact of poverty on young children’s experience of school