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Three DUPRI Scholars are represented in the 2024 edition of the Web of Science Highly Cited Researchers list: Avshalom Caspi, Jane Costello, Terrie Moffitt. William Copeland, a DUPRI external affiliate who has a secondary appointment at Duke and is an investigator on the Great Smoky Mountains Study, was also named in the list. The scholars are among the pver 6,600 authors on the global list. According to Clarivate, which owns Web of Science, highly cited researchers have demonstrated significant and broad influence reflected in their publication of multiple highly cited papers over the last decade. These highly cited papers rank in the top 1% by citations for a field or fields and publication year in the Web of Science.

The Lancet Commission on Investing in Health, a team consisting of 50 economists and global health experts, including DUPRI visiting scholar Omar Karlsson, has released it's Global Health 2050 final report. In the Global Health 2050 report (GH2050), the Lancet Commission on Investing in Health (CIH) provides a roadmap for countries at all income levels to achieve dramatic improvements in human welfare by mid-century. The report, available at https://globalhealth2050.org/, comes at a time when global health faces many headwinds—from geopolitical tensions, ongoing and new conflicts, and increasingly manifest climate change to slowed progress towards universal health coverage (UHC), rising healthcare costs, and the ever-present risk of pandemics. GH2050 shows that even in the face of these challenges, there is a practical pathway for nations that choose to do so to sharply reduce premature death and morbidity by focusing resources on high priority conditions and scaling up financing to develop and deliver new health technologies. Written by an international team of 50 economists and global health experts, the report reached seven key conclusions.

A new paper by DUPRI's Cheryl Elman and Angela O’Rand, and by Andrew London of Syracuse University, published in PLoS One, links the racial gap in post-reproductive age all-cause mortality to race-related differentials in infecundity risk (childlessness). The study is based on a sample of non-Hispanic black and white women drawn from the Health and Retirement Study. A second new study argues that the twenty-first century COVID-19 epidemic revealed a U.S. public health system that countenanced health inequities and a U.S. public that resisted disease containment policies. This paper, co-authored by Cheryl Elman and published in Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, finds that this crisis was only the most recent chapter in a longer U.S. struggle to institutionalize public health.

Many population surveys do not provide information on respondents’ residential addresses, instead offering coarse geographies like zip code or higher aggregations. However, fine resolution geography can be beneficial for characterizing neighbourhoods, especially for relatively rare populations such as immigrants. One way to obtain such information is to link survey records to records in auxiliary databases that include residential addresses by matching on variables common to both files. We present an approach based on probabilistic record linkage that enables matching survey participants in the Chinese Immigrants in Raleigh–Durham Study to records from InfoUSA, an information provider of residential records. The two files use different Chinese name romanization practices, which we address through a novel and generalizable strategy for constructing records’ pairwise comparison vectors for romanized names. Using a fully Bayesian record linkage model, we characterize the geospatial distribution of Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh–Durham area of North Carolina.

Can cash transfers help break cycles of poverty across generations? This study, co-authored by DUPRI scholars Kenneth Dodge and Jennifer Lansford, explores the impact of a casino-funded cash transfer program on educational outcomes among American Indian communities. Utilizing a difference-in-difference approach, researchers found that children of mothers exposed to cash transfers for a decade scored higher in math and reading than peers whose mothers received shorter exposure and were also likelier to pursue higher education and delay childbirth. Findings suggest that substantial cash transfers could mitigate intergenerational poverty and enhance the quality of life in underserved communities, particularly when initiated early in parental life.

A new paper authored in Nature Mental Health by a team of scholars including DUPRI's Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt reports that primary-care doctors are seeing a surprisingly high volume of mental health conditions. The authors analyzed Norway’s nationwide administrative primary-care records, extracting all doctor-patient encounters occurring during 14 years for the population aged newborn to 100 years. They analyzed over 350 million primary-care medical encounters. The authors found that 1 in 9 doctor-patient encounters in primary-care settings (11.7%) involved a mental-health condition.

The Carolina-Duke rivalry is arguably one of the greatest, but when it comes to the population sciences, faculty are often close research collaborators and good friends. This was showcased September 6, 2024 as the Carolina Population Center (CPC) hosted friends from that darker blue institution down the road for Demography Daze 2024. The annual event – now in its 10th year – switches between CPC and the the Social Science Research Institute’s affiliated center, the Duke University Population Research Institute (DUPRI).

Monthly cash transfers reduce risk of poverty — and higher amounts do not lead to higher spending on tobacco or alcohol.

A new special issue of the International Journal of Psychology edited by DUPRI's Jennifer Lansford uses the Parenting Across Cultures Project to investigate how mothers' and fathers' individualism, collectivism and conformity values are related to parenting behaviours and child adjustment during middle childhood. The special issue contains 10 empirical articles, the first nine of which focus on a specific country that participated in the Parenting Across Cultures project. These country-specific articles allow readers to gain a deep understanding of how cultural values in China, Colombia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, the Philippines, Sweden, Thailand and the United States are related to specific domains of parenting and child adjustment in a way that goes beyond cross-national comparisons to delve deeply into within-country analyses. The tenth empirical article then provides a cross-national comparison of the associations among cultural values, parenting and child adjustment to advance understanding of cultural similarities and differences in human development.

A team of DUPRI Scholars have received a 5 year grant from the NIA to study the health of Ghanaian immigrants in the US. The grant is titled "Dynamics of Ghanaian immigrants’ health in the US: Critical life-stage experiences, social networks, acculturation and selection (GMHeS)." It represents a collaboration among Scholars at Duke, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Ghana. At Duke: M. Giovanna Merli (Contact PI), James Moody and Marta Mulawa. At the University of Pennsylvania: Chenoa Flippen (co-PI), Jere Behrman and Irma Elo. At the University of Ghana: Ayaga Bawah (co-PI) Patrick Asuming , Leander Kandilige and Pearl Kyei.