Questions for Expert Panel:

• Given our mission, what are the most important scientific opportunities that the DBSB should try to pursue in the next four years?
• Given our mission, what are the most important public health issues that the DBSB should address in the next four years? ["Public health" can be interpreted broadly to refer to the status and well-being of individuals, families, communities and populations.]
• Given the above, which areas of the DBSB's portfolio have progressed to a point where program-initiated efforts to stimulate the field, or to provide set-aside funding, are no longer needed?

Themes

The Branch and the Expert Panel identified three broad substantive areas and five cross-cutting issues that will provide a framework for the planning process. These themes and issues were informed by:

• Input from 67 members of the scientific community received as the result of an email solicitation sent to grantees and other members of the scientific communities served by the Branch;
• Discussions at a DBSB Branch retreat November 22, 2005; and
• Discussion with members of the Expert Panel January 13, 2006 and subsequent comments received by email.

Although scientific content areas are divided into three categories for convenience, these categories are considered interdependent and their interactions of high interest and importance. The bullets within the categories illustrate cross-area connections.

Also, the Branch and its Expert Panel view the substantive areas and cross-cutting issues described below as of equal importance for consideration in the long-range planning efforts. Although the substantive areas receive most attention in many contexts, how the Branch goes about supporting science and disseminating results is critical to its success.

1. Substantive areas

FAMILY CHANGE AND VARIATION

• Family formation: Trends in fertility, cohabitation and marriage; causes and consequences; couple relationships, low fertility, birth timing, infertility and adoption.
• Family stability, union structure and family processes: Trends, causes and consequences; cohabiting and marital families, divorce, effects on children and adults; inequalities within families
• Sexual behavior: Trends, causes and consequences at the population, community, couple and individual level, causes and consequences of unintended pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, HIV/AIDS and other STDs.
• Intergenerational and within-generation processes: Resource sharing and allocation, intergenerational transmission of resources, social status, behavior, and values; family relationships within and across households, especially siblings.
• Family and health: effects of family structure, resources and processes on adult/child health and development; effect of individual health on union structure, change and processes.
• Socio-spatial dimensions of fertility, families and households. transnational families.
• Cross-cutting issues: interrelationships of family with religion, gender, public policy and practice (e.g., incarceration), ethnic and racial diversity, immigration, new technologies; developmental perspectives on family formation and change, with emphasis on transitional life stages such as the transition to adulthood.

BIOSOCIAL LINKAGES & HEALTH

• Family and intergenerational influences on health and development over the life course; biological, socioeconomic, cultural, and psychological mechanisms (e.g., nutrition, poverty, work/time, health practices, gender, religion, self-regulation).
• Consequences of health trajectories for human capital, productivity, socioeconomic attainment, family formation, and family processes.
• Social and environmental contextual effects on health/mortality, e.g., neighborhood, social networks, public policy, economic opportunity; linkages to biological pathways.
• Socioeconomic and cultural pathways in health disparities, e.g. health care access and use, poverty, stress, behavioral norms.
• Migration and health: immigrant health, health literacy, health selectivity in migration, effects of migration and movement on individual and population health (e.g., spread of disease).
• Interrelationships of individual-level health/mortality and health behaviors with population processes and population health.
• Cross cutting issues: linking theoretical and empirical research; methods; measurement; interdisciplinary strategies; integration of biomarkers and spatial methods; comparative research; developmental perspectives, with emphasis on transitional periods such as young adulthood.

POPULATION DIVERSITY & DISTRIBUTION

• Causes and consequences of racial and ethnic disparities/differences: health, fertility, socioeconomic, cultural, discrimination, structural factors (e.g. in labor and housing markets, public policies), criminal justice system; intergenerational processes that transmit disparities; religious diversity, residential mobility, migration, and immigration.
• Consequences of increasing racial/ethnic diversity for intermarriage, race relations, cultural norms.
• Causes and consequences of migration; effects of immigration on internal migration; effects of migration on health, socioeconomic status, family networks, the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases; attention to refugee movements (political or natural disasters); origin and destination studies.
• Social and economic effects of immigration on sending and receiving communities: remittances, intergenerational and family supports; development of "transnational communities"; patterns of immigrant settlement in US; assimilation of immigrants; effects at community and national level (e.g., reshaping national institutions and health, population growth); why has US more successfully assimilated high immigration?
• Interrelations among population, health and the environment, including migration, family and intergenerational factors in land use, and child/adult/population health, including global warming and its effects on mortality, zoonotic spillover and its amplification in human populations, local ecologies and human health.
• Consequences of the spatial distribution/location of populations; spatial variations in health, fertility, poverty.

2. Cross-Cutting Issues

INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH

• Needs and opportunities for interdisciplinary collaborations to address high-priority research areas.
• Strategies for facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration; overcoming review barriers; overcoming barriers from disciplinary differences in modes of discovery, theory, standards of evidence and disciplinary structures that inhibit collaboration.

INNOVATION IN THEORY AND METHODS

• Relates to all substantive areas; following are examples not clearly implied elsewhere.
• Improved theory and measurement for studying socio-spatial aspects of population processes (e.g., conceptualization and measurement of neighborhood; improved theory to drive spatial applications; methods for multi-level modeling and spatial regression; application of spatial statistics to social epidemiology).
• Innovations in creating theoretical and methodological linkages between biology and population health and stratification processes.
• Network approaches to understanding change and variation in demographic processes and health; sexual networks; social networks and diffusion of change; effects of networks on health and social attainment.
• Improved measurement and theory on the relations between time and population processes, including insights from historical research and methods, time use measurement, and the effects of demographic and economic change on temporal dimensions of lives.
• Innovative development and application of experimental and quasi-experimental designs; interventions as methodological tools; alternatives to randomized trials for identifying causal effects, rigorous evaluation of these methods taking into account potential behavioral responses by subjects.

DATA

• DBSB investments in large data collection projects; balance of large-scale nationally representative datasets, smaller focused data collections, and secondary analysis; balance of investments in large data collection projects; issues of cost containment.
• Data sharing: achievements to date and remaining challenges; strategies for facilitating data sharing and ensuring continuing access to data; strategies for collaborating on data sharing with other agencies and the medical sciences.
• Balance of investment in U.S. and non-U.S. datasets. Coverage and methods issues in light of increasing population diversity, immigration, and new technologies.
• Special features of data collection investments: biomarkers, longitudinal designs, genetically informed designs, spatial dimensions, mixed methods, ethical and privacy implications of special features and linked data sets.
• Measurement and data quality; validation studies.

TRANSLATION

• Potential for expanding range of intervention studies supported by the branch.
• Potential for increased investment in dissemination of basic research findings relevant to policy and of interest to the public.
• Other means of improving, speeding translation of basic research knowledge into policy and practice.

TRAINING

• Current training investments of the program, by mechanism; balance of core training in demographic research and training in other fields.
• Interdisciplinary research training, including training biomedical scientists and Ob-Gyns and other medical professionals in behavioral/social science; and behavioral/social scientists in biomedical sciences..
• Strategies for creating partnerships between university training programs and with community organizations.
• Relative importance of investments in various stages of training: undergraduate, graduate, post-doctoral, career development, mentoring.
• Training minority researchers.
• International reach of training programs.
• Implications of tight funding lines for training in areas of importance to DBSB.