Faculty Provide Research on Both Internal and External Influences

Addressing Concerns Of Disparity With Heat Mapping

Extreme heat kills many Americans every year but not everyone’s risk is the same. Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator Dr. Jennifer First, along with researchers from UT Geography and Public Health teamed up with local community members to map urban heat islands, or UHIs, and collect the data necessary to protect disproportionately affected communities.

UHIs are places where buildings, pavement, and other parts of urban environments can be up to 20 degrees hotter than nearby rural areas, putting people at heightened risk of illness and death during extreme heat events.

Through this project, using heat sensors mounted on their own cars or bikes, volunteer citizen scientists traveled their neighborhoods in the morning, afternoon, and evening on the hottest days of the year, recording temperature, humidity, and their precise location.

First explained that the success of such a large city-wide heat project required strong community partnerships. “Last year we developed a collaborative network—the Knoxville Heat Equity Coalition—which includes researchers, city government offices, nonprofit organizations, students, and community members who are working to advance climate resilience and heat inequities in Knoxville. For the Knoxville Heat Mapping Campaign, we worked with community partners to recruit 50 to 65 volunteers via email listservs, social media posts, flyers, neighborhood events, and word of mouth across the city,” said First.

Knoxville was one of 14 US cities chosen to participate in the 2022 Heat Mapping Campaign supported by the National Integrated Heat Health Information System (NIHHIS), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate Program Office, and CAPA Strategies LLC.

“We are extremely grateful that NOAA is helping communities like Knoxville measure their hottest places so that we can use this information to inform strategies to reduce the unequal and unhealthy impacts of heat across our city,” First noted. “By working with community members, this campaign raised awareness among volunteers and residents about heat risk, informed heat adaptation and mitigation strategies, and provided research on how Knoxville’s UHI intersects with equity issues such as housing insecurity, energy burden, transportation, and health care access.”

To review the recap of the project, visit https://osf.io/ukg5z

Examining Disproportional School Suspensions

Dr. Andrea Joseph-McCatty’s school suspension research, funded from the UTCSW Social Justice Innovation Initiative grant, focused on understanding and addressing racially disproportional school suspensions and the ways in which those are also gender disproportionate.

“We know nationally that in the 2017-2018 academic year, over 2.5 million children received one or more out-of-school suspensions,” Joseph-McCatty explained. “While these numbers are going down compared to years prior, students of color and students with disabilities are receiving a greater share of suspensions and expulsions. It’s also important to disaggregate the data to understand trends at the intersection of race, gender, class, and other student characteristics. For example, in 2017-2018, black girls had 4.19 times the risk of receiving an out-of-school suspension compared to white girls. Nationally, they are the only group of girls disproportionately suspended in relation to their enrollment.”

To address high and disproportional suspensions, Joseph-McCatty noted that schools have implemented multitiered interventions, such as restorative justice practices, and positive behavior interventions, which can create positive, predictable, equitable and safe learning environments. While some studies showed a reduction in high and disproportional suspensions from these efforts, discipline disparities often continued to persist.

Some schools are seeking to change these disproportional rates for Black girls and other girls of color by partnering with the community to provide gender and culturally responsive interventions. Yet, a major barrier to intervention is the perception adults hold about Black girls. Instead of receiving developmentally appropriate and socioemotional support, many Black girls are “adultified” – a concept coined to describe how Black girls are disproportionately perceived as less innocent, needing less nurturing, less protection, less support, knowing more about sex and adult topics, and are more adultlike than their peers.

“While some may generally assume that students only receive school discipline for breaking school rules, social scientists have used data to show how race, gender, disability and class bias at the intersection of punitive discipline policies and systematic inequities lead to disproportional suspensions,” Joseph-McCatty stated. “For example, we know that Black girls in particular are getting disciplined in school for wearing their natural hair in afros or having braids, both of which are styles that allow Black girls to embrace their beauty and have cultural pride in the face of Eurocentric beauty ideals that suggest straight hair is more professional. In other cases, Black girls are more likely to receive school discipline outcomes for subjective infractions such as tone of voice, clothing, and disrespect compared to other girls. And that’s part of the way racial and gender discrimination intersects to create disproportional suspensions for Black girls. In my research, I build on these ideas and explore how adverse childhood experiences, including neglect, abuse, neighborhood violence, and parent incarceration and/or death, become another layer by which Black girls are misunderstood.”

To read Joseph-McCatty’s full study, go to https://www. thefinddesign.org/post/black-girl-wellness-tennessee-schools

UNDERSTANDING FACTORS THAT PROMOTE THE WELL-BEING OF CHILDREN

In her role as the Urban Child Institute Endowed Professor, Associate Professor Dr. Anne Conway’s research goal is to advance the understanding of factors that promote the well-being of children. Her research is organized around one central question critical to the field of social work: What factors are associated with children’s ability to regulate, manage, or control their emotion, attention, cognition, and sleep, and do these abilities, in turn, predict better health, mental health, and educational outcomes?

“With the help of the generous support of the Urban Child Institute, we have been able to purchase electroencephalography (EEG) equipment needed to study brain development and adverse childhood experiences in young children,” Conway noted. “It is important to underscore that we are the only college of social work to have an EEG research and teaching lab to study neural correlates of emotion and cognition and adversity in young children. The few colleges of social work that study neural correlates using EEG focus on adults.”

Conway uses the equipment to study adverse childhood experiences, social determinants of health, and early biomarkers of mental health with infants and young children and their parents. It can also be used to study the effects of early interventions and policies on development.

Assistant Professor Dr. Kristen Ravi also plans to use the EEG equipment to study trauma in children. She will also examine the effect of nature, such as green spaces and parks, on children’s health and brain development. This important piece of research creates an understanding of how investing in green spaces may improve children’s brain development and wellbeing.

“We are creating a social work internship site where students will have first-hand experience studying brain development,” Conway explained. “The promise of neuroscience is that it can inform our social work practice and policies focused on building strong brains. Neuroscience data may help social workers identify predictors of treatment and whether our interventions are working before we observe behavioral changes.”

In addition to integrating neuroscience into the MSSW curriculum, Urban Child Institute members expressed interest in further expansion into the doctoral curriculum. “Last fall, I taught a course entitled Neuroscience for Clinical Practice for Doctor of Social Work clinical students,” Conway said. “By integrating material on development from pre-conception through adulthood, social determinants of health, racism, and the effects of interventions and policies on brain structure and function, students developed knowledge pertaining to clinical and developmental neuroscience that they can apply to social work practice and research. Using a developmental framework, this course provides an overview of brain structure and function across the lifespan and associations with cumulative risks, adverse childhood experiences, social determinants of health, and enriching environmental experiences.”

To read the full 2022 report, go to https://tiny.utk.edu/UrbanChild-22

Linking Violent Rhetoric To Mass Shootings

Dr. William Nugent, along with colleagues Dr. Thereasa Abrams, Dr. Anne Conway and Dr. Andrea Joseph-McCatty, have hypothesized about a link between the violent rhetoric increasingly employed by US politicians and social commentators, and mass shootings. Their recent findings illustrate an understudied dimension of contemporary violence.

Together with Conway, he focused his research on the violent political rhetoric (VPR) in the US. He examined a connection between VPR and mass shootings.

Nugent explained, “There are varying definitions of violent political rhetoric. Essentially it is provocative phrasing used by people with influence that defames, dehumanizes, or is derogatory towards specific groups of people that could justify harming them. Violent political rhetoric can also be more subtle, such as the use of a statement by a politician that a target group, such as LGBTQ+ people, ‘should be very afraid’. Numerous examples of violent political rhetoric by US politicians and commentators can be found, such as statements to the effect that a particular person should be assassinated, beheaded, or put to death.”

Nugent also considered other speculated influences on mass shootings: gun ownership, imitation of other mass shootings, income inequality, and changes in gross domestic product. “We collected data on gun ownership, examined time lags between mass shootings, and tracked income inequality and changes in gross domestic product as possible explanations for mass shootings,” he said. “We then started crunching all the data, using multiple analysis models, looking for possible relationships with mass shootings. What came out was both unsurprising and unexpected. The findings showed a positive link between income inequality and mass shootings and that, generally, periods of decreases in gross domestic product coincided with increases in mass shootings. These findings might support theories that mass shootings are often perpetrated by people under psychological stress and pressure.”

After controlling for these alternative explanations for mass shootings, as Nugent and colleagues expected, there was indeed a positive relationship between VPR and mass shootings. His research suggested that, after controlling for income inequality, changes in GDP, imitation effects, and gun ownership, as VPR increased mass shootings increased.

“I would urge those thinking about the implications of this research to not over-interpret the meaning,” he said. “We do not show definitively that VPR causes mass shootings, but rather that there is a positive association. As VPR increases, mass shootings also appear to increase. The results are consistent with violent political rhetoric being a contributing factor in mass shootings, but many alternate explanations need to be ruled out as well. Much more research is called for and needed, and I hope to continue to explore this field of study.”

To read the complete article on Research Features, go to https://researchfeatures.com/assessing-link-violent-politicalrhetoric-mass-shootings/

Top left: PhD students Eliza Galvez and Namrata Mukherjee; Top middle: (l to r): Nashville MSSW students Jazzmin Mitchell and Linda Sok discuss a class project on the Nashville campus; Top right: MSSW Online Student Morgan Ridgell participates in her online classes; Middle center: UTCSW Professor Stan Bowie teaches in his Social Welfare Policies/Issues class in Strong Hall; Bottom left: UTCSW students head to class in front of Henson Hall; Bottom right: Assistant Professor Kristen Ravi discusses research data with MSSW Student DeAyne Scaife.