Photos from top: Professors Greg Duncan, Barton Hirsch and Larry Hedges |
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Two of the four major grant awards made recently by the William T. Grant Foundation went to School of Education and Social Policy professors for their research on how social settings affect youth.
The two funded research projects are a study of peer impacts on attitudes and drinking behavior co-led by SESP professor Greg Duncan and a study of a large-scale after-school program co-led by SESP professors Barton Hirsch and Larry Hedges.
“These are very strong experimental and observational studies that add to our work on how schools, families, peers, and after-school programs affect important youth outcomes,” said the Foundation's president, Bob Granger.
For their research project on peers’ influence on social attitudes and behaviors, “A Replication and Extension of a Study of Peer Impacts on Attitudes and Drinking Behavior,” Duncan and Guang Guo of the University of North Carolina are studying 3,000 randomly assigned roommates at a large public university. The researchers will examine how college roommates affect each other’s beliefs, attitudes and behaviors and whether certain genetic factors moderate the influence of particular pairings.
A major focus of the two-year study is genetic analysis of binge drinking, using DNA samples from 2,000 students to determine genetic predisposition. The W. T. Grant Foundation has awarded $568,450 in funding for this project, which is an extension of a previous project examining peer impacts.
Hedges and Hirsch’s three-year study, “After-School Programs for High School Students: An Evaluation of After School Matters,” will evaluate the impact of a large after-school apprenticeship program for high school students. It will look at whether an after-school program can improve youth development, marketable job skills and academic performance while at the same time decreasing problem behavior. Their random-assignment study of the Chicago-based After School Matters program will increase the available research on the efficacy of large-scale after-school programs for youths ages 14 to 18 and will likely provide data on how to improve such programs.
Matching samples of incoming students with a control group, the study involves tracking the students to determine how and if the program improves success in school, the workplace, and their relationships. The W. T. Grant Foundation recently awarded $843,729 in funding for the project. |
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