Wei-Jun Jean Yeung

Yeung is a co-principal investigator of the PSID, one of the longest-running nationally representative study of American families that was initiated in 1968. The study has a genealogical design that follows the original family members and their grown children when they establish their independent households. The PSID is one of the richest data archives in the social science history, with its contents including economic, demographic, health, education and child development data about American families. As of 2009, 37 waves of the PSID data, containing more than 50,000 variables, were assembled from more than 8,000 families and nearly 70,000 individuals.

This project examines the relationship between industrialization and children's well-being measured by education and child mortality in China. Our analysis is based on micro census data collected in 1982, 1990, and 2000 and various industrial surveys. These data allow us to control for year and county fixed effects.

This research investigates factors contributing to the substantial achievement gaps in high school children. Yeung and Persell focus on four important clusters of factors: (1) intergenerational resources, 2) family interactions, 3) racial inequalities in students' school and neighborhoods, and 4) how racial inequalities in various contexts interact with one another to affect children's cognitive abilities. The analysis is based on longitudinal data on family histories from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplements conducted in 1997 and 2003 as well as on geographic information from census data and school district data over the last three decades.

This research is supported by funding from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to support work in American fathers' involvement with children. The goals of this project are (1) to describe how paternal involvement with children, in the form of time, financial and psychological resources, differ by family structure, (2) to test hypotheses about factors that affect paternal involvement behavior, and (3) to investigate how children's psychological and cognitive well-being relates to fathers' attitudes and involvement behavior. The research will be based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which contains annual data collected since 1968 for a nationally representative sample of American households. Using longitudinal history in the PSID and data from the 1997 Child Development Supplement, this project will assess the extent to which social and economic involvement with children varies with fathers' changing life circumstances.

This research is supported by funding from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to support work in American fathers' involvement with children. The goals of this project are (1) to describe how paternal involvement with children, in the form of time, financial and psychological resources, differ by family structure, (2) to test hypotheses about factors that affect paternal involvement behavior, and (3) to investigate how children's psychological and cognitive well-being relates to fathers' attitudes and involvement behavior. The research will be based on data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), which contains annual data collected since 1968 for a nationally representative sample of American households. Using longitudinal history in the PSID and data from the 1997 Child Development Supplement, this project will assess the extent to which social and economic involvement with children varies with fathers' changing life circumstances.

The National Institute of Aging has funded collaboration between Wei-Jun Jean Yeung and Martha Hill in University of Michigan to examine responses of baby-boom children to the health care needs of their elderly parents and how these responses compare to those of earlier cohorts. Intergenerational transfers to ailing parents are central to this investigation, and a primary interest is in gauging the extent to which changes in children's labor market participation are engendered by providing those transfers. Using a national sample of baby-boomers, both leading edge (born 1945-54) and trailing edge (born 1955-64), and prior cohorts with elderly parents, the analysis aims at examining differences across these groups in terms of: level and type of transfers, actual changes in work hours (short-run and long run), extent to which transfers engendered changes in work hours, and how individual histories of social, economic and demographic circumstances and behaviors relate to these outcomes.

With funding received from the National Science Foundation, this project examines the long-term trends of poverty and welfare receipts in U.S. Yeung documented the duration and patterns of poverty and welfare receipt for multiple cohorts of individuals in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, by different individual and family characteristics such as ethnicity, marital status, and age of the household head. The project also examines intergenerational correlation between childhood poverty and young adult achievement such as educational attainment and welfare status. Parts of the results from this project were used to support the production of the annual report on the indicators of poverty and welfare dependence by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.

Yeung and Dalton Conley received a research grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development to examine the link between parental wealth and young children's physical and mental well-being. We intend to investigate how family net worth may mediate or modify the race - child outcome association. The mechanism through which family wealth influences children's health and achievements will be a focus of this study. We will make advantage of data collected in a series of supplemental files to Panel Study of Income Dynamics, including the 1997 Child Development Supplement and family wealth data collected in the years 1984, 1989, 1994, 1999 and 2001.