. . . Winter 2003 Top Ten Research Challenges of the 2000s Dean Rebecca M. Blank of the Ford School of Public Policy lists these 10 research topics as the "center of attention" for scholars and US society in general over the next decade. 1. Immigrants, Poverty and the Second Generation. Over a third of all poor are immigrants. A key question is how their children are faring and whether they will also be disproportionately poor. 2. Family Formation and Fertility Policies. This is the hottest topic, in terms of current demand for evaluating such programs. But the research agenda may not proceed very far, given the difficulty of linking policies with these long-term demographic changes. 3. Low-skilled Men and the Labor Market. With the large incarceration rates, especially among African-American men, we need to know more about how these men are faring when they leave jail and try to move back into the labor market. We need to evaluate and experiment with a wider variety of jail-to-work programs. 4. Fiscal Policy. With tight state budgets, which low-income programs will states choose to cut and by how much? How will this affect Temporary Assistance to Needy Families programs and Medicaid? 5. Spatial Issues. A high share of those who remain on welfare live in very poor urban or rural neighborhoods. Poverty among this population and policies that might help them are high on the research agenda. 6. What Is Poverty? We need to improve the ways we officially measure poverty. And we need to do more to measure "well-being" rather than economic poverty, looking at such things as consumption, neighborhood quality, health indicators, et cetera. 7. Role of Nonprofit Services and Nongovernmental Service Providers. Agencies, community foundations and faith-based organizations all play important roles and have been little studied. 8. Health. Little research exists on Medicaid—public health insurance for low income families—despite the size of the program. Looking at effective ways to provide health insurance to low-income working families remains a high policy priority. 9. Changing Methodological Approaches. We need to find good ways to do state-specific studies since welfare programs are now defined at the state level. And that means we need to do meta-analyses that let us merge together multiple state studies to investigate issues of generalizability. 10. Meeting Increasing Data Demands. To study poverty and to study policy, we need longitudinal data over time across geographical and political boundaries. More use of administrative state-specific data is also likely to occur. One of the best ways to produce a well-read study is still to put together data sources that nobody has used before. |