Research Projects at the PSTC
Research at the PSTC is innovative and interdisciplinary. It is distinguished by its commitment to collaboration across disciplinary and institutional boundaries as well as its strong portfolio of research in developing country settings. The scope of PSTC research encompasses both traditional topics of interest to demographers, such as fertility, mortality, and migration, as well as a much broader range of issues, including environmental change, health (including living with disability and studies of nutrition), gender, family structure, schooling, segregation, and the consequences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
Five signature themes characterize our substantive research areas:
Spatial Inquiry
Fertility and HIV/AIDS
Families and Households
Social Behavior and Health
Population and EnvironmentClick here to search our research projects by theme, PSTC investigator, and geographic region.
Spatial Inquiry is a long-standing area of strength for the PSTC. This signature area incorporates the several PSTC disciplines. Research by associates linked to this thematic area spans a wide range of population phenomena that examine human behavior with respect to context and place. Projects range from microlevel longitudinal studies of migration to patterns of urbanization in developing societies to the role of policies in shaping the outlines and settlement patterns of US cities.
The establishment of Brown’s research initiative in Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4, see www.s4.brown.edu) has, furthermore, made this thematic area one of growth. Today active areas of research include migration, social networks, and social adjustment; urbanization; neighborhood effects; and spatial methods.
This thematic area pairs the oldest of demographic topics – fertility – with a topic – HIV/AIDS – that has taken on great importance in the demographic world over the past decade. What links the two at the PSTC are a series of perspectives and approaches that are distinctive. Among these are: (1) research that, while incorporating the micro-level, systematically theorizes about and empirically investigates meso-level influences; (2) an emphasis on the collection of original data; (3) multi-method research designs incorporating both quantitative and qualitative methods; (4) a significant international focus covering Africa, East and South Asia, Eastern and Western Europe, and Latin America; (5) a focus on life course and longitudinal approaches; and (6) an interest in the impact of intergenerational social and economic relations on behavior. These, in turn, reflect the fact that the PSTC is unusual among population centers in the balance achieved in integrating anthropological, sociological, and economic demography in demographic research.
Fertility . Although PSTC researchers utilize international standard surveys such as the DHS, the distinctive feature of PSTC fertility research is its commitment to achieving deep understanding of the social, cultural, and economic contexts in which reproduction occurs, something that cannot be done through standard survey research alone. This commitment is based on the premise that fertility behavior cannot be understood simply by the analysis of individual-level traits but requires adequate knowledge of family and kinship systems, changing gender systems, religious institutions, and the impact of the state, to mention only some of the foci of PSTC study.
HIV/AIDS . Research on HIV/AIDS has expanded dramatically at the PSTC in recent years, with particular focus on sub-Saharan Africa, where the epidemic is most severe. The PSTC is at the forefront in developing a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to understanding behavioral aspects of the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa. The links across themes are again evident as work here ties into PSTC work on households, health behavior, and spatial inquiry.
Demography of Families and Households
The PSTC has a longstanding reputation for scholarship and innovation in the area of Families and Households. New PSTC-based work in this area emphasizes dynamics of household change, processes and patterns of intra-family and inter-generational exchange, and links between household dynamics and macro outcomes. A distinctive feature of this research at Brown is its strength across three social science disciplines: anthropology, economics, and sociology.
PSTC researchers are particularly active in the area of family stratification – exploring inequalities related to gender, race/ethnicity/nativity, and disability in families and households. A hallmark of PSTC research is its emphasis on context as critical to models of family and household processes and outcomes. In addition to policy context, PSTC researchers study social and kinship networks; environmental contexts such as landcover, air, and water quality; economic contexts including employment opportunities, poverty, and economic growth; and neighborhood contexts including segregation.
Research in social behavior and health cuts a broad swath through the activity of the PSTC, as it does at many other population centers. The PSTC signature is distinguished by the introduction of strong disciplinary frameworks to the study of health behavior, enriched by interdisciplinary collaboration that integrates anthropological, economic, public health, and sociological perspectives. While description is the starting point, the major emphasis is on identifying causal processes and testing theories of health-related behavior, such as household investments, on health outcomes. As such PSTC associates draw on frames taken from multiple disciplines to examine health, using both data taken at single points in time to characterize health and health differentials, and data from longitudinal studies that examine causal mechanisms affecting health and health behaviors.
Health research at the PSTC is also distinctive in its emphasis on international health issues affecting Africa and South Asia, by theoretically-driven study designs, and by mixed-method data collection. The following description highlights selected health research projects underway or in planning. Three broad areas of emphasis include population growth, household incomes, and resource allocation; physical and social contexts of health; and health and healthcare in the U.S.
Population and Environment has been a growing area of focus for researchers at the PSTC in recent years. A centerpiece of the research at the PSTC is the recognition that inference about the interrelationship between environmental and population processes requires a detailed understanding of the scales at which these processes operate. Currently active research projects employ the individual as the unit of analysis and the region as the scale of analysis. Other projects emphasize the household as well as inter-household processes. Still others focus on a shared resource, such as the watershed or air. PSTC research on population and environment is interdisciplinary and innovative, yet informed by the best of discipline-specific theories and methods.