The Center for Child and Family Policy (CCFP) at Duke founded in 1999 by Kenneth Dodge, DPRC Scholar and a leader in child development science, has the goal to pursue science based solutions to important problems affecting today’s children and families. Much research at CCFP relies on the collection of primary data that prospectively follow cohorts and represent known populations and integrated multi-domain administrative datasets which address fundamental topics in the population sciences, such as family relationships, early childhood conditions as precursors of adolescent health and wellbeing, adolescent transitions, and the intergenerational transmission of human capital interventions in childhood.
CCFP houses the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (CERDC) a unique portal to an large store of data dating back to the mid-1990s from the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction (DPI) and the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).
Research topics enabled by these data have permitted DPRC scholars such as Kenneth Dodge, Christina-Gibson Davis, Anna Gassman-Pines, Elizabeth Gifford and Marcos Rangel to link educational records with other administrative data sources to investigate long-term and intergenerational effects of policies or exogenous shocks on children and families.
As a direct result of synergies between CCFP and DPRC, DRPC has funded several collaborative studies. Jennifer Lansford and Kenneth Dodge’s Pilot Project, Biological, Familial, and Cultural Processes in the Development of Risk-Taking Behavior, adds biomarkers to the U.S. site of the Parenting Across Cultures Study to understand how and why parental socialization and cultural processes can lead to risk-taking behaviors. CCFP affiliate, Elizabeth Gifford, is collaborating with DPRC researcher, Marcos Rangel, on a project that uses matched administrative data for North Carolina (civil court data, education data and health records) to study how the experience of eviction may affect children’s school performance and health outcomes. A third project leverages Kenneth Dodge’s Family Connects (DC) project, a large, high-participation program featuring nurse home visits to new mothers in Durham, to assess local services that might help families with newborns. A joint effort between Elizabeth Gifford and Jillian Hurst at the Children's Health and Discovery Initiative at Duke, uses DC home visit data for periodic web surveys and administrative data linkages as a means to follow mothers and children over time in their study of stress effects on child outcomes.