Mass Incarceration and Violence in Families: Informing the Next Generation of Public Responses to Violence

该奖项是作为NSF的社会，行为和经济科学博士后研究奖学金（SPRF）计划的一部分提供的。SPRF计划的目标是为学术界，工业或私营部门和政府的科学事业准备有前途的早期职业博士级科学家。SPRF的奖励包括在知名科学家的赞助下进行两年的培训，并鼓励博士后研究员进行独立研究。NSF致力于促进来自科学界各部门的科学家，包括来自代表性不足的群体的科学家参与其研究计划和活动;博士后期间被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的重要水平。每个博士后研究员必须解决推进各自学科领域的重要科学问题。在杜克大学的克里斯托弗·威尔德曼博士的赞助下，这个博士后奖学金支持一位早期职业科学家研究大规模监禁如何塑造了家庭暴力的使用，以及这一历史性的惩罚和监禁时期的后果可以教会我们关于暴力的社会控制。通过扩展创新的定量和定性方法，揭示最常见的暴力行为与社会预防和应对暴力行为的努力之间的动态关系，这项工作旨在为下一代公共安全战略提供信息。为了快速提供公共政策转型的见解，该项目侧重于从已经收集的数据中获取尽可能丰富的暴力见解，并将其用于学术研究，政策制定者和外行观众使用。运用新的方法和来自三个大规模研究的二手数据，这项工作解决了三个研究目标：（1）调查如何理解公共和私人空间和行为塑造儿童虐待和伴侣暴力在一个大规模监禁的时间;（2）确定家庭层面的儿童虐待和伴侣暴力的模式，在家庭中，父母是和没有参与刑事司法系统;以及（3）研究地方、家庭和个人层面的因素如何影响受影响家庭中的虐待儿童和伴侣暴力，包括街头和监狱暴力是否以及如何蔓延到养育子女和伴侣关系中。该项目以调查人员先前对大规模监禁和家庭生活的研究为基础，采用潜变量方法以及结构化归纳定性分析，以捕捉复杂和难以衡量的人际暴力经历。这项工作扩展了对身体和社会行为（如家庭暴力）的研究方法，揭示和回应了经历这些行为的人所赋予的主观意义。这样的工作保证了公众对脆弱和严重卷入系统的家庭的私人生活有更丰富的理解，这更好地解释了社会的隐蔽性，这种隐蔽性塑造了家庭动态（暴力和其他）在研究中的表现。这项研究的结果旨在为人际暴力的更强大的科学做出贡献。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估来支持。

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Christopher Wildeman at Duke University, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist examining how mass incarceration has shaped the use of violence in families and what the fallout of this historic period of punishment and imprisonment can teach us about the social control of violence. Extending innovative quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal the dynamic relationship between the most common acts of violence and societal efforts to prevent and respond to them, this work is designed to inform a next generation of public safety strategies.To deliver rapid insight for transforming public policy, the project focuses on capturing the richest possible insight on violence from already-collected data and rendering it ready for scholarly, policymaker, and lay audience use. Applying novel methods with secondary data from three large-scale studies, this work addresses three research aims: (1) to investigate how understandings of public and private spaces and behaviors shape child maltreatment and partner violence in a time of mass incarceration; (2) to identify family-level patterns of child maltreatment and partner violence in families in which parents are and are not involved with the criminal justice system; and (3) to examine how local-, family-, and individual-level factors shape child maltreatment and partner violence in affected families, including whether and how street and carceral violence spill over into parenting and partner relationships. Building on the investigators’ prior research on mass incarceration and family life, this project applies latent variable methods alongside structured, inductive qualitative analysis to capture complex and difficult-to-measure experiences of interpersonal violence. This work extends methods for the study of charged physical and social acts (such as violence in families) in ways that reveal and respond to the subjective meanings ascribed by those who experience them. Such work promises a richer public understanding of private life in vulnerable and heavily system-involved families—one that better accounts for the social hiddenness that shapes how family dynamics (violent and otherwise) surface in research. Findings from this research are intended to contribute to a more robust science of interpersonal violence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.