20 minute read
Getting That Second Vaccine Dose
Community-Based Research Shows More People Exposed to COVID-19 Virus Than Previously Known
Study reveals need for two doses of mRNA vaccines for mild and asymptomatic cases
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An assay plate contains mailed-in samples of reconstituted blood.
As the U.S. continues to vaccinate Americans to prevent a wider outbreak of COVID-19, the Food and Drug Administration has currently authorized three vaccines for emergency use, two of which use a two-dose regime. Northwestern University researchers are conducting an ongoing communitybased study that shows that mild or asymptomatic infections—which comprise the vast majority of infections in the general population—do not generate high levels of protective immunity.
The study also shows that a single dose of current two-dose mRNA vaccines does not provide adequate protection for most people with mild or asymptomatic COVID-19.
The interdisciplinary team of Northwestern scientists, who include IPR biological anthropologist Thomas McDade, and medical social sciences professor and IPR associate Brian Mustanski, launched a large community-based study called SCAN: Screening for Coronavirus Antibodies in Neighborhoods in June 2020. SCAN aims to track the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and to identify the circumstances and behaviors associated with exposure and severity of infection. Nearly 10,000 people across the Chicagoland area are enrolled in the study. platform,” McDade said. “This allows us to reach a large and diverse group of participants to generate important insights into the causes and consequences of COVID-19 infection in the community.”
SCAN is a serological study, meaning that it measures antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 in blood samples to determine whether someone was previously exposed to the virus, even if the person never showed any symptoms of infection or received a clinical diagnosis of disease. Blood samples are selfcollected at home with a simple finger stick.
Importantly, SCAN applies two different kinds of antibody tests. The first test provides a very accurate measure of prior exposure to the virus. The second test measures the level of protective immunity against infection.
SCAN’s findings, which are detailed in five preprints and a published article, include:
• The majority of SARS-CoV-2 infections in the community are mild and asymptomatic, and they generate lower levels of protective immunity than has been reported in clinical studies which focus on more severe cases of COVID-19.
• Rates of infection were seven times higher in Chicago—as indicated by a positive antibody test—than detected by viral testing for acute infection.
• Chicagoans in more disadvantaged neighborhoods had more severe
COVID-19 cases compared to adjoining neighborhoods, but antibody testing revealed no significant differences in the likelihood of exposure to the virus between the areas.
• Those exposed to COVID-19 in the home scored 2.5 times higher on a measure of symptom severity. They also had higher levels of antibodies than individuals who picked up the virus outside of the home.
Thomas McDade is Carlos Montezuma Professor of Anthropology, director of IPR’s Cells to Society: The Center on Social Disparities and Health, and an IPR fellow.
Two Doses of an mRNA Vaccine Are Better Than One for Those Without Confirmed Cases of COVID-19
RESEARCH NEWS
Public Perceptions of Black Girls and the Punitive Consequences
Black women and girls are punished— through suspension, arrests, and incarceration—at alarmingly high rates in the United States.
In an IPR working paper, social policy expert Sally Nuamah investigates the public perceptions shaping the punitive experiences of Black women and girls. In a survey experiment of 1,466 adults, she presented participants with a scenario in which a student violated the school’s dress code policy by wearing shorts. They were then randomly presented with one of four names common among particular racial and gender groups—Keisha (a Black girl), Emily (a White girl), Jamal (a Black boy), and Jake (a White boy)—as the violator of the dress code. The participants were then asked questions about their perception of the student.
The findings show participants perceived Emily and Keisha as older than the male students, but Keisha was viewed as significantly more dangerous, experienced with sex, and appropriately punished for violating the dress code by being suspended. The results reveal that Black girls suffer from more severe forms of punishment because of their gender and race. This work has serious implications for research related to the impacts of Black women and girls’ punishment for democracy at large.
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Sally Nuamah is assistant professor of human development and social policy and an IPR fellow.
45–50 Minutes
of High-Dosage Tutoring to Double Math Learning
IPR economist Jonathan Guryan released a study with the University of Chicago Education Lab that demonstrates individualized, intensive—or “high-dosage”—tutoring can double or triple the amount of math high school students learn each year, increase student grades, and reduce the number of failed classes in math and other courses. The study evaluated the impact of an intervention that provided Chicago Public Schools students with daily 45–50 minute, two-on-one math instruction in ninth and tenth grades. The intervention, which cost $3,500 to $4,300 per pupil per year, was developed by the Saga Education, a nonprofit organization.
Jonathan Guryan is the Lawyer Taylor Professor of Education and Social Policy and an IPR fellow.
A Limit on the Range of Vocalizations That Support Infant Cognition
A study published in PLOS One finds that although human and non-human primate vocalizations facilitate core cognitive processes in very young human infants, birdsong does not. The researchers, including IPR research specialist Kali Woodruff Carr and IPR psychologist Sandra Waxman, have new evidence documenting that not all naturally produced vocalizations support cognition in infants. Ample evidence documents that infants as young as 3 and 4 months old have begun to link the language they hear to the objects that surround them. Listening to their native language boosts their success in forming categories of objects, for instance, dog. Object categorization, the ability to identify commonalities among objects—for example, Fido or Spot—is a fundamental building block of cognition. “This new evidence brings us closer to identifying which vocalizations initially support infant cognition,” Waxman said.
The Power of Balanced Messaging to Support Marginalized Students
A study finds that messages about the positive power of a student’s background can support the achievement and wellbeing of marginalized high school or college students. The finding by IPR social psychologist Mesmin Destin holds important implications for educational policies and practices. Students who are Black, Latinx, or from lower socioeconomic (SES) or other marginalized backgrounds constantly hear negative messages about their problems and challenges. Such messages can lead them to believe that their backgrounds are only barriers and never strengths. One significant influence on students is their instructors. Students systematically pick up messages from faculty, intentional or not, that “aren’t necessarily conveying a belief that their group that is seen as marginalized in society actually is a source of some unique strengths,” Destin said. Other work in Destin’s lab demonstrates that high school and college students can get “big messages” from society and the political world that affect students’ sense of belonging in their academic communities.
Mesmin Destin is associate professor of psychology and of human development and social policy and an IPR fellow.
The History of Diversity as an Education Value
In November 2020, an appellate court agreed with the lower court that Harvard University’s effort to diversify its student body did not involve intentional discrimination against Asian American applicants. This summer the Supreme Court has requested the views of Biden’s Department of Justice on the case. In the meantime, new research reveals that a belief in the educational value of diversity was a critical part of the original motivation behind affirmative action.
This idea that diversity is educationally valuable—or the “diversity rationale”—is often seen as coming out of the seminal 1978 Regents of California v. Bakke Supreme Court case. But IPR sociologist Anthony S. Chen and co-author Lisa Stulberg of New York University find that it started much earlier.
In Bakke, the court struck down racial quotas in the admissions process, but held that race could still be used to foster racial diversity. Examining historical records dating back to the 1960s, he and Stulberg discover something else: “It’s actually a creature of the early 1960s, which is a very different moment in American political life.”
The two researchers focus on little known but critically important conversations in the early 1960s, when admissions officers and administrators at top universities saw that American society was changing. They decided that their institutions should take the lead in enrolling students who differed from the White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who had long made up their student bodies.
Those like Wilbur Bender, Harvard’s dean of admissions during the Eisenhower era, believed that classes of diverse students improved education. He set out to disseminate his ideas in 1961, just after the country had elected its first Roman Catholic president—John F. Kennedy.
Chen and Stulberg’s findings challenge the idea that the diversity rationale was hurriedly concocted in the 1970s to justify racial preferences that could not otherwise survive legal and constitutional scrutiny. They call into question the intense skepticism that is often brought to bear on the underlying motives of schools that wish to compose a diverse class for its educational value.
—Mesmin Destin
Boston protestors support the lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions against Harvard in October 2018.
Anthony Chen is associate professor of sociology and political science (by courtesy) and an IPR fellow.
The Contradiction Between Women’s Empowerment and Greek Life
Research by IPR education sociologist Simone Ispa-Landa with graduate research assistant Mariana Oliver sheds light on an apparent conflict between women’s ideals of feminist empowerment and taking part in Greek life.
The study, published in Gender & Society, explores how women perceive, explain, and reconcile the costs and benefits associated with historically White college sororities and a social hierarchy predominately controlled by men.
A centuries-old institution, the historically White Greek system is a pillar of social and extracurricular life on many campuses, with robust enrollments by middle- and uppermiddle-class White students. But even before the Abolish Greek Life Movement, women held serious doubts about whether Greek life was sustainable, given its clash with their goals and values.
In a series of 117 interviews with 53 sorority women conducted over the course of three years, study participants consistently talked about three recurrent issues.
The women complained about a social status system that rewards women for beauty, wealth, and fashion over anything else. They expressed outrage about a rush process that excludes and marginalizes women of color and women from lower-income backgrounds. And they criticized Greek party culture for allowing a male-controlled social environment, as fraternities tended to host parties and fraternity members determined the lighting, music, and alcohol.
“This new study shows that the problems in Greek life are even greater than previously thought,” Ispa-Landa said. “Women saw sororities as putting the brakes on efforts to find an equal footing with men.”
Simone Ispa-Landa is associate professor of human development and social policy and an IPR fellow. Mariana Oliver is a PhD student in sociology and a law student at Northwestern.
Certain characteristics and skills help young people do well in life, research shows, such as being hardworking, understanding, and flexible. High schools encourage these mindsets, habits, and competencies as social-emotional development, but can its impact be measured?
In a study that appeared in Education Next, IPR education and labor economist Kirabo Jackson, IPR graduate research assistant Sebastián Kiguel, and their colleagues create value-added measures of social-emotional development similar to value-added test score measures to gauge the impact on short- and long-term student outcomes.
They examine surveys of social-emotional development given to Chicago Public School students in combination with administrative and test-score data for 55,500 students in ninth grade between 2011 and 2017. Outcomes they consider include absences, disciplinary infractions and school-connected arrests, course credits, and freshman grades, as well as graduating from high school and enrolling in college in the longer term.
The researchers show that schools better at developing students’ social-emotional learning tend to do so in one of two ways: They either promote social wellbeing, which improves student attendance and behavior, or boost work habits, which increases academic performance. They find that school improvement of students’ social-
emotional growth has a larger effect on students’ outcomes than schools raising
students’ test scores. The authors offer that the next step is to understand which school practices are working and which policies are needed to implement them widely.
Kirabo Jackson is the Abraham Harris Professor of Education and Social Policy and an IPR fellow. Sebastián Kiguel is a PhD student in human development and social policy and an IPR graduate research assistant.
140 Studies 30 Countries 25 Years
No Change in Hiring Discrimination
IPR sociologist Lincoln Quillian and Arnfinn Midtbøen of the University of Oslo examine over 140 field experimental studies of discrimination in the hiring of various racial and ethnic groups across 30 countries. They find that White ethnic groups experience hiring discrimination but much less than non-White ethnoracial groups. Discrimination in hiring against racial and ethnic minorities is a worldwide phenomenon. While larger employers and public-sector employers tend to have lower rates of discrimination, rates of discrimination in the United States and the United Kingdom have not changed over the last 25 years.
‘Incarceration Should Be the Last Resort’ for Youth with Mental Health Struggles
Youth arrested as juveniles with psychiatric disorders that remain untreated struggle with mental health, getting an education, stable relationships, employment, and housing well beyond adolescence reports a Northwestern Medicine study.
Research shows nearly two-thirds of males and more than one-third of females with one or more existing psychiatric disorders when they entered detention, still had a disorder 15 years later.
The findings are significant because mental health struggles add to the existing racial, ethnic and economic disparities as well as academic challenges from missed school. This makes it harder for them to attain a successful transition to adulthood.
“Kids get into trouble during adolescence. Those from wealthier families also use drugs and get into fights. But these situations are most often handled informally by the school and parent, and don’t culminate in arrest and detention,” said psychologist and IPR associate Linda Teplin, the study’s lead author.
“These are not necessarily bad kids, but they have many strikes against them,” Teplin continued. “Physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect are common. These experiences can precipitate depression. Incarceration should be the last resort.”
-Linda Teplin
Linda Teplin is the Owen L. Coon Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and an IPR associate.
The Cost of School Shootings
More than 240,000 U.S. students have experienced gun violence at school since the 1999 Columbine shooting, according to a Washington Post analysis. In a working paper, IPR economists Molly Schnell and Hannes Schwandt, along with their colleagues, examine the cost of school shootings to the surviving students. Beyond the terrible loss of life—with 147 students, educators, and others killed since 1999—the study is among the first to quantify the long-term impacts of school shootings on the numerous students who survived them. It finds that students do not just “bounce
back” from shootings, and they are affected across the board—no matter their race, gender, or socioeconomic status.
The researchers used a unique Texas dataset that linked administrative data from primary schools, high schools, universities, and the labor market. They compared each of 33 K–12 public schools in Texas that experienced a school shooting between 1995 and 2016 to similar Texas schools that did not.
In the short-term, the researchers find students who experience a school shooting, when compared to their peers who do not, are more likely to miss school, be chronically absent, and repeat a grade two years after the event. Longer term, these students are less likely to graduate high school as well as attend and graduate from college. Between the ages of 24 and 26, they were also less likely to be employed and earned less than others their age. The researchers calculated that this could amount to an estimated $115,500 per student in lost wages over the course of their lives.
Molly Schnell is an assistant professor of economics and Hannes Schwandt is an assistant professor of human development and social policy. Both are IPR fellows.
Dangers of Collecting Drinking Water
An international study is one of the first to reveal how those who set out to collect drinking water in low- and middle-income countries can face serious injury. Coauthors IPR anthropologist Sera Young and Northwestern postdoctoral fellow Vidya Venkataramanan report in BMJ Global Health that these injuries more frequently impact women and compound the issue of water insecurity. Such dangers include falls, traffic accidents, animal attacks, and fights, which can result in broken bones, spinal injuries, lacerations, and other physical injuries.
“When it comes to water, the bulk of our attention goes to what is in it,” Young said. “It’s easy to forget that for the millions of people who don’t have the luxury of clean drinking water at their home, they can face many dangers before the water even touches their lips.”
The Kids Are Not Alright
Growing mental health issues threaten teenagers and young adults
With vaccination rates increasing and states reopening, many in the U.S. are hopeful that the pandemic is finally nearing its end. Despite the optimism around the pandemic’s progress, a national survey run by researchers from Northwestern, Harvard, Northeastern, and Rutgers universities finds that depression and other mental health issues have not improved since the winter.
The survey of over 21,000 individuals between April 1 and May 3, 2021, reveals that young adults between the ages of 18 and 24 have been hit particularly hard, with 42% showing signs of at least moderate depression.
“This is sobering news and likely reflects that young people are already dealing with much uncertainty at that stage of life; the pandemic thrown in exacerbates that,” said IPR political scientist James Druckman, who co-authored the report.
A national survey conducted earlier in the pandemic by the American Psychological Association (APA) reveals stress from COVID-19—along with stress related to healthcare, the economy, racism, and the presidential election—is seriously threatening the mental health of our country, particularly our youngest generation.
“Loneliness and uncertainty about the future are major stressors for adolescents and young adults who are striving to find their places in the world, both socially, and in terms of education and work,” said IPR developmental psychobiologist Emma Adam, who led the study design and data collection on teenagers for the report.
The potential long-term consequences of the persistent stress and trauma created by the pandemic are particularly serious for our country’s youngest individuals, known as Generation Z. The 2020 APA survey shows that teens (ages 13–17) and young adults (ages 18–23) are facing unprecedented uncertainty, experiencing elevated stress, and already reporting symptoms of depression.
Emma Adam is the Edwina S. Tarry Professor of Human Development and Social Policy. James Druckman is the Payson S. Wild Professor of Political Science and IPR associate director. Both are IPR fellows.
Policy and Science During the Pandemic
Pexels In Science, strategy professor and IPR associate Benjamin Jones and his colleagues examine the coevolution of policy and science during the pandemic. Using a dataset of 37,735 policy documents published by government agencies and think tanks from 114 countries and 55 intergovernmental organizations between January 2 and May 26, 2020, the researchers matched each document to scientific references in a second dataset of academic publications and citations.
They find in the early stages of the pandemic, 90% of the policy documents were focused on medical and public health, but beginning in March 2020, there was more focus on issues around the economy and society. The researchers also show studies referenced in policy documents had on average 40 times more citations in other scientific studies than those not referenced, indicating that policymakers used the research that scientists themselves consider especially impactful. The researchers find that many policy documents created to combat COVID-19 used recent and peer-reviewed scientific studies, despite the rapidly evolving nature of the pandemic.
The Widening Gender Pay Gap
Study calculates women’s wages might not recover before 2040
When the coronavirus shut down the economy, U.S. working women were hit with what has been called the “shecession”: They lost jobs in greater numbers than in previous downturns, and working mothers saw their childcare responsibilities increase when schools closed.
Economist and IPR associate Matthias Doepke and his co-authors show this combination of women’s job losses, mostly in the service sector, and juggling work with extra childcare has caused many of them to leave the workforce. It also differs from prior recessions where job losses hit men harder.
“The primary reason for the rise in the wage gap is that losing employment during a recession has been shown to have a large and persistent negative effect on future earnings,” Doepke said. “It takes time to find a new job, and more often than not the new job will have lower earnings, less employment security, and lesser career prospects.”
As the decline in women’s employment was much larger than men’s, he says it will depress women’s earnings and widen the wage gap by up to 5%. And he calculates that gap may not return to pre-pandemic levels for nearly 20 years. This differs from a normal recession when the gender gap slightly decreases.
Doepke also points to long-term economic consequences. When their husband or partner lost a job in other recessions, women typically held on to theirs, absorbing some of the economic shock. Without this buffer many families have been forced to reduce spending. “A policy that would have prioritized opening schools safely, rather than, say, opening bars and indoor dining while infection rates were still high, would have much reduced families’ childcare needs and allowed many parents, particularly mothers, to resume employment,” Doepke said.
A study estimates that the ‘shecession’ will widen the wage gap by up to 5%.
Matthias Doepke is the HSBC Research Professor in Economics and an IPR associate.
Opioid Deaths Spiked During the First Chicago Lockdown
Average number of opioid overdose deaths increased more than 25%, from 35 to 44 per week
The number of fatal opioid overdoses in Cook County spiked during Illinois’ first 11-week COVID-19 stay-at-home order in spring 2020, according to a JAMA Insights article by IPR associates and Feinberg researchers Maryann Mason and Joe Feinglass.
The researchers, who included Ponni Arunkumar of the Cook County Medical Examiners’ office, analyzed data from the office on overdoses before, during, and after the stay-at-home order that lasted from March 21 to May 30, 2020. They tallied the number of deaths between January 5, 2018 and December 23, 2020, showing 4,283 opioid overdose fatalities in Cook County. Opioid overdose deaths following the stay-at-home period remain elevated above pre-2020 levels, the study reports. Additionally, it finds:
• In the 15 weeks leading up to the stay-at-home period (beginning in late 2019), the average number of weekly fatal opioid overdoses increased from 23 to 35.1.
• During the 11-week stay-at-home period, the average number of weekly overdose deaths increased 25.6%, from 35.1 to 44.1.
• In the 29 weeks after the stay-at-home order lifted, average weekly deaths sharply declined. But they began to rise at the end of the period to 32.7 deaths per week.
