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Christina Cross receives award from National Council on Family Relations for publication

Head shot of Christina Cross

Christina Cross, PhD, our recent postdoctoral fellow who has now joined the ranks as one of our faculty members, co-authored an article that has been awarded the Best New Professional Article Award from the National Council on Family Relations’ Men in Families Focus Group.  The article — “Nonresident Social Fathering in African American Single-Mother Families” — has been accepted in the Journal of Marriage and Family’s special issue on Transformative…

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Can India’s Health Information Management System (HMIS) data be relied upon for estimates of population-level birth and child mortality rates?

A series of graphs that compare neonatal mortality rates from HMIS administrative data to national survey data in India

This study is one of the first to compare facility-based, administrative health data on births and child deaths to birth and death vital statistics from the more commonly relied upon nationally representative surveys, such as the Sample Registration System and the National Family Health System, at national and state levels over a four-year period. Although the study authors (including Pritha Chatterjee, Harvard Bell Fellow Aashish Gupta, and HCPDS faculty member…

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JAMA study findings call for more targeted interventions in LMICS for malnutrition and infections for children under age 2, as well as for pregnant women

Newborn baby sleeps on the forearm of a man

An original investigation of 77 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) published in JAMA Network found that 82% of under 5 child deaths occurred before age 2, with over half occurring in the neonatal period. Authors include faculty member S (Subu) V Subramanian, visiting scientist Rockli Kim, and their colleagues Omar Karlsson and Andreas Hasman. The study also spotlights diarrhea and pneumonia as two significant causes for child death over 2…

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Better than average… study applies complex variance modelling to more accurately assess treatment effects of the Head Start program

Road sign that says "average"

When assessing the effectiveness of a large-scale, federally funded program such as Head Start—a program designed to better prepare children ages 3-5 from low-income families for school—it is limited to only look at the Average Treatment Effect given the “considerable systematic heterogeneity within population between individuals.” This study applies complex variance modelling, an extension of multilevel modelling, to capture the variance, as well as the mean, in order to shed…

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How does eviction during childhood impact cognitive development?

Children play a board game in the middle of moving

The urban children in this study published in Social Science & Medicine were evaluated at age 9 using four cognitive assessments. Those students who experienced eviction during middle childhood exhibited lower scores (as much as equal to a full year of schooling) than students who did not go through eviction. Authors of the study that examine the under-explored association between childhood eviction and cognitive development include Harvard Pop Center Director…

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Christina Cross wins prestigious award for paper that parses out racial/ethnic differences when looking at family structure & children’s education

Head shot of Christina Cross

A paper by Harvard Pop Center post-doctoral fellow Christina Cross, PhD, was selected by the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) as the winner of the 2020 Reuben Hill Award. Cross’s paper, which is being recognized for making a “substantial and significant contribution to family research and theory (with a requirement of theory development),” was selected by a committee that reviewed over 30 leading scholarly journals in the family field.…

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Christina Cross in The Harvard Gazette: “Why living in a two-parent home isn’t a cure-all for Black students”

Illustration of Christina Cross in The Harvard Gazette

Harvard Pop Center Postdoctoral Fellow Christina Cross, PhD, has penned an op-ed in The Harvard Gazette in which she shares her forthcoming research on why a two-parent household is not a panacea for better educational outcomes for low-income Black students. Dr. Cross points to President Biden’s proposed American Families Plan as an example of a policy that could better address inequalities in opportunity than policies anchored to a two-parent household…

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Sung S. Park in NYT “Family Caregivers Feel the Pandemic’s Weight”

headshot of Sung Park

Harvard Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work, Sung S. Park, PhD, shares findings of her study published in The Journals of Gerontology on the differences in mental and physical health among non-caregivers, short-term caregivers, and long-term caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic in this New York Times piece.

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First study to map child undernutrition in India by village shows greatest variation at these micro levels

Screenshot of website dashboard for villages in India

A study published in PNAS by Harvard Pop Center Visiting Scientist Rockli Kim, ScD, faculty member S V Subramanian, PhD, and colleagues that utilizes “state-of-the-art data science techniques” to map and predict child undernutrition across the nearly 600,000 villages in India now provides governments at the most local level with this critical information about their constituents. To learn more about the potential value of such breakthrough, precision mapping, read the…

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Study aims to advance prevention of HIV/AIDS among young women in low- and middle-income countries

Head shot of Chunling Lu and Subu Subramanian

Two researchers affiliated with the Harvard Pop Center (Chungling Lu, PhD, and S V Subramanian, PhD) and their colleagues assessed levels of knowledge of HIV/AIDS and associated socioeconomic disparities among young women between the ages of 15-24 using Demographic Health Surveys from 51 low- and middle-income countries completed between 2002–2018.  Their findings, published in JAMA Network Open, point to there being a need to increase knowledge of HIV/AIDS across this…

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