Sociology

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholars Program was designed to build the field of population health by training scholars to investigate the connections among biological, behavioral, environmental, economic, and social determinants of health; and develop, evaluate, and disseminate knowledge and interventions based upon integration of these determinants.

The number of autism spectrum disorders diagnoses in the U.S. has risen exponentially over the last 10 years. Why has this happened? This research project begins from the sense that the search for explanation has up till now been impeded by an untenable opposition between biological (therefore "real") and social (therefore "artificial") causes.

The project develops a new strategy to explain and measure scientific consensus formation. It develops a quantitative measure of scientific consensus, based on an analysis of the structure of scientific citation networks. The measure is validated by exploiting changing consensus levels across time regarding several scientific propositions, such as "smoking causes cancer", "Human activity causes a climate change", etc.

This research project will collect and analyze the first national-level data on migrant children and children left behind by one or both parents, as well as, for comparison, rural and urban children living with their parents. The investigators will use a 2008 national probability sample of the adult population of China, which collected complete rosters of the children of each respondent and all children residing in respondent?s households.