Overview of Activities - Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern ...

P. Reese
POLITICS, INSTITUTIONS, AND PUBLIC POLICY
suggests otherwise. The three researchers looked at the
relationship between advanced commercial Internet use
and technology and local wage growth in the United
States between 1995 and 2000. They find that advanced
Internet business use such as e-commerce
is associated with wage growth—but
only as a one-time relative gain and
only in more urban locations already in
the top 25 percent of income that are
also well off in terms of education and
industries. While some recent studies
suggest that Internet use might lower
the costs of operating a business in rural
areas, they could not find any proof that
wages in these areas gained as a result—
or that the Internet has helped rural areas
to develop much at all. Instead, their
results point to a large gap in advanced
Internet use between urban and rural
areas. Thus, the researchers suggest that policymakers
focus on tailored regional development instead of the
current trend of encouraging Internet business use
outside of urban areas. Greenstein is Elinor and H.
Wendell Hobbs Professor of Management and Strategy
at Northwestern. Forman is at the Georgia Institute
of Technology, and Goldfarb is at the University
of Toronto.
< Networks of Politically Active Lawyers
Longtime law school professor John Heinz, Anthony
Paik of the University of Iowa, and Ann Southworth
of the University of California, Irvine, analyze the
characteristics of lawyers and the structure of their
networks. Using network analysis, they study contacts
between lawyers active in domestic politics and their
patterns of integration and cleavage. Recently, the
researchers studied how lawyers in the conservative
coalition organize and mobilize interest groups. In
continuing work, they have uncovered a stark divide
between the network’s social and religious conservatives
and other conservative and libertarian legal advocates.
In their current project, Heinz and his colleagues
employ data on organizations and lawyers drawn from
the full range of American politics and then focus on
Shari Diamond studies jury
deliberations and verdicts.
a set of policy issues that were particularly salient in
2004–05 (when the network data were collected), such
as gay rights, abortion, and the Terri Schiavo case.
For analytic purposes, the organizations—and the
lawyers connected to their causes—
were divided into eight groups that
reflect the conservative and liberal
establishment and activist wings, as
well as business and other separate
interests. The researchers are looking
both at the structure of the overall
network—including lines of cooperation
and conflict—in addition to whether
characteristics of the lawyers vary by the
causes served or types of organizations
represented. Thus far, their analysis
suggests that women are overrepresented
among lawyers serving liberal activist
groups and strikingly underrepresented
among those serving social and religious conservative
organizations. Heinz is Owen L. Coon Professor
Emeritus in the Northwestern School of Law.
< Jury Deliberations and Decision Making
Shari Seidman Diamond, a law professor and
psychologist, continues her innovative line of research
on jury deliberations. Despite the popular view that
deliberation does not have much of an impact on jury
verdicts, Diamond finds that both classic and more
recent literature on the subject—particularly when
combined with findings from cognitive psychology
on the dynamics of group decision making—indicate
the importance of the deliberative process on jurors’
decision making. In the Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, she and American Bar Foundation researcher
Jessica Salerno advocate further investigation of
the cognitive processes during deliberation that
could potentially explain the transition between
predeliberation preferences and a jury’s ultimate
verdict. They have also identified certain cognitive
concepts—such as recall, information pooling,
error correction, analogical reasoning, heuristics,
and perceptions of others’ confidence—that could
be especially valuable for understanding jurors’
deliberative behavior.
S
ocial Disparities
and Health
IPR 2009
IPR’s Cells to Society (C2S): The Center on Social Disparities and Health continues to expand its
scope of activities to understand how social, economic, and cultural contexts affect physical and
mental health, as well as cognitive achievement, at the population level. Faculty research overlaps
with other IPR program areas, including Child, Adolescent, and Family Studies; Poverty, Race,
and Inequality; and Education Policy (see pp. 10–24). Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, a developmental
psychologist, is C2S’s founding director. Currently, the center has three signature research themes:
• social disparities, stress, and health
• families, interpersonal relationships, and health
• longevity, mortality, and preconception-to-adult models of health
Overview of Activities
< First Joint Appointment with the
Medical School
Clinical and developmental psychologist Lauren
Wakschlag became the first IPR/C2S faculty fellow
from Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine to
hold a term appointment. The position will specifically
link the medical and social sciences at Northwestern
by bridging C2S and the newly created Feinberg
Department of Medical Social Sciences (MSS). In
addition to her IPR/C2S faculty fellow appointment,
Wakschlag serves as MSS professor and associate
chair for scientific development and institutional
collaboration. With this appointment, IPR is advancing
the One Northwestern initiative that seeks to integrate
research conducted on the Chicago and Evanston
campuses in the life, biomedical, and social sciences.
MSS was founded in 2009 by David Cella, an
international leader in biomedical outcomes research.
This department is affiliated with C2S and is part
of a growing effort by Northwestern to more closely
integrate biomedical and social sciences to improve
health and healthcare delivery in diverse populations
over the lifespan. MSS focuses on developing
measurement methods and approaches applicable across
a range of health and disease states. It also aims to
rapidly translate basic discoveries into applications for
treating specific diseases, such as cancer, neurological
disease, and early onset psychopathology.
< Add Health and Biomarkers
A team of C2S researchers is investigating the
impact of socioeconomic status, social relationships,
Chair
Lindsay Chase-Lansdale, Human Development
and Social Policy
The goal of C2S is to integrate the social, behavioral, biomedical,
and life sciences to illuminate pathways contributing to health
inequalities and to develop translational and policy solutions.
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