Penn State Family Issues Symposium

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ABSTRACT This application requests an additional five years of support for the Penn State Family Issues Symposium, an annual interdisciplinary conference designed to focus attention on understudied issues that are important for understanding family structure and function and their impacts on the behavior, health and development of family members, particularly children and youth. Our application is responsive to the call in NICHD’s Scientific Vision: The Next Decade, which identified population dynamics as a priority and argued that advancing knowledge in this area “starts with understanding the rapid and profound changes shaping families in the United States and around the world. This includes understanding how biological, social, and other environmental factors, in concert with population dynamics, influence the health and well- being of mothers, fathers, children, families, communities, and societies.” This proposal builds on a 26-year tradition of annual symposia that have been co-organized by faculty members from the departments of Sociology and Human Development and Family Studies with financial support from Penn State’s Population Research Institute, Social Science Research Institute, numerous other Penn State departments and centers as relevant for particular symposium topics, and the NICHD. Aims of the symposium series are: (1) to promote dialogue that stimulates and advances novel interdisciplinary and translational research on family issues; (2) to promote understanding of and scholarly excellence in basic and translational research on families; and (3) to identify and address significant, emerging issues in the field of family studies that have not yet received substantial research attention or been the focus of other conferences and meetings and wherein knowledge can be advanced by interdisciplinary and translational research. To address these aims, the symposium series is designed to foster discussion among scholars whose work ranges from more basic to more applied and who might not otherwise find opportunities for exchange, to produce a book series for broad dissemination of the symposium’s knowledge contributions, and to engage students and junior scholars−the next generation of family researchers.