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University of Colorado Boulder doctoral candidate Adenife Modile, who studies fertility and maternal health worldwide, travels to Tanzania this month as a Population Reference Bureau fellow. His aim, in the long term, is disrupting the assumption that “having lots of kids is what we do.”

The summit in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, is the first stage of the Policy Communications Fellows Program, a one-year fellowship designed to help researchers like Modile better understand how their research can inform social policy.One of 10 people from seven countries selected for the fellowship, Modile wants to influence public policy to disrupt cultural norms that encourage high fertility rates.

Modile explores fertility trends by analyzing data sets from more than 200 countries. He has researched the effects of origin family size, availability of natural resources, father involvement and racism on “fertility intentions” and maternal health in African countries and the United States. In Madagascar, he researched the variability of women’s fertility intentions, or how many children a woman wants to have, from region to region, analyzing the effects of natural obstacles and barriers on women’s healthcare.

“Our study found that higher levels of local natural resources are associated with lower desired family size. In other words, scarcity is linked to higher desired fertility,” Modile says. One explanation for this may be that children provide necessary labor in regions with limited resources and challenging livelihoods. 

Furthermore, women who experience more seasonal variation in resource availability tend to have lower fertility intentions, indicating that “children’s labor may be particularly important in regions with consistent availability of natural capital,” Modile says.  

In Nigeria, he studied the relationship between a woman’s nuclear family size as a child and her ideal family size when she grows up: what Modile calls “intergenerational transmissions of fertility intentions.” He has found that origin family size is linked with one's ideal number of children. This means that a woman with five siblings is slightly more likely than a woman with two siblings to report five children as her ideal number of children.

But Modile wonders whether women consistently report their actual ideal numbers, and how husbands influence those reported numbers. “Is this [survey] a true measure of a woman’s wish?” he asks. “What’s the role of men in childbearing intentions?”

Modile also wants to examine the role of men in women’s healthcare. He sees a need for more cutting-edge quantitative research regarding the role of men in maternal health, especially using under-utilized data sets. “Men act as important social determinants in their partners’ accessing healthcare services. Male involvement is an important factor in improving maternal health and reducing maternal mortality rates,” Modile says.

He wants to know more about the role of men in their partners’ prenatal health care and how “men’s attendance in prenatal care affects fertility outcomes.” Modile’s research in the United States explores racial disparities in life satisfaction and overall health of white women and black women during pregnancy.

Data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System suggest that during pregnancy, women generally enjoy increases in life satisfaction, but not equally. Even when controlled for education and income, “non-Hispanic black pregnant women did not really increase to the levels of white women’s life satisfaction.”

Drawing on work by University of Michigan sociology Professor Arline Geronimus, Modile suggests that the cumulative effect of racial disparity and discrimination in everyday interactions dramatically affects the ways in which women think about their health.

He is interested in the ways racial health disparities contribute to this, as well as how these differences relate to birth outcomes. “Everyday racism can create problems in how women think about their living conditions and recreational facilities, which can impact how they rate their physical and mental health,” he says.

Modile plans to use his communications fellowship to influence policy in sub-Saharan African countries and around the globe. His goal is to increase access to reproductive health services, to lower fertility rates globally and to “break the idea that … having lots of kids is what we do.”

This begins with increasing education levels, especially among women, so that women are more involved in decisions beyond the household, Modile says. Yet he is realistic about effecting change in sub-Saharan Africa. “Even when sociologists and health experts see places where things need to change, it can be difficult to get interventions to stick.” Identifying the beneficiaries and stakeholders of these health interventions is one important step.

With good communication between scientists and government officials and by starting in smaller communities, Modile believes he can achieve tangible, lasting results. 

This article was originally published by Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. You can find the original atricle in its entirety here. 

During the 2017 Consortion of Social Science Associations Science (COSSA) Policy Conference & Social Science Advocacy Day, held in Washington D.C. on March 29th-30th, IBS Director Myron Gutmann presented Colorado Senator Cory Gardner with the Distinguished Service Award. According to COSSA, this award “recognizes leaders who have gone above and beyond to promote, protect, and advance the social and behavioral science research enterprise.”

About the award, Dr. Gutmann said "I'm delighted to see COSSA recognize Senator Gardner with its 2017 Distinguished Service Award in acknowledgment of his strong support for science in Congress. As the Director of CU Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science, I'm especially grateful for Senator Gardner's support for social and behavioral science research, which addresses human-centered issues of national and global importance."

Read the full press release on Senator Gardner's website here. 

The Center for Resilience and Wellbeing in Schools at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Behavioral Science was launched October 1, 2017 with a five-year $3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration as a part of the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. The Center serves the Rocky Mountain region directly and will be national resource hub to promote safe, trauma responsive school environments.

The following is an exerpt from an article originally published in CU Boulder Today. A link to the full article can be found at the bottom of the page.

By: Lisa Marshall

In the days following 9/11, frightened college students across the country gathered around TVs to get a sense of what was happening in New York City.

Lori Peek, who was just starting her third year of graduate school at CU Boulder, also watched the catastrophe unfold from afar. But soon after the twin towers fell, she packed her bags and flew into the chaos.

"I’d never been to New York or even ridden a subway before," recalls Peek, a research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center at the time. "But I understood it was vital that I get into the field quickly to collect valuable information that would otherwise be lost."

Fast forward 16 years and Peek, who in January returned to Boulder to direct the center, has amassed a unique body of research on how disasters – from terrorist attacks to tornadoes – impact the lives of the vulnerable and marginalized in the days and years to follow.

Her two-year study of the impact 9/11 had on Muslim Americans led to an acclaimed book, Behind the Backlash: Muslim Americans after 9/11. Her work in the Gulf Coast after Katrina and the BP oil spill and Joplin, Missouri – home to the deadliest tornado in 70 years – led to community interventions that help teens better prepare for and recover from disasters. And her 2015 book Children of Katrina, a 7-year project completed with fellow sociologist Alice Fothergill, has been lauded as a groundbreaking exploration of children's long-term recovery.

Peek has no doubt that larger, more destructive disasters are yet to come, due to growing populations in geographically vulnerable areas, unsustainable development and climate change. After spending a decade as a faculty member at Colorado State University and having traveled around the world studying the aftermath of disaster, she returned to the Natural Hazards Center – the nation's clearinghouse for disaster research – to apply the lessons learned.

"We’re in a race, trying to figure out how to work with communities to make them more resilient and be sure that, when disaster strikes, those that are already struggling aren’t left behind," says Peek, also a professor in the sociology department. "To be at this center at this particular time in our nation's history represents an incredible opportunity to work with others to have an impact."

Read the full article in CU Boulder Today. 

This article was originally published in the Colorado Arts and Sciences Magazine. You can view the original article here. 

Article by: Clay Evans

President John F. Kennedy signed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961, for the first time separating federal budgets for defense and non-defense spending and creating the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID.

“The amount of money that is involved in the nonmilitary areas are a fraction of what we spend on our national defense every year,” Kennedy said, “and yet this is very much related to our national security and is as important dollar for dollar as any expenditure for national defense itself.”

More than six decades later, USAID provides more than $20 billion annually — less than 1 percent of the federal budget — about a quarter of it to non-governmental organizations working in Asia, Africa, Latin America and beyond in its efforts to “end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential.”

Perhaps not surprisingly, the money doesn’t always achieve desired results. In fact, it tends to promote moderate political participation through formal mechanisms such as voting only in democratic societies where institutions already are working well, says Carew Boulding, associate professor of political science at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of “NGOs, Political Protest, and Civil Society,” published by Cambridge University Press.

“My research has shown that where historically aid allocation is assumed almost always to lead to more democratic engagement, the evidence has shown that a lot of that engagement is really contentious,” Boulding says.

“That’s certainly not what (USAID) expected. The assumption is that they are giving to NGOs to help build civic engagement in a moderate, institutionalized way.”

Now, Boulding and Associate Professor of Political Science Andy Baker have been awarded a USAID grant to find out why. With help from five graduate students, they will conduct a massive literature review to examine what happens to citizen engagement when previously liberal democratic nations become more repressive.

The researchers hope to get a clearer idea of what citizens can do in such scenarios. Are there spaces for them to express themselves via the internet? How do they vote when elections continue but are highly restricted? How do they engage when protest activity is heavily regulated?

The review will focus on cases from the 20th and 21st centuries, from the collapse of Weimar Germany to recent backsliding in countries such as Venezuela and Ecuador. The researchers will locate appropriate literature from academic journals and annotate some 200 articles. Boulding and Baker will write a summary focused on three questions:

• What enables civic and political participation in countries where civil liberties have been lost? 
• How do forms of civic and political engagement in such contexts differ from forms of engagement in contexts in which civil liberties are protected? 
• Are some forms of civic and political engagement generally more tolerated in newly repressive contexts than others? How do civic actors adapt their engagement tactics to achieve their objectives? 

“For years academics have been telling policy makers and practitioners that they need to listen to academics, read the research, and distribute aid in a way that recognizes best practices, what works, what doesn’t work, and follows the cutting edge of the most rigorous research,” Baker says.

“This is USAID putting its money where its mouth is.”

China, while infamous for its repression of protest and citizen engagement, doesn’t make the researchers’ list because it is a “stable authoritarian” nation lacking recent history as a democracy. But China does provide insight into just how difficult it is for governments to control information flow and protest, Baker notes.

“The internet is like a giant sieve; there is only so much dictators can control what is said and done there,” he says. “China has had some success, but they have tens of thousands of people whose job it is to sit at a desk all day and troll the internet and be the speech police. That level of repression is very costly.”

A quarter-century later, it’s clear that political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” following the collapse of communism, and “the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government” was premature.

Even in the United States and Europe, liberal democratic ideals once considered the foundations of Western society have been weakened, particularly in the post-9/11 era.

“It’s easy to believe that democracy is just naturally stable,” Boulding says. “This project is looking at the ways in which democratic freedoms can be undermined even in seemingly stable systems like the U.S.—and the ways in which citizens can push back.”

This article was originally published by CU Boulder Today. You can read the full original article here. 

By: Lisa Marshall

Seasonally-influenced changes in a mother’s environment and diet can have a profound impact on levels of beneficial sugars in her breast milk, in turn altering the bacterial makeup of her baby’s gut and shaping his or her health and growth.

That’s the conclusion of a first-of-its-kind study designed and co-authored by Robin Bernstein, an associate professor of anthropology at CU Boulder.

“This study helps us better understand how a woman’s environment might influence the composition of her milk and how the composition of her milk might have real-life consequences for her baby,” said Bernstein, who has traveled to Gambia in West Africa for six years to organize the collection of thousands of samples of mother’s milk and infant fecal material for research.

The study – co-authored by researchers from the University of California Davis and the United Kingdom-based Medical Research Council (MRC) and published in January in the journal Scientific Reports – analyzed samples from 33 mom-baby pairs taken at four, 16, and 20 weeks postpartum, along with growth and health information for the infants. The researchers found that during the wet season, when food was scarce and stressors were high, women’s breast milk contained on average 20 percent fewer human milk oligosaccharides (HMOs) – complex sugars that serve as key food sources for babies’ gut bacteria.

The kinds of HMOs present in the milk and the kinds of bacteria present in the infants also changed from season to season, and with those changes sometimes came changes in infant wellbeing. For instance, babies exposed to more of the sugar lacto-N-fucopentaose (LNFP1) tended to get sick less. Those exposed to greater levels of the sugar 3’-sialyllactose tended to show a healthier growth pattern. Babies with higher levels of the Dialister, Prevotella and Bifidobacteria genera of bacteria tended to avoid illness. Those with high levels of Bacteroides bacteria showed higher levels of intestinal inflammation.

A true cause-and-effect conclusion would require further studies with a larger sample size, the authors stress.

Continue reading the full article here. 

(Article originally published by the Daily Camera)

Mental Health Partners and the University of Colorado's Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence have been awarded a $2 million grant to bolster services for Boulder and Broomfield county children and families that have experienced some form of trauma.

The five-year grant, awarded by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, will go toward building a "Trauma Center of Excellence" and will help train nearly 1,000 mental health and other professionals across the state in trauma-informed therapy methods.

"Trauma exposure is really prevalent but we can only learn about potentially traumatic events if we can do screenings," said Monica Fitzgerald, a clinical psychologist and senior research associate at the CU Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence. "We're talking about trauma including child abuse, interfamilial violence but also those other types of traumatic events that many people experience — it can be car accidents, it can be dog bites, sudden death or loss. That doesn't mean everyone needs treatment but we're trying to identify the folks that do."

Read the full article from the Daily Camera here.