Blogs

Call for Articles! ISSUE ON: DISPARATE EFFECTS OF DISRUPTIVE EVENTS ON CHILDREN

Economic recession, natural disaster, pandemic, and other large-scale events can have far-reaching effects on families. Individuals often experience disruptive events within these contexts, losing jobs, homes, or their lives, as a result. Disruption can induce socioeconomic loss, psychological distress, and injurious health consequences, potentially inducing long-term scarring effects on wellbeing for families. Disruptive events may be particularly harmful for children because they impact access to resources, cognitive and socioemotional development, and health, in ways that shape later educational attainment and socioeconomic wellbeing. Understanding the consequences of disruptive events on children is important because these exposures are highly prevalent at the population level and they are occurring at an unprecedented rate in the context of current health, economic, and social crises. Furthermore, the risk of exposure is not neutral. Rather, it is typically stratified by sources of disadvantage, such as socioeconomic and racial/ethnic minority status. Poor and marginalized families in disadvantaged communities are more likely to experience harmful disruption in their daily lives. As such, early-life exposure to harmful events could contribute to the intergenerational persistence of disadvantage.

Much attention focuses on overall average effects of disruptive events on children. However, the consequences of such events vary, sometimes dramatically, across different groups. Some studies suggest that the same event could have profound negative consequences for some populations but less, or even no, impact among others. For example, prenatal exposure to natural disaster hampers children's cognitive development among poor families, but carries no penalties among more advantaged families. Historical evidence suggests that the negative consequences of early-life exposure to the 1918 flu on mortality, educational attainment, and socioeconomic status were stronger for African Americans than Whites.

This special issue of RSF invites empirical papers that examine heterogeneity in the effects of disruptive events on children's attainment and wellbeing. Given the health, economic, and social upheaval of 2020, this is a crucial time to understand the differential impact of disruption on children's lives. In addition to analyses of heterogeneity in the effects of disruptive events, we encourage contributions that consider mechanisms accounting for and policies aimed at alleviating heterogeneous effects of disruptive events. We are interested in both aggregate shocks (e.g., economic recession, natural disaster, pandemic) and individual- or family-level disruptive events (e.g., job loss, housing loss, and health shocks), and various axes of heterogeneity, such as demographic, socioeconomic, and developmental. Finally, we are interested in interactions between macro-level and micro-level sources of disruption.

We invite papers using diverse methodological approaches—quantitative and qualitative—to uncover heterogeneous effects of disruption on children's attainment and wellbeing. Analyses that add to our understanding of the mechanisms linking event exposure and subsequent outcomes, are welcome. We welcome work that addresses disruptive events in the U.S. and abroad.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.

Anticipated Timeline

Prospective contributors should submit a CV and an abstract (up to two pages in length, single or double spaced) of their study along with up to two pages of supporting material (e.g., tables, figures, pictures, references that don't fit on the proposal pages, etc.) no later than 5 PM EST on August 11, 2021 to:

rsf.fluxx.io

NOTE that if you wish to submit an abstract and do not yet have an account with us, it can take up to 48 hours to get credentials, so please start your application at least two days before the deadline. All submissions must be original work that has not been previously published in part or in full. Only abstracts submitted to https://rsf.fluxx.io will be considered. Each paper will receive a $1,000 honorarium when the issue is published. All questions regarding this issue should be directed to Suzanne Nichols, Director of Publications, at journal@rsage.org and not to the email addresses of the editors of the issue.

A conference will take place at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City on June 10, 2022. The selected contributors will gather for a one-day workshop to present draft papers (due a month prior to the conference on 5/9/22) and receive feedback from the other contributors and editors. Travel costs, food, and lodging for one author per paper will be covered by the foundation. Papers will be circulated before the conference. After the conference, the authors will submit their revised drafts by 9/6/22. The papers will then be sent out to three additional scholars for formal peer review. Having received feedback from reviewers and the RSF board, authors will revise their papers by 11/9//22. The full and final issue will be published in the fall of 2023. Papers will be published open access on the RSF website as well as in several digital repositories, including JSTOR and UPCC/Muse.

Please click here for a full description of the topics covered in this call for articles.