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

该奖项是作为NSF社会、行为和经济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、工业界或私营部门和政府的科学职业生涯培养有前途的、早期职业博士水平的科学家。SPRF奖项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。国家科学基金会致力于促进科学界所有阶层的科学家参与其研究方案和活动，包括那些来自代表性不足的群体的科学家；博士后阶段被认为是实现这一目标的专业发展的一个重要水平。每个博士后研究员都必须解决推动各自学科领域向前发展的重要科学问题。在杜克大学克里斯托弗·威尔德曼博士的赞助下，这项博士后奖学金资助了一位早期的职业科学家，他研究了大规模监禁如何塑造了家庭中暴力的使用，以及这段惩罚和监禁的历史时期的后果可以教会我们什么关于暴力的社会控制。将创新的定量和定性方法扩展到揭示最常见的暴力行为与预防和应对它们的社会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。为了快速洞察转变公共政策，该项目专注于从已经收集的数据中获取关于暴力的最丰富的见解，并将其提供给学术界、政策制定者和普通受众使用。这项工作利用来自三项大规模研究的二手数据，应用新的方法，解决了三个研究目标：(1)调查在大规模监禁的时代，对公共和私人空间和行为的理解如何塑造虐待儿童和伴侣暴力的行为；(2)确定父母参与和不参与刑事司法系统的家庭中虐待儿童和伴侣暴力的家庭层面模式；以及(3)检查地方、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，包括街头和监禁暴力是否以及如何溢出到育儿和伴侣关系中。基于调查人员先前对大规模监禁和家庭生活的研究，该项目将潜在变量方法与结构化、归纳的定性分析相结合，以捕捉复杂和难以衡量的人际暴力经历。这项工作扩展了研究被指控的身体和社会行为(如家庭暴力)的方法，揭示并回应了亲历者赋予的主观意义。这样的工作有望让公众更丰富地了解脆弱和高度系统参与的家庭中的私人生活--这更好地解释了社会隐蔽性塑造了家庭动态(暴力和其他)如何在研究中浮出水面。这项研究的发现旨在为更强有力的人际暴力科学做出贡献。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.