This project is funded from the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Sites program in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE). It has both scientific and societal benefits, and it integrates research and education. U.S. families are changing, reflecting the rapid economic, political, demographic, and technological transformation of society and forecasting the future. These changes can be seen in how adults partner and have children as well as evolving norms of gender relations, children's experiences, and extended networks of support and obligation. Changes in family life is, in turn, intricately related to the diversification of the U.S. population as a result of increased immigration over many decades coupled with differential fertility across racial/ethnic groups. In many ways, changes in family behaviors are adaptive for all Americans. The implications of these changes, however, play out differently across racial/ethnic groups. To understand how family change is differentially experienced across diverse segments of the U.S. population, how racial/ethnic diversity accelerates or slows family change, and how racialized family change reflects, reinforces, and reduces broader patterns of inequality and discrimination, the field of family demography needs to train and support a new generation of scholars who can produce theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous knowledge and use it to inform policy and practice. The Race, Ethnicity, and Demography of U.S. Families Program at the University of Texas at Austin aims to explore these questions.
This REU site is an eight-week summer program designed to help students develop research skills and technical abilities in family demography and quantitative analysis, and to prepare them for graduate study or employment following graduation. Using a team-based pedagogical approach based at the Population Research Center (PRC) of the University of Texas Austin, this site will select top students and expose them to the scientific study of demography, race/ethnicity, and families, and train them in data analysis, including working with large data sets, estimating regressions and population forecasts, and guide them in report writing. Students will be taught and mentored by top scholars at the PRC, assisting them as they develop their specific research interests. Students will also work with scholars at Child-Family Research Partnership (CFRP) and the Texas Demographic Center, local- and state-level research institutes that conduct demographic research used to create effective and targeted public policy. By the end of the summer, students will complete an independent research product, either a research paper, which can be presented at a national academic conference or a policy brief, which can be presented to local stakeholders. Students will also participate in workshops designed to prepare them for graduate school and/or professional employment in the data analytics field. Taken together, this program will help develop and support research on family change and diversify the next generation of scholars conducting basic and applied research in an array of professional settings.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
