This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Christopher Wildeman at Duke University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining how mass incarceration has shaped the use of violence in families and what the fallout of this historic period of punishment and imprisonment can teach us about the social control of violence. Extending innovative quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal the dynamic relationship between the most common acts of violence and societal efforts to prevent and respond to them, this work is designed to inform a next generation of public safety strategies.
To deliver rapid insight for transforming public policy, the project focuses on capturing the richest possible insight on violence from already-collected data and rendering it ready for scholarly, policymaker, and lay audience use. Applying novel methods with secondary data from three large-scale studies, this work addresses three research aims: (1) to investigate how understandings of public and private spaces and behaviors shape child maltreatment and partner violence in a time of mass incarceration; (2) to identify family-level patterns of child maltreatment and partner violence in families in which parents are and are not involved with the criminal justice system; and (3) to examine how local-, family-, and individual-level factors shape child maltreatment and partner violence in affected families, including whether and how street and carceral violence spill over into parenting and partner relationships. Building on the investigators’ prior research on mass incarceration and family life, this project applies latent variable methods alongside structured, inductive qualitative analysis to capture complex and difficult-to-measure experiences of interpersonal violence. This work extends methods for the study of charged physical and social acts (such as violence in families) in ways that reveal and respond to the subjective meanings ascribed by those who experience them. Such work promises a richer public understanding of private life in vulnerable and heavily system-involved families—one that better accounts for the social hiddenness that shapes how family dynamics (violent and otherwise) surface in research. Findings from this research are intended to contribute to a more robust science of interpersonal violence.
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.
