This project has 3 Specific Aims. Aims 1 and 2 are well-developed and likely to generate academic publications and external funding (via the Russell Sage Foundation Pipeline Grants Program). Aim 3 is exploratory but has the potential to generate external funding via the NICHD (Research on the Impact of Policy Changes and Emerging and Evolving Public Health Crises on NICHD Populations of Interest (NOT-HD-22-038)).
Aim 1: Create a new, school-level dataset documenting non-shooting, gun incidents in public schools in North Carolina. I will make use of the North Carolina Education Research Data Center (NCERDC) administrative data to identify non-shooting, gun incidents in public schools in North Carolina. To my knowledge, there are no existing research papers that have used the NCERDC student-level data in this way. According to public reports, during the 2021/22 school year there were more than 160 non-shooting gun incidents (NC Department of Public Instruction, 2023) in North Carolina public schools. This school-level dataset (detailing incident, school, and date) will be used as an input to the causal and exploratory analyses outlined in Aims 2 and 3 below.
Aim 2: Causal Econometric Analysis on Effects of Exposure to Gun Violence on Children’s Educational Outcomes. Econometric analysis (detailed in “Analytic Plan” below) will address the following questions: What is the causal effect of exposure to a non-shooting, gun incident in high school on students’ short- and long-run educational outcomes? How do these effects vary by student race/ethnicity, sex, and socioeconomic status? This aim will be pursued using NCERDC administrative data, with focus on the following outcomes: chronic absenteeism and high school graduation. These outcomes will be the primary focus of my analyses, although there are other intervening and short-run outcomes included in the data that could be of secondary focus.
Aim 3: Exploratory Analysis Assessing the Feasibility of Linking Incident Dataset (Developed in Aim 1) to Healthcare Utilization Cost Utilization Project (HCUP) Data. To investigate the causal effects of exposure to non-shooting, gun violence at school on children’s mental and physical health outcomes, I propose zip-code level linkage to healthcare utilization data from the Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project (HCUP) for the state of North Carolina. I plan to seek access to these data via either (1) Duke PopHealth DataShare (https://populationhealth.duke.edu/research/duke-pophealth-datashare/datashare-data-assets) or (2) direct purchase from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) (https://www.ahrq.gov/data/hcup/index.html). This Aim is exploratory and, if successful, would lead to the development of an application for external funding via a NICHD mechanism (one possibility noted above). The proposal for NICHD funding would utilize similar econometric methods to those proposed in Aim 2.