Fertility and Family Planning - Casterline, McCarthy, Walker
Families and Households - McLanahan, Huston
Well-being of Children (Birth through Adolescence) - Huston, Currie, McLanahan
Immigration and Population Movement - Hirschman, Waters
Population and Environment - Gutmann, Entwisle, Foster
Mortality and Health - Lee, Palloni
AIDS - Dolcini, Dodoo, Morris
Innovative Methodologies - Morris, Goldstein, Walker
Formal Demography - Goldstein, Palloni
Culture - Hirsch, Casterline
Biodemography - Menken, Haaga
Translational Research - McCarthy, Haaga, Michael
Training - Palloni, Menken, Goldstein
Race and Ethnicity - Waters, Dodoo, Hirschman
Health Disparities- Currie, Foster
Intergenerational Research - Lee, McLanahan, Michael
Social and Economic Inequality - Yu Xie, Mouw
Spatial Demography - Entwisle, Gutmann, Mouw
Technological Change - Yu Xie
Sexuality - Michael, Hirsch, Dolcini

Fertility and Family Planning - Casterline, McCarthy, Walker

1. Maintain the focus on integrating "parenting and partnering"
   • Partnership status of parents
   • Causes and consequences of nonmarital childbearing
   • Effects of childbearing on partnerships
   • Non-biological aspects of parenting
   
   
2. Continue research on unintended pregnancy
   • Meanings of terms: wanted, intended, planned
   • Consequences of unintended pregnancy for children, parents, families
   • Effects of socialization on planning orientations, behaviors
   
   
3. Research on fertility motivation, decision-making
   • Study in context of couple
   • Study motives, expected values of childbearing, and actual values experienced
   • What future considerations influence decisions?
   • Provide a larger social context
   
   
4. Male reproductive behavior and fertility
   
   
5. Research on contraception
   • Barriers to use
   • Cultural factors, women's power, service delivery/organization/financing
   
   
6. Research on access to abortion
   
   
7. Study low fertility regimes
   • Determinants of post-transition fertility levels; need integrated models of causal mechanisms
   • Consequences of variation in fertility levels, timing, other characteristics
   • Improve forecasting
   • Effectiveness of policies to raise fertility
   • Highlight long-term dynamics of fertility change, especially at the macro level
   • Highlight a broader, more global perspective on fertility change
   
   
8. Timing of childbearing
   • More rigorous research on consequences for children and parents
   • Study adolescent reproductive behavior in a variety of settings
   • Study fertility at the end of the life span
   • Delay of fertility: role of assisted reproductive technologies?
   • Study the biology of age-related fecundability declines
   
   
9. Fertility and inequality
   • Effects of wealth and poverty of collectivities on fertility
   • Effects of fertility differentials on the distribution of wealth, poverty
   
   
10. Increase emphasis on effects of:
    • Gender construction and gender stratification
    • Culture, meaning of dimensions of sexuality
    • Political forces
    • Globalization
    • Race and ethnicity
    
    
11. Study how discourse, implicature, innuendo enters into descriptions of fertility practices; impact on research
    
    
12. Improve measurement of subjective phenomena
    
    
13. Impact of immigration on fertility at aggregate level
    • Are immigrant fertility levels converging?
    • Highlight fertility changes in sending countries
    
    

Families and Households - McLanahan, Huston

1. Study new family types
   • Prevalence, incidence, stability, resources, organization, meanings
   • Determinants of family structure
   • Study variation within family types (e.g., cohabitation)
   • Status of women in context of family change (i.e., divorce)
   • Stress role of internal migration on extended and traditional families
   
   
2. Father's roles in families
   • Content, meaning of fatherhood
   • Influence of relationship to mother
   
   
3. Impact of public policy on:
   • Fertility
   • Family formation and stability
   • Parental involvement
   
   
4. Time use in families
   
   
5. Encourage new theoretical paradigms
   • Encourage intergenerational perspectives
   • Encourage evolutionary perspectives
   
   
6. Improve understanding of racial/ethnic variations in and the influence of immigration on marriage, cohabitation, fertility, intergenerational relations and family processes
   
   
7. Study the meanings of family forms, behaviors, and relationships to individuals
   
   
8. Inequality and family/household formation
   • Determinants and consequences
   
   
9. Stress work in developing countries
   
   
10. Understand role of culture
    
    
11. Gender
    • Focus on opportunity structures, not just meanings and norms

Well-being of Children (Birth through Adolescence) - Huston, Currie, McLanahan

1. Investigate intervening processes linking family structure and child outcomes
   • Early parent-child relationships, changes in parental relationships across family types
   • Study effects on children at different ages
   • Focus on new family structures
   • How changes in family structure affect family resources, parenting
   • Child health effects on family
   
   
2. What fosters well-being of children/adults within family types?
   • Single-father families deserve increased focus
   
   
3. How do non-family structures (schools, programs) affect child well-being?
   • Describe time spent in these, organization, stability, resources provided
   • Differences across class, race, ethnicity in use
   • Parental decisions affecting use
   • What are the informational structures that parents use in making choices
   • Need more research on the institutional and physical environments affecting children
   
   
4. Resource distribution to children in various types of families
   • How decisions are made
   • Impact of transfers of money vs. restricted-purpose subsidies
   • How resources are used and how that affects development
   • How does parent investment behavior affect parenting?
   • How do grandparents and the extended family fit into child well-being?
   
   
5. Impact of public policies/interventions
   • Child support enforcement (e.g., impact on family resources, family interactions, relationships with non-resident parents)
   • Effect of public assistance programs and how they are delivered on children in poor families
   • Use experimental designs to measure impact
   • Study cost-effectiveness of interventions
   • Comparative research needed
   
   
6. Children in poor families
   • Impact of perceptions of inequality, unequal opportunity
   • Need to broaden the definition of "poor"
   
   
7. Parental employment and child care
   • Effects of maternal/paternal employment on resource distribution, power in family
   • Impact of employment schedules, attributes on family functioning, well-being
   • Child care cost, amount, quality; impact on child well-being and parental employment
   • Cost-benefit analyses of child care, including impact on children, parents
   • Impact of parental knowledge, beliefs on child care decisions
   • Need time-use studies, including not only how much, but how time used
   
   
8. Address behavioral threats to child health (e.g., injuries, obesity, smoking, unprotected sex)
   • Establish basic facts regarding contributing factors
   • Evaluate the efficacy of interventions
   • Need more research on the effect of education, abuse, and delinquency on children
   • How does parental incarceration and incarceration of children affect children over the life course?
   
   
9. Immigration and multi-culturalism
   • Need comparative studies
   • Why do immigrant children fare better?
   • What skills do children need to function in a multi-cultural world?
   
   
10. Measurement
    • Study validity, reliability, and interrelationships of measures of child well-being
    • Need better age-specific measures
    
    
11. Middle childhood and adolescence as factors in the transition to adulthood
    
    
12. Life cycle ramifications of well-being
    
    

Immigration and Population Movement - Hirschman, Waters

1. Strengthen theory/data in migration research
   • Develop theories that are cumulative
   • Develop consensus on data needs
   • Focus on migration in relation to the life course
   
   
2. Emphasize macro-level theory, analysis in migration research
   • Draw from human ecology tradition
   • Study the characteristics of places that affect migration flows
   • Integrate migration research with urban studies
   • Integrate micro- and macro-level approaches
   
   
3. Study sending as well as receiving populations
   • Measure migrant selectivity, role of selectivity in observed relationships at destination
   • Experimental designs stressing migrant selectivity
     Create more models for studying selectivity (e.g., Mexican Migration Project)
   • Study the circular nature of immigration
   • Study trans-nationalism
   
   
4. Study effects of migration on sending and receiving areas
   • Study positive as well as negative effects
   • Economic benefits of migrants
   • Impact of immigration on income inequality
   • Assimilation and incorporation of immigrants - comparative research important
   • Role of migration in disease spread
   • Support historical studies of migration
   
   
5. Consequences of geographic distribution of immigrants
   • Consider legal status (e.g. effects of concentration of illegals or non-citizens in neighborhoods)
   • Implications of new settlement patterns in rural areas for immigrants and receiving areas
   
   
6. Develop innovative strategies to study illegal immigration
   
   
7. Study the impact of policies on immigration via cross-national research
   
   
8. Study how immigration affects changes in race/ethnicity
   
   
9. Encourage work on internal migration
   • Encourage data sources (e.g. Panel Study of Income Dynamics)
   • Internal migration important around the globe
   
   

Population and Environment - Gutmann, Entwisle, Foster

1. Study the ways in which environmental quality affects population processes and health
   
   
2. Study water use (including use of ground and coastal waters)
   
   
3. Study population-environment relationships in urban settings
   
   
4. Expand areas studied to include Africa and Europe
   
   
5. Continue practice of supporting long-term case studies with interdisciplinary teams
   • Give priority to interdisciplinary projects (natural and social scientists)
   • 0Spport cross-training between natural and social sciences
   
   
6. Develop ways to work across different levels of analysis (e.g., individual, family, region)
   • Integrate micro- with macro-level
   • Similar issues for differences in scales of time
   • Scale-dependency
   • Relate to human ecology theories, approaches
   
   
7. Focus on the interaction between individual behavior and local environmental conditions
   • Combine data on village institutions, governance with household data to study management of common resources
   
   
8. Study the social and demographic sustainability of communities, in the context of economic, physical, and environmental aspects of sustainability
   
   
9. Study climatic or environmental "surprises" and relationship to demographic change
   • Need mechanisms to launch studies quickly
   • How do we conceptualize and study such events?
   
   
10. Measure the distributional effects of environmental resources (e.g., does loss of forest cover disproportionately affect the poor?)
    
    
11. Study environmental effects of settlement patterns (e.g., urban sprawl, spatial mismatch of housing, industry, residential segregation and environmental toxins)
    • Study decisions regarding where people live
    • Study the effects of the natural environment on populations
    
    
12. Stress training in environmental sciences and not just demography
    
    
13. Encourage historical approaches to population and environment
    
    
14. Avoid over-reliance on hierarchical nested models; think about determinants that are "out of the box," spatially remote (i.e., the New York Stock Exchange)
    
    

Mortality and Health - Lee, Palloni

1. Biodemography of health and mortality
   • Genetic markers for risk and environmental influences on gene expression
   • Neurophysiological, hormonal responses to environmental stimuli; role in health disparities
   • Need biomarkers, but also proper study designs to understand environmental effects, interactions
   • Develop statistical methods for clustered hazard models; accounting for genetic and physiological variation among individuals
   • Need to examine infectious diseases as well as chronic conditions
   
   
2. Life time pathways
   • Early life impacts on later health: is one stage of development key?
   • How do health-wealth/productivity feedbacks over the life course feed into the observed relationship between socioeconomic status and health?
   • Need longitudinal studies with good health data; explore study and data linkages
   
   
3. Social contexts
   • Address conceptualization, measurement, and modeling of social context effects
   • Need data on context over time
   • Need to specify concrete mediating mechanisms between context and health
   • Need studies of urbanization in regard to health and mortality in developing countries
   
   
4. Integrated multi-state models and assessment of risk profiles
   • Develop integrated representations of knowledge about health conditions, integrating across studies with different outcomes (e.g., illness, treatment, death)
   
   
5. Advances in morbidity and mortality models
   • Study markers for health status and their ability to predict mortality
   • Model health status and predictors of health transitions over different ages
   • Develop models for forecasting mortality, health, disability for populations
   • Develop better methodologies for data linkage
   • Need structural approaches to explaining health and mortality
   
   
6. Investigating patterns of aggregate causes of deaths
   • Cross-national comparisons of deaths by age and cause; insights for aging processes, impacts of health care system
   
   
7. Special studies on health status, disability, and mortality of migrants
   • Studies of migrant selectivity and how to account for its effect
   • Does assimilation affect health and through what mechanisms?
   • Study populations at origin and destination; use sibling/kin designs
   • Do migrants bring health problems with them?
   
   
8. Social and economic inequalities and their roots in health status
   • Does poor health compromise socioeconomic attainment at individual, family/intergenerational level?
   • Can improving health reduce population social/economic disparities?
   • Impact of health service delivery
   • Stress relationship between mortality and health disparities research
   
   

AIDS - Dolcini, Dodoo, Morris

1. Populations to study
   • Emphasize Sub-Saharan Africa and U.S. minority populations; also children and youth
   • But focus only on high-risk populations will limit understanding of AIDS-related behaviors
   
   
2. Determinants of sexual risk and protective behaviors
   • Cultural, social, economic determinants of behavior, behavior change
   • Intersection with fertility and gender dynamics; contraceptive practice
   • Study roles of power, coercion, early abuse
   • Study the commercial sex industry and sources of resistance to change
   • Study non-use of condoms
   • Study social networks, sexual networks, and how they intersect
   • Basic studies of social networks and dynamics over time, in transitions (e.g., migration, going to school, etc.); concurrency
   • Impact of mass media, especially in conveying public health and other messages that may affect behavior
   • Focus on influencing people in childhood vs. teenage years
   
   
3. Research on disease dynamics
   • Role of sexual networks in disease spread
   • Role of testing in ameliorating spread
   • How adolescent sexual behavior and child sexual abuse contributes to disease spread
   • Focus on the mechanisms of transmission
   • Impact of migration, including seasonal migration for work, urban-rural
     • Study variations in disease dynamics within sub-Saharan Africa
   
   
4. Intervention approaches
   • Research on network-based interventions: study impact, methodological issues
   • Interventions to address sexual abuse and ameliorate its impact
   • Secondary analysis to identify who is not helped by existing interventions
   • Stress techniques that go beyond experimental design
   • Develop creative structural interventions and study the factors influencing their success and limitations
   
   
5. Translating intervention research results to community use
   • Study "essential" elements of interventions, packaging, and training
   • Evaluate efficacy in community settings
   
   
6. Demographic/social impacts of AIDS/HIV
   • Mortality associated with AIDS: impact on life expectancy, household structure, population growth
   • Focus on effects of HIV in families and households
   • Impact of HIV on dependent populations (elderly, children)
   • Direct effects on fertility (biological effects on fertility)
   • Indirect demographic effects via proximate determinants
   
   
7. Data needs and methodology
   • Use diverse approaches: network, intervention, focus groups, in-depth interviews
   • Longitudinal surveys
   • Compare surveillance populations (e.g., pre-natal) to general populations
   • Validate behavioral markers and test feasibility of alternative biomarker surveillance
   • Challenges of studying networks in open, closed settings
   • Continue study of methods to improve self-reports and learn more about processes that mediate success or failure of methods under varying conditions
   
   

Innovative Methodologies - Morris, Goldstein, Walker

1. Support research on dynamic modeling
   • Tool for basic research on population systems, micro-macro linkages
   • Support integration of simulation tools into demographic training
   • Support research on link between statistical estimation and dynamic modeling
   
   
2. Encourage training on methods of and issues in causal modeling
   
   
3. Support research on the statistical modeling of dependent data (e.g., models for network analysis and path-dependence)
   
   
4. Support research on statistical methods to integrate census and sample survey data
   
   
5. Support research on methods of network analysis
   • Imputing extended networks from ego-based data
   • Role of networks: explanation or mechanism?
   • Temporal dimensions of networks: change over time and temporal overlap
   
   
6. Encourage collection of biological marker data in surveys to:
   • Provide new measures of sources of heterogeneity among individuals
   • Study relationship between biomarkers and psycho-social processes
   • Obtain representative data on health of non-clinic samples
   • Calibrate self-reports with bio-indicators of disease and health
   • Study causal linkages between social environment and health
   
   
7. Study the methods and implications of biomarker collection; necessary restrictions and guidelines
   • What biomarkers should be collected?
   • What will respondents agree to?
   • Consider implications for privacy, participant well-being, dissemination of data
   • Consider impact of testing on behavior
   • Consider need to report negative findings (i.e., no direct genetic effect on outcome)
   • Development of new tools for analyzing data
   
   
8. Support research on methods to protect confidentiality in data sets
   • Methods to assure anonymity without compromising data utility
   • Methods to analyze data stripped of identifiers, especially in local area analysis
   • Focus not only on protecting data, but on ways to ensure investigators are responsible in use of data
   • Give thought to standards of confidentiality in datasets
   • Consider spatial dimension of data in protecting confidentiality
   
   
9. Encourage dissemination of detailed documentation of data and analyses, to facilitate replication
   
   
10. Support research on web-based interviewing for applications relevant to the DBSB
    • Issues of cost, data quality, sampling, instrument design and presentation, survey design, and confidentiality
    
    
11. Develop improved methods for modeling heterogeneity
    
    
12. Continue to pursue the integration of qualitative/case studies with survey methods
    
    
13. Encourage use of experimental methods (random assignment)
    
    
14. Collect expectations data in surveys
    
    
15. Continue to promote openness to an eclectic mix of methods
    
    

Formal Demography - Goldstein, Palloni

1. Population dynamics of changing demographic rates
   • Study the transitory dynamics of population waves that result from fertility and mortality declines; also applicable to estimating consequences of immigration
   • Study tempo and quantum effects and apply to new topics
   • Model age-specific patterns of population change; adapt approaches to heterogeneous populations
   
   
2. Stochastic forecasting
   • Develop simpler models, models for small areas, and models for fertility
   • Develop methods for incomplete data and methods to incorporate model uncertainty and other forms of uncertainty
   
   
3. Develop and simplify two-sex models, especially in application to:
   • Analysis of the origins and future of multiple race identification
   • Sex differentials in remarriage after divorce
   • Consequences of skewed population sex ratios
   
   
4. Diffusion models
   • Study the behavioral diffusion and the dynamics of "tipping points" in networks as a means of linking micro- and macro-levels
   
   
5. Dynamic demographic systems (relates to topics 1 and 4 above)
   • Study systems containing feedbacks between individual behaviors and aggregate rates: formal properties, existence/number of equilibria?
   
   
6. Formal dynamics and properties of multi-state systems
   • Support research on the implications of individual-level estimates for long-run population trajectories.
   
   
7. Support the assembly and dissemination of aggregate data
   
   
8. Support research that utilizes simulation
   
   
9. Reinvigorate training in formal demography
   • Keep the focus on the basic questions of demography
   
   
10. Integrate analysis of micro and macro levels in demographic phenomena
    
    
11. Integrate formal and statistical demography
    
    

Culture - Hirsch, Casterline

1. Study the local meanings people give to demographic behaviors and relevant explanatory variables
   
   
2. Encourage theoretical approaches that view cultures as dynamic, historically variable, and non-homogeneous
   • Consider how cultural meanings change over time
   • Consider how the substantive nature of culture can provide meaning to analyses, and not just provide an additional explanatory variable
   
   
3. Encourage the integration of culture and social stratification research
   • Recognize interrelationships between local meanings, social structure, and social location
   • Explore the key social factors influencing meanings
   • Explore how meaning intersects with social stratification to create socially and culturally variable opportunity structures
   • Apply integrated approaches in research on gender, sexuality, teen pregnancy, fatherhood, immigrant health, contraceptive choice
   
   
4. Explore the relationship between meaning and behavior by working comparatively
   
   
5. Explore the role of culture at levels other than the individual (e.g., cultures of institutions, professions)
   • Encourage demographers to articulate and critique their own culturally-constructed worldviews
   
   
6. Study the role of ideas in demographic change
   • Understand how changing ideas about appropriateness intersect with structural phenomena
   
   
7. Encourage systematic and rigorous study of the "cognitive dimensions" of the meanings that constitute culture (i.e., knowledge, attitudes, preferences, and values)
   
   
8. Focus more on the role of religion
   
   
9. Encourage cross-fertilization of methods: train qualitative researchers in broader range of data collection methods; train demographers in qualitative methods; promote more interdisciplinary collaboration
   
   
10. Develop innovative methodologies for measuring cultural phenomena
    
    

Biodemography - Menken, Haaga

1. Continue to facilitate interdisciplinary communication and research on demographic outcomes involving biological and social scientists
   • Workshops and conferences
   • Mid-career cross-training, summer institutes
   
   
2. Specify better the biological mechanisms (and hence the relevant sub-disciplines of biology) involved in "biodemography" - will depend on demographic outcome studied
   
   
3. Fund behavior genetic studies of demographic behaviors and outcomes
   • Twin studies
   • Molecular (Quantitative Trait Loci) studies of the effects of multiple genes
   • Be prepared to respond to findings of gene-behavior links with appropriate data from representative populations
   • Join social theories to genetic research
   
   
4. Support research based on evolutionary theory
   • Contrast with economics approach useful
   • May provide clues to rapid fertility declines
   • May also contribute to research on childrearing and marital stability
   
   
5. Support studies of biological processes using complementary animal and human models
   • Study only phenomena frequent enough to have population significance
   
   
6. Support the collection of biomarkers in social surveys (see Innovative Methods Section)
   • Support the development of new methods to gather biomarkers
   
   
7. Support the addition of social and economic information to health surveys
   
   
8. Support studies that stress the impact of behavior and social experience on physiological functioning
   
   
9. Use known theories to develop new targets of research
   
   
10. Support work on population histories
    
    

Translational Research - McCarthy, Haaga, Michael

1. Strengthen investments in outreach efforts that make demographic researchers more accessible to users/policy-makers
   • Journalists remain key gate-keepers, facilitators, despite internet revolution
   • Journalists are more sophisticated; more demanding of resources (e.g., research summaries, Web resources, interviews) to support stories
   • Multiple approaches (presentations, interviews, summaries, Web links) important
   • Support outreach activities through population centers to provide incentives for researcher participation
   
   
2. Train/encourage researchers to distinguish what can from what can't inform policy
   • Substantial interest in demographic topics encourages inappropriate leaps to policy
   • "Grandmother effect" creates impression that science is "soft," dependent on point-of-view
   • Investigators must learn appropriate ways of communicating findings
   
   
3. Recognize that the audience for translation includes:
   • Scientists and the next generation of researchers; good non-technical translation can attract people to the field
   • Public and private policy-makers (i.e., individuals making private decisions as well as legislators)
   
   
4. Strengthen the ability of DBSB research to inform policy
   • Encourage training programs to stress importance of causation in linking science to policy; integrate demographic training with training in policy analysis
   • Encourage study sections to give priority to research grounded in theory that has the capacity to establish causal connections
   • Encourage researchers to be aware of value of descriptive vs. causally informative data for policy, and study sections to weigh potential of empirical studies to provide information regarding causal relationships
   • Encourage researchers to specify the policy and program implications of their work
   
   
5. Focus research on the demographic effects of public assistance
   
   
6. Prepare adjunct PAA session on issues pertaining to translational research
   
   

Training - Palloni, Menken, Goldstein

1. Demographic training must adapt to the opening of new research areas and the change and growth in methods and techniques; must integrate advances within the body of theories and technical practices that are uniquely demographic
   • Stress interdisciplinary training at graduate and professional level
   
   
2. The core of demographic teaching (e.g., life tables, stable populations, projections and forecasts) should remain intact and be recognized as such
   • Strengthen the teaching of simple and multi-state life tables
   • Develop basic statistical interfaces to life tables (e.g., hazard models, sequence analysis, pattern identification)
   • Reinforce teaching of theory verification via micro-simulation models, training in the use of computer-intensive algorithms
   • Strengthen the study of relations between rates and populations by teaching stable population, generalized stable population, and oscillatory population regimes
   • Enhance training of population projections by incorporating consideration of error structure and error propagation
   • Encourage intensive summer institutes that focus on core subject matter
   
   
3. Enhance core demographic training with opportunities to learn about the nature and applications of:
   • Micro-simulation as well as associated computer intensive algorithms
   • Spatial statistics
   • Study designs to identify demographic processes
   
   
4. Complement demographic training with disciplinary training providing theoretical foundation
   • Enhance social science training, perhaps requiring complementation between the core disciplines (e.g., trainees must know well the basic economic theories but also be familiar with theories of social interactions and evolutionary psychology)
   • For trainees interested in health and mortality, require elementary training in biology and genetics, as well as in infectious and chronic diseases, basic epidemiology, and public health
   • Other needed complementary training will depend on the area of study
   
   
5. Initiate, recreate, or strengthen the part of our prescribed training that deals with translation, dissemination, and implementation of policies based on scientific findings
   
   
6. Increase training for developing country students, perhaps through the Fogarty International Center
   
   
7. Offer special post-doctoral training opportunities in population centers for people trained in specialties that are newly important to demography
   • Stress mentorship in training
   
   
8. Consider greater emphasis in areas that lead to non-academic employment
   
   
9. Develop innovative approaches to delivering training
   • Support short courses in topics not offered outside a few centers (e.g. geographic information systems, health, biodemography, economics for social demographers, stochastic forecasting, multilevel modeling, network analysis, Bayesian statistics, stochastic micro-simulation, demographic applications of population genetics, mathematical demography)
   • Experiment with formalized visiting student programs such as that based at the Max Planck Institute
   • Distance-learning opportunities
   • Graduate seminars that involve students from dispersed campuses
   
   

Race and Ethnicity - Waters, Dodoo, Hirschman

1. Identify factors affecting how individuals develop and report racial and ethnic identity
   
   
2. Identify, quantify, and develop solutions to uncertainty and error in measuring race and ethnicity; items to be dealt with and potential tools include:
   • Changes in how race and ethnicity collected in 2000 Census compared with previous censuses and data collection efforts
   • Adjustment and/or correction of Census and Current Population Survey numbers
   • Differences in measuring race across data sets, across data collection entities
   • How different measures (e.g., self-identified vs. interviewer-identified) and measurement methods create variation in reporting race and ethnicity
   • Effects and reasons for non-response to questions on race and ethnicity
   • Under-enumeration of racial and ethnic minorities
   • Matching studies
   
   
3. Examine how the following are conceptualized:
   • Race and ethnicity
   • Racism
   • Discrimination
   
   
4. Develop methods of interpreting information on individuals of mixed race or ethnicity
   
   
5. Examine the social processes that create racial and ethnic diversity and ambiguity
   
   
6. Examine the intersection of immigration, race, and stratification
   • Disentangle the effects of race and ethnicity from the effects of other factors, including most notably class, but also other factors including immigrant status
   • Examine how race and ethnicity affect immigrant adaptation
   
   
7. Examine the effects of intermarriage
   
   
8. Examine how racial and ethnic diversity affects institutions
   • Changing racial/ethnic composition of institutions
   
   
9. Support research on racial and ethnic inequalities
   • Examine the impacts of affirmative action and quotas
   • Develop ways of defining and measuring racial profiling
   • Strengthen research on discrimination; develop causal frameworks for determining how discrimination restricts opportunities
   
   
10. Support work in developing countries
    
    

Health Disparities - Currie, Foster

1. Emphasize research examining causal mechanisms contributing to health disparities
   
   
2. Bridge the gap between medical and epidemiological research and population-based demographic research, including doing the following:
   • Focus on disparities in particular health outcomes
   • Develop more population-based studies that examine causal mechanisms, by, for example, using biomarkers in these studies
   
   
3. Pay attention to the statistical issues that arise when researchers use aggregate data to make inferences about the mechanisms that function at the individual level, with particular attention to selection effects
   
   
4. Evaluate policies aimed at reducing health disparities, looking at effects not only over the short term as is usually done, but also over the long-term.
   
   
5. Explain health disparities within groups with similar levels of insurance coverage and economic resources
   • Shift focus from disparities in health care to disparities in health-related behaviors of families
   
   
6. Clarify the underlying scientific and policy objectives motivating research on health disparities
   
   
7. Examine health disparities (or lack thereof) to identify mechanisms that may influence health in general
   • Investigate the impact of household structure on household health
   • Impact of different family structures and labor force behavior on health care
   
   
8. Explore the implications of moving to alternative schemes for providing subsidized health care for the poor in developing countries as these countries move away from clinic-based models
   
   
9. Explore the consequences of exposure to adverse conditions while in utero, as an infant, or as a child; should emphasize not only short-term consequences, but also long-term consequences; should examine mechanisms of long-term effects; and should take into account factors that mediate recovery from adverse conditions
   
   
10. Examine how health affects, and is affected by social groupings (e.g., marriage, extended family co-residence, various living arrangements of the elderly), with particular attention to selection effects
    
    
11. Examine how health affects, and is affected by, socioeconomic status over the life course
    
    
12. Racial/ethnic differences in health disparities
    
    

Intergenerational Research - Lee, McLanahan, Michael

1. Develop better theories of transfers to the elderly from their children and transfers from young adults to those in the workforce
   
   
2. Two strategies:
   • Carve out a portion of the NICHD agenda that seems most germane to intergenerational relations; or
   • Retain "intergenerational relations" as a way of providing a broad integration of many topics.
   
   
3. Examine the effects of family structure on support for the elderly, especially with respect to whether divorce and multiple marriages more or less support for parents (especially fathers) when they are old
   • Consider culture; treatment of elderly by minority and immigrant populations
   
   
4. Examine how families transmit tastes, preferences, and expectations across generations
   • Explore mechanisms of these transfers
   
   
5. Examine and take into account the implicit social contracts that families make across generations
   
   
6. Formulate policy interventions using an intergenerational framework; that is, take into account how families transmit attitudes and preferences when formulating strategies to persuade individuals to change their behavior
   
   
7. How public transfers will affect intergenerational mobility (inequality)
   • Income transfers vs. socioeconomic status or occupation
   • Wealth bequests
   • Does the receiver of the transfer matter?
   • How does opportunity and mobility vary by family size, region, race, and ethnicity? How do opportunity and mobility ease assimilation?
   • How is the structure of mobility (through structure of labor market and returns to education) changing?
   • The effect of changing demographics on intergenerational transfers: investment in children
   • Trends across countries and over time
   
   
8. Data gaps
   • Data on minority groups other than African Americans
   • Expectations, attitudinal data
   • Socialization, punishment
   
   

Social and Economic Inequality - Yu Xie, Mouw

1. Support basic descriptive analyses of trends in inequality with respect to income and wealth - over time and across sub-groups
   
   
2. Study the causes of social and economic inequality
   • Test the relationship between technological change and the wage distribution
   • Study the role of education
   
   
3. Link micro-level analyses with population trends: do micro effects make a difference in explaining population trends and differentials?
   
   
4. Expand research on income
   
   
5. Link research on inequality to research on race, ethnicity, immigration
   
   
6. Integrate research on inequality with research on socioeconomic status and health
   
   
7. Understand better the link between socioeconomic status and family behaviors, and the relationship between trends in inequality and trends in the family
   • Focus on inequality within households
   
   
8. Study the consequences of social and economic inequality
   • Study the mechanisms linking socioeconomic status and health
   • Support innovative, longitudinal studies to test the effect of SES on child development
   
   
9. Improve and expand the documentation of trends in social and economic inequalities
   
   
10. Encourage work on the relationship between inequality and education
    
    
11. Stress value of inequality as both independent and dependent variable
    
    
12. Role of differential fertility on inequality
    
    
13. Gender and social/economic inequalities
    
    
14. Relationship between inequality and use of education programs and medical care
    
    

Spatial Demography - Entwisle, Gutmann, Mouw

1. Research on neighborhood effects
   • Geocoded data offer potential of linking community to individual data
   • Potential of lifetime migration histories
   • Need to improve measurement, theory of neighborhood effects
   • Develop measures of neighborhood for rural, suburban areas
   • Re-examine what constitutes a neighborhood
   • Consider the role of selection processes
   • Use experimental designs
   
   
2. Research on stratification and segregation
   • Study the mismatch of jobs and neighborhoods: distance between workers and jobs causally related to unemployment
   • Fund research that develops new methods for incorporating the spatial dimension of segregation
   • Fund research in spatial patterns of segregation
   • Improve measurement of spatial inequality
   
   
3. Research on population and environment
   • Spatial tools most important for micro-level effects involving population density
   • Research on migration
   • Causal theories involve distance; lack of data a problem
   
   
4. Integrate spatial demography as a descriptive tool; theory required for analytical use
   • Focus work on issues of space instead of just characteristics of locations
   • Influence of space on medical care
   
   
5. Develop theory
   • Relating to spatial distribution of populations
   • Why geography matters: the relevance, dimensions of space in research on demographic outcomes
   • Role of spatial analysis in demography unclear because theory lacking
   • Integrate space and time in causal frameworks
   
   
6. Develop strategies for allowing access to geocoded data while maintaining privacy
   
   
7. Integrate work from other disciplines
   • Geography
   • Human ecology
   
   

Technological Change - Yu Xie

1. How has the information revolution affected demographic outcomes?
   
   
2. Does information technology affect social and economic inequalities and how?
   
   
3. What are the implications of biomedical advances for fertility, health, mortality, and how do these differ by socioeconomic status? How does this intersect with access to information technology?
   
   
4. Should there be a demography of genetic diseases?
   
   
5. Will assisted reproductive technologies be used widely and what social implications would this have?
   
   
6. Estimate the amount of technological change, access and diffusion to individuals in the following areas:
   • Medical advances
   • Education
   • Pharmaceuticals
   • Quality of dependent care
   
   
7. Effect of demographic behavior on technological change

Sexuality - Michael, Hirsch, Dolcini

1. Study sexuality and sexual behavior with the following goals:
   • Understanding healthy human development
   • Informing individual, professional, policy judgments
   • Understanding sex as a factor in social life
   • Develop an integrated understanding of public health issues (e.g., preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, dual-method use)
   
   
2. Study sexuality and sexual behavior across the life course
   • Focus on development of sexuality (e.g., attitudes, identify, self-awareness and social expression) in adolescence, in addition to behaviors
   • Study the sexual development of gay youth
   • Expand research on adult heterosexuality
   • Study sexuality in the post-reproductive years
   
   
3. Expand work on individual sexual behavior, drawing on psychological and social science theory
   • Motives for sexual behavior: broaden research and re-examine assumptions
   • Focus on adolescents and heterosexuals
   
   
4. Expand work on sexual partnerships
   • Bargaining within partnerships
   • Relate sexual and non-sexual aspects of partnerships, quality; interrelationships between intimacy and sex
   • Dyad-specific skills, understandings
   • Effects of culture systems on development of partnerships
   
   
5. Support research on the social context of sexuality and sexual behavior
   • Family influence on sexual development, including effect of family transitions
   • Social structural factors influencing behavior and norms
   • Ethnic/cultural background; studies of recent immigrants
   • Sexual and dating marketplaces
   • Social and cultural factors affecting men's multiple partnerships
   • Pornography and other institutionalized mechanisms that promote socially unattractive and socially attractive aspects of sex
   • Examine assumptions about sexuality implicit in public health programs
   
   
6. Research on cultural aspects of sexuality
   • Sexual scripts and their meanings over the life course, over time, social space
   • Research should focus on social structure not culture (or integrate these in a political economy approach)
   • Research on gender and sexuality should recognize that gender is a structural aspect of social organization
   
   
7. Study policy issues related to the regulation of sexual behavior
   • Laws relating to access to services for specific populations, or to certain acts and behaviors
   • Structural interventions, such as health care coverage for unmarried partners, or changes in insurance coverage for birth control devices
   
   
8. Study sexual dysfunction
   • Prevalence, contributing factors, help-seeking, treatment options
   
   
9. Study sexual violence and abuse
   • Prevalence, long-term outcomes, mediating factors, and interventions
   
   
10. Encourage work on theory and conceptualization of human sexuality
    
    
11. Improve data on sexual behavior and sexuality
    
    
12. Encourage work on sex and aging
    • Stress theory and data needs
    
    
13. Incorporate expertise from different fields
    • Hormonal and neurological evidence
    
    
14. Study the role of motivation in sexual behavior, with an emphasis on emotional factors