Just 33 months into its mission, JCPR is moving at high speed to promote and disseminate the best of the nation's poverty research while it coordinates a far-flung network of research affiliates, trains graduate students, and seeds new studies by junior scholars and faculty. Through a blizzard of conferences, policy briefings, workshops, information sessions, working papers, newsletters, and electronic media, it has captured a national audience of academics, policy-makers, and agency staffers anxious to understand the causes and effects of poverty and find ways to alleviate it.
JCPR was founded shortly before passage of the national welfare reform law in 1996 that effectively turned
| |
| Susan Mayer |
Young Scholars. As part of its training mission, JCPR now supports 15 junior scholars a year through small research grants from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Census Bureau and, most recently, the Department of Agriculture. It also mentors two young visiting scholars annually, one at Chicago, and one at Northwestern. Some have opened new doors for the core poverty researchers.
"We are bringing together research areas sometimes not thought of as poverty research," says JCPR Director Susan Mayer, an associate professor at the Harris School. She points to the work of current visiting scholars Annamaria Lusardi at Chicago, who studies savings behavior, and Sheila Murray at Northwestern, who specializes in educational financing. Neither is a mainstream poverty issue, but both could be important to understanding poverty. "Poverty is not synonymous with social welfare benefits," insists Mayer, who expects issues such as education and mental health to become increasingly important to researchers concerned with poverty issues.
JCPR Deputy Director Greg Duncan credits both the Poverty Center and the teaching resources at the two universities for the breadth of training received by JCPR graduate fellows. The Northwestern students who worked on the New Hope evaluation (see p. 9), for example, were trained in both qualitative and quantitative methods in human development, economics, and sociology. This diverse background positioned them well to analyze program effects, and they enriched the study by providing ethnographic data as well as statistical analysis, Duncan said.
Conferences. Duncan is equally pleased with how well JCPR has advanced research through its conferences. Not only are there more (six in this academic year alone) than JCPR committed for, but he says they afford an opportunity to bring in the best people to write papers on focused topics.
A case in point is a major conference that he and University of Chicago developmental psychologist Lindsay Chase-Lansdale will host in Washington DC next September on State Welfare Reform and the Well-Being of Low-Income Families and Children. It is timed for early evaluations of the effects of Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). "We want to go beyond the usual caseload and labor supply data to understand the impact of welfare reform on families and kids," said Duncan. "Are families better off? Are kids worse off? We hope for the best, fear the worst, but we urgently need to know."
A dozen papers have been commissioned and 125 people are expected to attend the conference. "These are totally new papers that would not have been written otherwise," says Duncan, "papers that provide an interdisciplinary and highly policy-focused approach to particular topics." Among those to be covered are the New Hope findings and early results from a three-city study of the impact of wefare reform on children and youth.
Similarly well-timed is a large conference on Economic Incentives and Income Support Programs that JCPR plans for November 2000. It will coincide with the national debate on reauthorizing TANF.
Well aware that poverty is not confined to central cities, JCPR will hold a conference on Rural Poverty and Welfare Reform next May. "Rural people may actually suffer more than the urban poor because there are fewer jobs in rural areas and bigger transportation needs," says Mayer. "Yet this field has been underappreciated because we've been so focused on urban poverty."
Proceedings from three of JCPR's commissioned conferences are available on its website and may soon appear as books. The Upjohn Institute is publishing the papers from a conference on Welfare Reform and the Macro-Economy, and the Russell Sage Foundation is reviewing the papers from last November's conference on Labor Markets and Less-Skilled Workers.
JCPR is publishing proceedings from an Illinois Welfare Reform symposium held last December both as a book and on its web site. All the sessions were recorded and transcribed by University of Chicago graduate students.
A special issue of the Journal of Public Economics, edited by Bruce Meyer (IPR-Economics), will contain the papers from a conference on tax and transfer programs that Meyer is putting together for next November. While reviewing papers submitted for the conference, Meyer discovered such a wealth of excellent papers on the EITC that he was impelled to organize a separate conference on that topic alone. JCPR jumped on the idea and both worked quickly to secure the necessary funding. The conference is planned for October.
Reaching Out. Communicating outside the academic community has been an eye-opener for JCPR director Mayer, who "thought we'd be talking in empty rooms" when they went to Washington for policy briefings. Instead she has seen a thirst for new knowledge "about what works and what doesn't" from agency personnel, congressional staffers, and others involved in the policy process. And it's a two-way street. "We are not getting standard academic questions," says Mayer, who believes "we have all benefited from being at the same table." "Many many people come to these presentations," concurs Duncan, who thinks JCPR has successfully bridged the gap between academic researchers and "those who are eager to know."
The MacArthur Foundation has awarded JCPR a four-year grant of $350,000 to disseminate poverty research to state and local policy audiences. One of its most successful initiatives has been a series of information sessions, now held monthly at the Gleacher Center in Chicago. These feature academic researchers who present their latest work over lunch to intimate groups of journalists, policymakers and advisors, advocates, and foundation program officers.
Speakers have covered issues that ranged from concealed gun-carrying laws and crime to why people are not saving for retirement. In recent sessions, Meyer presented his own research on the effects of the EITC, IPR Director Fay Lomax Cook spoke about the new politics of Social Security, and Duncan offered new findings from the New Hope evaluation.
"We feel quite solid with our national audience and with Chicago and Illinois audiences. Reaching out across states is our new push," says JCPR Communications Director Julie Balzekas. One route to state officials may be through annual and regional meetings like the National Governors Association. JCPR also plans to help disseminate relevant findings from JCPR researchers at a session on "The Chicago Face of Poverty and Welfare Reform" at the August meetings of the American Sociological Association.
Electronic Media. JCPR is now well-wired into cyberspace. It has a listserv audience of 1200; its extensive web site (www.jcpr.org) averages 14,700 user sessions a month; and its rapidly growing stable of working papers averages 3500 monthly downloads.
The National Welfare Information Network is planning a new web site for the state of Illinois that may become a model for other states. JCPR plans to create the research section for the site, which may also post data on welfare recipients as they are gathered by the new Illinois Consortium on Welfare Reform (see p. 1).
"We are just now hitting our stride," says Mayer. "It takes a ton of effort to get going. Bringing people together to talk about their research, doing new research and communicating it, rely on good networks of people and building a reputation. We've now gotten to a place where we can accomplish the mission that we established in the beginning."
 |
IPR Home | Calendar | News | Events | Publications | People | Research Programs and Centers Institute for Policy Research • 2040 Sheridan Road • Evanston, IL, 60208-4100 T: 847-491-3395 • F: 847-491-9916 • ipr@northwestern.edu Last updated 11/29/2011
|