Across Decades and Disciplines
Forty years of policy-relevant research at IPR

Fall, 2009, Volume 31, Number 1

IPR sociologist and African American studies professor Mary Pattillo asks a question about race relations.

Since its founding in 1968 as the Center for Urban Affairs, the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) has brought together social scientists from fields ranging from sociology to economics, law, political science, psychology, anthropology, and education to tackle the policy-relevant issues of the day.

With Chicago as its laboratory, IPR’s first studies concentrated on improving the quality of urban life. Its early research projects focused on high school dropouts, redlining, determinants of urban health, environmental concerns, delivery of city services, and migrants’ labor market experiences.

“These initial studies planted the seeds for some of the major, and often intertwining themes, that have defined IPR throughout its four decades—racism, poverty, criminal justice reform, public housing, and education,” said Fay Lomax Cook, IPR’s director.

One of the Institute’s very first projects was a 1972 study by sociologist Andrew Gordon and communication studies professor John McKnight that uncovered redlining practices in Chicago. Their research paved the way for passage of the Community Reinvestment and Home Mortgage Disclosure acts.

The same decade also saw IPR undertake several major crime studies using previously unavailable data sets, including a study to assess reactions to crime and another to gauge the effects of government programs on crime rates.

In 1983, political scientist Wesley G. Skogan began a pathbreaking body of work with his evaluation of Chicago’s Community Alternative Policing Strategy or CAPS, the nation’s first community policing initiative.

IPR faculty have also been involved in groundbreaking housing and mobility research. Following the Supreme Court’s 1976 Gautreaux decision mandating desegregation of Chicago public housing, professors James Rosenbaum (education and social policy) and Leonard Rubinowitz (law) began studying how residents who moved fared. In 1994, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched the random-assignment Moving to Opportunity (MTO) program, providing vouchers to poor families in five U.S. cities, based on the results of the Center’s Gautreaux studies.

During the Reagan-era recession of the early 1980s, sociologist Christopher Jencks and Fay Lomax Cook led a collaborative effort by four area universities to measure economic hardship in Chicago, concluding that income distribution became more unequal during this period. Later in the decade, IPR hosted a national poverty conference, resulting in the volume The Urban Underclass, co-edited by Jencks.

In 1996, IPR received funding from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to launch the Joint Center for Poverty Research, in partnership with the University of Chicago. Economists Greg Duncan and Rebecca Blank led the Center for IPR. Blank, who published It Takes a Nation: A New Agenda for Fighting Poverty in 1997 while at IPR, is now Under Secretary for Economic Affairs at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

That same year, Clinton signed the landmark 1996 welfare reform act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act). Soon thereafter followed several studies tracking those who moved from welfare to work, including the Three-City Study, co-led by developmental psychologist P. Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, and the Illinois Families Study, directed by social policy professor Dan A. Lewis.

Founded in the Civil Rights era, IPR has always been keenly attuned to the role of race in the nation’s social, economic, and political affairs. Its faculty continue to examine the issue from creative angles, from sociologist and African American studies professor Mary Pattillo’s analysis of the black middle class to law professor Dorothy Roberts’ exploration of race and biotech-nology research. Social psychologist Jennifer Richeson, recipient of a 2006 MacArthur “genius grant,” studies how racial bias affects the mind, brain, and behavior.

IPR researchers have also long studied aspects of feminism and gender. Pioneering work by Jane Mansbridge culminated in her 1985 book Why We Lost the ERA, and Margaret Gordon and Stephanie Riger published their revelatory findings in the 1977 book The Female Fear: The Social Cost of Rape. Alice Eagly—one of the nation’s foremost scholars on the psychology of attitudes—has contributed significantly to scholarship on gender, most recently through her study of men’s and women’s leadership styles.

Public opinion regarding social and political phenomena has been another hallmark of the Institute. IPR director Fay Lomax Cook studies the dynamics of Americans’ support for programs such as Social Security and Medicare. At the intersection of race, politics, and public opinion, Victoria DeFrancesco Soto researches the effects of Latino-targeted advertising on voters, including in the 2008 presidential election. James Druckman is examining the online campaign strategies of congressional candidates and has established a new theory of framing effects with Dennis Chong.

In 2005, IPR received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to establish Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health, led by Chase-Lansdale, C2S’ founding director. C2S has become a national center for population research training through such activities as its Summer Biomarker Institute, organized by anthropologists Thomas McDade and Christopher Kuzawa and developmental psychobiologist Emma Adam.

IPR faculty are also keenly aware that effective social policies should be based on evidence from soundly constructed studies. To this end, IPR launched the Center for Improving Methods for Quantitative Policy Research, or Q-Center, co-directed by two methodological pioneers: Larry Hedges and Thomas D. Cook. Cook co-wrote Quasi-Experimentation: Design and Analysis Issues for Field Settings, in 1979 with Donald Campbell. Hedges co-wrote The Handbook of Meta-Analysis, now in its second printing (see p. 10). Both continue to address methodological issues, especially in the realm of education.

Just this year, IPR formalized the decades of education research conducted in its various program areas, establishing a new Education Policy program. Current and past studies have scrutinized No Child Left Behind, Perry Preschools, ABeCeDarian, state pre-K programs, and making the transition from high to school to college, among others. Its chair, David Figlio, is currently conducting a detailed study of Florida’s school voucher program—the nation’s largest.

“These are just a few examples of IPR’s research impact over the years,” noted Lomax Cook. “That IPR has managed to remain vital and relevant over the past four decades is a testament to its faculty’s ability to reach across disciplines and conduct social policy research of the highest caliber.”