The University of Michigan has long been a leader in social science research on the many dimensions of social inequality. This bicentennial symposium will highlight these contributions by focusing on the work of distinguished social scientists who were trained at the University of Michigan.
Transcript:
0:00:01: Good afternoon.
0:00:02: Good afternoon.
0:00:03: Oh, this is a faithful group. We are so glad that you are here with us for this very last panel of this symposium. It's been an exciting symposium, have you enjoyed it?
0:00:14: Yes.
0:00:14: Excellent, excellent. Well this afternoon is the last panel. We decided what we wanted to do was have some fun with our topic. Our topic for this afternoon is Innovative Methodology and as all of you know Michigan has been just a hot bed of discovery in terms of various methodologies for doing cutting edge research. And what we wanted to do with this panel was put together a number of alum from the university who are doing creative and cutting edge innovative research, and that's gonna allow them to talk specifically about methodology, not so much their findings 'cause they could do that too, these are very accomplished scholars and they have been doing work that we think you'll find intriguing so that's why we wanted to put this together and they wanted me to remind the audience that I told them that they were supposed to have fun with this presentation.
0:01:09: So that's what we want to do. So what I'm gonna do is just introduce basically by name and affiliation all of our speakers for this afternoon, we have four. They're gonna present, and then we'll have a panel discussion. We wanted to make sure that we were gonna be leaving enough time so that we could interact and have a discussion around some of the questions you may have about the work that they're doing. Because I think it's all very creative and we're delighted they're with us. Our first speaker for the day is gonna be Shinobu Kitayama and he is the Robert B. Zajonc Collegic Professor of Psychology here at the University of Michigan. He's a graduate of the Social Psychology program here in psychology. I have to say that 'cause at the time that we were here I'm also a social psychologist from psychology. The sociology program also had a social psychology program so we are the psychologist side of social psychology. I didn't even introduce myself. I'm Cleo Caldwell, and I'm the moderator for this particular panel. I'm a faculty over in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the School of Public Health.
0:02:20: Our second speaker is gonna be Enrique Neblett, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience. He's currently at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He's a graduate of our Clinical Psychology program, so you can see some of the diversity that we have here on the panel. He'll be followed by Amy Schulz, and Amy is a Professor in the Department of Health Behavior and Health Education at the School of Public Health. And Amy is a sociologist. So we wanted to have some diversity in the disciplines as well. And then finally we have with us as Belinda Tucker who is a Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences University of California at Los Angeles. And Belinda was Social Psychology as well. See a little bias here, but...
[laughter]
0:03:14: We're all interdisciplinary which is another strength of the University of Michigan when we think about the type of research that happens in the world. So we wanted to highlight the contributions of some of our innovative researchers in the social sciences who are graduates of The University of Michigan. And that's what this panel does, so please join me in welcoming all of them 'cause they're gonna flow through and at the end of their presentations we'll take your questions.
[applause]
[background conversation]
0:04:06: Thank you very much for a wonderful introduction. I'm very very pleased to be here. I've been here for quite a number of years. I initially, well my degree was from 1987 here. And I had come from Japan. And I think I came here in 1982. When I came here people were very nice. "Oh, Shinobu welcome. Which do you like, red or white?" Took me awhile to figure out that they're talking about wine. And then second, I was just astonished that people didn't prepare the best wine for me from the very beginning. Well, this may sound a little bit strange, because back in Japan, there is no practice like making a choice. And I didn't imagine that asking somebody to make a choice is a polite thing to do. So anyway, from the very beginning, I found this cultural difference very interesting and in my own research since then I have investigated how deep sociocultural practices, meanings and maybe social structure, can go under the skin.
0:05:29: So that's the theme I'm going to elaborate on today. And in the more recent theories I have investigated this by using neuroscience method, as well as biomarkers and so on. And today, I like to discuss some neuroscience of it. Now, I displayed this word, phrase, cultural neuroscience and that's a new field of research that essentially is intended to address this question, how is nature nurtured? That is nature in this case, brain or body might be nurtured. There are many different ways in which culture can influence the brain. Well, maybe you might imitate or you might mimic other's behavior. Even you might conform, obedience might be another way in which culture can influence your behavior, but in addition to all this, some form of reinforcement can be very, very significant. Once behaviors, whatever you do, making a choice, not making a choice, conform to cultural norms, and then those behaviors may be reinforced. Now, this obvious notion seem to have very significant implications because once the behavior is reinforced, all the neural circuitries, neural connections recruited to produce this behavior may also be reinforced.
0:06:58: And from the very beginning, people, individuals engaging in the social environment, in a variety of different ways and the social environment provide feedback which can reinforce all the neural connections which are used and this can be repeated. This will be repeated in a finite amount of time resulting in potentially some significant effects on the brain and everything else. Now in this work, we have focused on two prototypical cultural groups. One, we call independent culture. Here, there are many tasks such as making a choice for example, but in addition to a self-promotion, self-actualization, freedom, achieving autonomy, those are some of the pro-typical tasks which define this cultural context which is very different from where I was coming from. Say, interdependent culture where self-sacrifice for the group obligations and duties are very important and social harmony is the ultimate value.
0:08:08: And as you might imagine the first kind of tasks are relatively more prevalent in, say, Western cultures, but the second ones are relatively more common in Asian cultures. Now, these cultures are extremely diverse. No question about this, but once you are looking to those pro-typical tasks which are existing in different cultural contexts, you may notice that there are some common themes or common things which are involved. So, in the case of independence, it's very important to manage one's own preferences, goals, attitudes, and so on, while monitoring what might make sense for me to do. Essentially, what this means is that you are managing reward contingencies to choose the best thing possible. Now in curious way, interdependence involves something kind of opposite. You have to manage social expectations and know what the requirements, so this often requires down regulated by inhibiting or suppressing or de-prioritizing, these desires, preferences and priorities.
0:09:23: Now does this have anything to do with neuroscience? Well, that's one very interesting question because calculating reward contingencies, establishing personal preferences, making judgments and decisions by using values, preferences, and so on. Those are pretty diverse set of tasks but many of them are often linked to one particular brain region called orbitalfrontal cortex, here just above your eyes. Now our work is motivated by this great insight from this classic icon of neuropsychology, Donald Hebb who essentially said, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." That is, neurons are activated simultaneously. They tend to be connected and this insight has reason to be used to investigate neuroplasticity.
0:10:28: Now evidence is mounting that essentially, if you engage in some specific set of tasks, say, playing piano or playing golf or chess or driving a cab for 20 years in a complicated city like London without using, well when modern navigation device [chuckle] was not quite available. Those can result in significant effects on the cortical volume of specific areas of the brain. Now apply this idea to what I said about culture. You might begin to see that if various neurons in OFC fire together because those neurons are often involved in the cultural tasks prevalent in independent cultures and then, well, those neurons may wire together. What does that mean? Well, given this neuroplasticity literature, you might expect that the OFC may show some increase in gray matter volume over time. Now conversely, if various neurons in OFC are prevented from firing, given the ways in which culture works, then they may not wire. OFC may show a decrease in gray matter volume over time. Now, is that true? Well, in order to investigate this, this is our initial study. It just came out. We scanned about 135 Japanese, some were in college age but most of the subjects are real people after college.
0:12:15: And we used this method called VVM, kind of standard methods to investigate major cortical grey matter volume and we administered a bunch of questionnaires including a scale of independent and interdependent self construal. See here, interdependence construal is measured by items like my happiness depends on happiness of other people. For example, okay. Now, what we did was to use these scales, one at a time, to see if this scale, say interdependence might predict cortical volume of different areas of brain. Now, you might be surprised that you end up having many many correlations if you'd carry out an analysis like this. However, brain is very complicated thing, there are so many neurons or voxels in neuro imaging and as a consequence, you really have to do very rigorous statistical control. Once you do this, only a few areas survive the statistical assault.
0:13:29: And one particular finding we got was this; essentially those two... This view of the brain essentially, you cut your brain here, and look the brain up. So those two regions are orbitofrontal Cortex, right here, right above your eyeballs and this region shows negative association with interdependent self construal. What this means is that more interdependent folks have relatively smaller OFC and this after controlling for total brain volume, age, gender and in this case, socio-economic status; educational achievement.
0:14:10: Now, out of this you might expect that there might be some systematic cross-cultural difference...
[background conversation]
0:14:21: Cross-cultural difference because we know that Asian people are relatively more interdependent, might it be the case that OFC volume is less for Asians as compared to Europeans-Americans? Well, we did this and as it turned out, if you do whole brain analysis, there are many areas, several areas actually which clearly differentiate between Europeans-Americans and Asians. But one of those is OFC, orbitofrontal Cortex. We have OFC here, OFC here, here and also here. So, in order to investigate whether we might be able to replicate previous finding, we extracted this particular OFC region of interest and see if this might correlate with interdependent self construal and actually this correlation was significant and we replicated it.
0:15:26: Now, from this you can see that Asians are more interdependent and OFC is relatively less. Now really interesting question is whether this correlation might justify any causal inference. It's very hard. I don't have to give you one hour lecture to make this particular point. Now, how can you address this? Well one way we address this was this. Maybe we might be able to use genetics to address potential significance of environmental influences. Why is that? Well, actually, in the recent years people have identified a set of alleles, genetic variants, which appears to support environmental influences.
0:16:19: So, for example, some alleles, some dopamine genes might increase the ability to learn some aspects of culture and maybe if you can show this Genetic Moderation it might be one way to make some inference about the impact of environmental influences. So, one particular gene we have looked into is DRD4 because we know that some variants carriers, seven-repeat, two-repeat, there's no point in explaining this. Alleles associated with greater ability of learning, are contrasted against non-carriers to see if the cortical volume difference in OFC might be more pronounced among carriers as it compares to non-carriers. I hope you get the logic, okay.
0:17:15: So, this is what we got and very interesting. Essentially we replicated cross-cultural differences in OFC volume but this difference was significant only among carriers of this particular type of DRD4. Now, I need to finish. One particular interesting finding which I will keep it to myself, however I'll show you the slides, is the effect of time among Asian born Asians. We tested those Asians in the United States and they had spent varying amount of time in the United States. So, if you look into the effect of time, this may be another way or explore whether there might be some systematic effects of exposure to a new culture on the cortical volume and here's the data.
0:18:10: And very simply there's a very interesting initial evidence indicating that exposure to this new western culture seem to encourage growth of OFC, but this is true only among those people who are genetically predisposed toward learning. All right, so let me conclude. So along with whole bunch of things we and many other people have done in this area of research, it's very clear that culture is powerful. That's very important. And now effects of culture has been extended, not only to functional aspects of brain, but also more structural aspect of the brain. And today I had no time to talk to about disparity, discrimination, and so on, but I hope you see the connection here. And finally, one second. Why neuroscience? I hope I illustrated the significance of neuroscience in social and behavioral research.
0:19:20: And there are many different ways to frame this but I think really one take home message about this issue is that, essentially brain is a great storage of socio-cultural experiences. And therefore, even though you may not be able to remember exactly what happened to you when you were in the first grade, or even in pre-school, it might be possible to look into the brain to investigate the trace of socio-cultural influences and that's where real value of neuroscience seem to lie. So thank you very much.
[applause]
0:20:10: There'll be time during the question and answers to get more information, 'cause I'm interested in that link with discrimination, from all of our speakers.
[pause]
0:20:30: Okay. Good afternoon, everyone. Everyone sounds sleepy or something. [laughter] Hopefully I can wake you up a little bit. I am honored to be here this afternoon. And to start us off, Cleo told us we had to have fun with this. I went through the archives of my photo pictures and came up with this picture from 2006. This is at my defence. [chuckle] So when... It was a Wednesday, February 15th, 2006. I underwent one of the toughest and challenging intellectual experiences of my graduate career. I was seated across the table from some of Michigan's greatest minds, some of whom are in the audience. Liz Cole, Laura Kohn-Wood, Robert Sellers, David Williams, Woody Neighbors, so on and so forth. Fortunately things turned out well, although I can still channel the modicum of embarrassment I felt when after the defense my mom went up to David Williams and said, "Wow. You sure ask some tough questions." [laughter] My dissertation was entitled "Racial Identity and Coping in Context", I was interested in the protective function of racial identity. So how could the significance and meaning of race to individuals act as a protective factor in the context of discrimination.
0:21:58: And I was really intrigued by this idea that the centrality or the importance of race to ones self concept could mitigate or counteract the deleterious impact of discrimination. So in the dissertation I was interested in looking at how different aspects of identity would relate to coping and really thinking about individual differences. What is a situational factors and other individual factors that influence how black youth cope with racism? About three weeks after this picture was taken, I received word that I would be a recipient of a national science foundation post-doctoral fellowship and I would have the opportunity to study with Dr. Jules Harrell at Howard University, who is one of the foremost thinkers on racism and stress. And the exciting thing about studying with Jules is that he is also a psychophysiologist. I had been increasingly reading the racial disparities literature with interest and I was intrigued by this fact that African-Americans, when you looked at life expectancy, disease, morbidity, all these things, were at the bottom. And I wanted to understand why that was.
0:23:12: Studying with Jules would be a perfect opportunity to connect the sort of psychological processes with the biology, to understand a little bit more about how exactly racism leads to poorer health outcomes. And then a more specific question I was interested in was, whether or not racial identity and some of the other protective factors that I had studied as a graduate student. So things like racial socialization, things like Afrocentric worldview, would act as a protective factor in the same way for biological outcomes as they might for psychological and physiological factors. So off I went to Howard and spent two years there and during that time thought about how we could do this effectively. A lot of it was actually figuring out the experimental methodology and less about actual findings, but one of the challenges of studying individual differences and responses to racism is that it presents a number of unique challenges [chuckle] for the experimental methodologist and for the psycho-physiologist.
0:24:28: How do you study racism in a laboratory context? Okay. Fortunately, there had been some work done in this area by Jules and others and he trained me up in something we called The Visual Imagery paradigm. So the visual imagery paradigm is a paradigm in which you have participants come into the lab and imagine instances of racism as if the individuals are actually experiencing the racism themselves. There's evidence that suggests that these analogs are similar to the actual experience of racism, at least that's what the literature argued, and so we had folks come into the lab and listen to these different vignettes and we measured their physiological responses as they imagined and processed these events.
0:25:20: So, to give you some idea of what a participant might hear, here's one scenario: You are driving along a suburban street when a car like yours screeches past you at high speed. Then you see a police car behind you with its red lights flashing. To your surprise, the white policeman pulls you over and begins to berate you for speeding. You feel your heart pounding in your chest as you realize his mistake. Muscles tensing, you try to explain but he cuts you off saying you "N" word are all the same and in the vignette we didn't say "N" word, we actually used the racial slur. While struggling to control your temper, you sit fuming to yourself while the policeman writes the ticket. And we would say, start imagining the scene from the beginning of the description. There was a lot of discussion around racism becoming more subtle, it wasn't new, but we talked about it and so we varied blatant versus subtle nature of the racism, we also borrowed some language from Rodney Clark's work on intergroup racism and varied the race of the perpetrator, so sometimes the officer was black, sometimes it was white. In a subtle instance or the subtle condition, I won't read the entire script here, but we had a scenario where an individual standing in line, they're next in line to receive service and the cashier calls the next person in line, things of that nature.
0:27:03: So, something a little more subtle where race was not invoked as directly as in the racial epithet scenario. What participants would do is they would come into the lab and we would outfit them with electrodes. My training at Howard was particularly in the area of cardiovascular psychophysiology and this was exciting because when I looked at the racial health disparates literature, a lot of it was talking about poorer disease outcomes in terms of cardiovascular related diseases. And so, I thought, "Wow, if I want to study psychophys, this is what I wanna look at, cardiovascular psychophys."
[background conversation]
0:27:48: The participant would sit quietly for one minute, 60 seconds and then listen to the scenario like the one I just read. After hearing the scenario, the participant would be asked to imagine the scene, to concentrate on imagining the scene for 60 seconds. And then, the participant would be asked to stop imagining the scene, open your eyes and concentrate on relaxing. And they would sit for another 60 seconds before they would move on to the next thing, okay. And we measured, in addition to their physiological responses, their affective emotional responses, we assesed their mood after each scenario, they listened to six of these, so on and so forth. So that was the design, as I mentioned, the design was not completely new, visual imagery had been used before but, the innovation here was that we were not using self-report measures.
0:28:50: We were also using cardiovascular psychophys measures that had not previously been used before. So, the field had focused primarily on heart rate, it had focused on blood pressure. One of the things we know about those measures is that you cannot isolate the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems which were some of the very systems that were implicated and understanding how racism leads to cardiovascular problems. And so this was an opportunity to see would we really see specific impact on the sympathetic nervous system flight or fight, so on and so forth. The other innovation here was that we were measuring racial identity, we were measuring racial socialization and a number of cultural resilience factors. One of the things I've been interested in in my work, is not just the relationship between racism and health, I think we have a pretty good idea of what [laughter] the news is there, but are there cultural resilience factors that might allow youth to be more resilient in the context of racism.
0:30:04: And can we incorporate these resilience factors into the interventions at multiple levels? So that was what the added piece was with the work that we did. Okay, Cleo's asked us not to spend a lot of time talking about findings, so I'm just gonna highlight one finding that I've been grappling with in the work that we've done at Carolina. So, as I mentioned, a lot of the visual imagery paradigm work at Howard was more about figuring out how you set this up, and designing the scenarios. It wasn't until Carolina that I set up my lab, and really got some of this other work going. And here's the interesting finding. So, racial identity...
[background conversation]
0:30:52: Protective factor in the context of mental health outcomes. When we used this paradigm, what we saw is that when we look at emotional and affective responses, it was the individuals who said, being Black is really important to who I am, who reported more anger. They reported more distress when they filled out a measure, shortly after completing, imagining this scenario. This is not what I expected. We expected that if racial centrality is protective, that they would be less bothered by these events.
0:31:31: But that's not what was happening. They were reporting higher levels of disgust, and really, across the board, negative affect. So that's what this shows, here. I'm not gonna focus on details. In the psycho-physiological realm, what was interesting is that when we isolated the sympathetic nervous system, the flight or fight response, and it takes a while before you get there, psycho-physiologists talk about the para-sympathetic. Usually when stress occurs, the para-sympathetic nervous system orients, and tries to figure out what's going on. Before you see sympathetic activation, or when you see sympathetic activation it means that the body's really saying, there's trouble here. And what we found was that individuals who were more race central, who said, being Black is important to who I am, they were the ones, they're on the right in both of these, when they imagined scenes with the White actors it didn't matter if it was subtle, if it were blatant, if it were just the control condition where we said there's some White folks in the area. The people who had higher racial centrality showed an exhibited sympathetic nervous system response. So this was again interesting.
0:32:54: When we looked at the emotional responses, they're reporting more negative affect. One of the beauties of the physiology is that you can't control... Well there are ways to move towards controlling it, but it's less subject to control. We saw elevated sympathetic nervous system responses. One finding which I won't detail here, because it didn't come out of this paradigm, over the last several years we've been collecting longitudinal data in North Carolina. And what we find is that in young adults, individuals who have higher levels of centrality, higher levels of private regard, over time racial discrimination experiences are associated with higher levels of anxiety, higher levels of psychological distress, so on and so forth. This body of work has really rocked my world a little bit, because as a graduate student, racial identity was a protective factor. It was supposed to buffer the effects of racism. And now we began to add a little more complexity to it. So folks reporting feeling more distressed and angry, could it be that that served a protective function? Could it also be that there were reasons, maybe the context mattered in terms of, there's a lot of stuff going on in North Carolina in terms of why folks who are more race central, might be reporting increased psychological distress.
0:34:29: So, in terms of some of the future directions that we're thinking about in this work, really trying to unpack the mechanisms. One of the things that's striking to me in re-reading and reading this literature, is that there are so many different mechanisms by which racism might impact health. We heard about some of them earlier today. Some of them have been tested, some not. But really, I'm really interested in underscoring what's going on. And that's because, if you want to dismantle racism, you have to understand how it works. And so we have empirical evidence about the mechanisms, I think, that serves that cause. If you want to design interventions, as I do, and culturally informed interventions, that inform some of these race socialization and identity pieces, you've got to understand the mechanisms by which that works. And so that's some of the work that we've been doing as well.
0:35:27: Time is short here, so I'll just comment quickly some additional innovation that's come from some of my former students and current students, is looking at vicarious racism. What is the impact of exposure to seeing, over and over, shootings; So the constant media attention online or through whatever medium? And thinking about how that may play a role. And my students said, we like your visual imagery paradigm. It's nice, but Dr. Neblett we really need to actually have live experiences of racism in the lab. And so this is a paradigm here where we use confederate social psychology paradigm and actually have someone bump the white confederate on his way out, the black confederate does this. The participant who's African-American is sitting in the back, the white confederate whips out his phone and makes a number of derogatory comments about the black individual who just bumped them, okay.
0:36:34: Another example of innovation, we have Lori Hoggard, she's now at Rutgers university, who looks at whether people eat cookies in the lab. So there is lots of chips always in the lab, or there used to be. And she would look at when people were accused of stealing an iPad, whether they would eat more cookies and whether eating sugary things might play a role in health outcomes. So this gives you an idea of some of the things that have come from the body of work. Okay. I am overtime, so if you want to hear about this image here, feel free to ask about it in the...
[laughter]
0:37:20: Ask about image.
0:37:22: Okay. And this is my last image here. We are doing many interesting things in the world of innovation. So we're using Photovoice, experimental psychophysiology, we use CBPR in our methods. But one of the exciting things about being a Michigan product is just the students I've been able to train who are Law school students, faculty, now postdocs, who are doing some of this innovative research. I'm extremely grateful to Michigan for equipping me with the skills to do good work. But also for the people that I had the opportunity to work with here, who pushed me to be excellent, who believed in me, and who just helped me, people like Rob Sellers, to train students and give back. So as I close I just wanna extend my thanks to my alma mater University of Michigan, for allowing me to be in a community of scholars that has really pushed my work forward, and has really surrounded me with lifelong family and friends who are truly leaders. Thank you very much.
[applause]
[pause]
[background conversation]
0:39:11: Welcome everybody, I also wanna extend my gratitude to Cleo and to the others who invited me to participate in this conference. I feel really fortunate to be able to share some of the work that we've doing, and to talk about community based participatory research, which is my innovative methodology that I'm gonna be talking about. I am, I think the token sociologist up here. [chuckle] And when I was a student in sociology, one of the things that I became very interested in was the social construction of knowledge, and how we go about, as human beings, as individuals, and as societies, thinking about how do we produce knowledge. And as part of that, I was interested in inequalities, in who has access to, or the opportunities to engage in the production of knowledge. And that lead me down a path to really thinking about how do we collectively engage. Who has voice, who has opportunities, and whose knowledge does get produced and gets out there. That really lead me to thinking about community based participatory research, which is an approach to research. It's not really a methodology, it's an approach to doing research, that focuses on, how do we engage multiple perspectives, multiple voices, including those who often don't have opportunities to engage in the social production of knowledge.
0:40:44: I'm starting my talk with a picture, some of you may recognize this. This is the Ambassador bridge, which is the busiest border crossing between the US and Canada. This bridge goes between Detroit and Windsor, and carries about 15,000 diesel trucks on it, across it every day. I'm gonna come back to this image in a little bit. But first I'm gonna take us to another river and another border. This is the border, also on the border between the United States and Canada, this is the Saint Lawrence river valley. It travels between upstate New York and Ontario. And it's an area that has a rich history of use by indigenous people in North America going back about 9,000 years. It's an area with abundant plant, wildlife, fish, very fertile soils. So it's a very good area for gardening. And it contributed to settlements with extensive gardens and trade networks that reach far north, far south, as far west as the western shore of lake Superior for centuries. Beginning about in the mid 1700s, thereabouts, the community that now is known as the Mohawk Community came and settled in this area, in an area called Akwesasne Community along the Saint Lawrence River Valley and they continue to live there to this day.
[background conversation]
0:42:24: So, this map shows the Saint Lawrence River, Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the area that shows in pink on this map is now what's called The Akwesasne Nation or The Mohawk Nation, it's a tribal community located between... It spans the US and Canada. Beginning in the 1950s, inexpensive hydroelectric power generated by the Saint Lawrence River attracted a number of industries to the area upstream of the Akwesasne Nation, you can see some of those shown in this map, I hope you can see these. The General Motors Powertrain Division is located immediately adjacent to the Akwesasne Nation, and it is downstream, downwind and downgradient, so everything's traveling towards the Mohawk Community from the RJ Reynolds Metals and the Aluminum Company of America or Alcoa, all of which are super fun sites currently.
0:43:24: Toxicants from these sites have contaminated the soil, the air, and the water of the Akwesasne Nation to the extent that public health professionals have issued advisories saying that "No women of childbearing age should eat any fish that are caught from the Saint Lawrence River, nor should infants or young children." And the tribal community has pretty much... They've internalized those messages, they have pretty much complied with those messages to a very strong extent. This is good news in the public health community where our mantra often is "No exposure, no adverse effects." People are not ingesting these toxic chemicals and therefore there is no adverse effect. However, I wanna read an excerpt from a very beautiful paper that was written a number of years ago by Mary Arquette, who is a public health professional and an enrolled member of the Akwesasne Nation.
0:44:25: She and her colleagues point out that in Akwesasne, as in many other communities, potentially serious adverse health effects can result when people stop traditional cultural practices in order to protect their health from the effects of toxic substances. When traditional foods such as fish are no longer eaten, alternative diets are often consumed, which are often high in fat and calories and low in vitamins and nutrients. This type of dietary change has been linked with many health outcomes such as type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer and obesity. Consequently, serious health problems can result, when as in the case of Akwesasne, traditional foods are no longer consumed even if there is little or no exposure to toxic substances. So here, we have an alternative perspective, an alternative way of thinking about this shift in the diet that may have protected people from toxic exposures, but may have opened the door to other health issues.
0:45:34: Furthermore, many of you may be familiar with the history of the Indian boarding schools in which young people from tribal communities were brought to boarding schools and kept there often many times for years with the goal of complete assimilation, away from tribal communities and into white communities, this is a photo, these types of before and after photos are very common from the boarding school era, they clearly symbolize something very important to the boarding school and the white communities that funded these. And this young man was Navajo not Akwesasne, but this is a picture of his before and after coming to the Carlisle Indian School. Within this historical context, a recommendation to stop traditional hunting and gathering practices which are deeply embedded with cultural, spiritual, and social significance within tribal communities can also be experienced as a continuation of assimilation or what's often called an indigenous community's cultural genocide.
0:46:46: Thus, scientifically informed advisories and actions grounded in the best of our western science and often, usually, the best of intentions to protect people from exposures to toxins can have unintended consequences that can lead them to be in the best case scenario, less effective than they might be. And in the worst case scenario, to actually harm communities often in unintended ways, and Tuskegee is probably the most notorious example of this. So, community based participatory research is an approach to conducting research that emerged out of this understanding that when we create knowledge in academic communities, we often may be creating a knowledge that's partial, that's incomplete, and that does not take advantage of the rich resources and knowledge and experiences of communities who do not have opportunities to sit in these places that we get to sit in everyday and think and create knowledge.
0:47:53: It recognizes that both researchers and community members stand to make critical contributions to an understanding of complex phenomenon. And that by working together in an equitable manner that recognizes and values contributions from multiple perspectives and lived experiences, we can create a more complete and nuanced understanding of a given phenomenon and can position ourselves with the potential to create more complete solutions to those issues. So now we're back to our bridge over the Detroit River. I wanna share very quickly an example from a community-based participatory research effort in which I've had the privilege to have worked over the last several years. So it's called Community Action to Promote Healthy Environments or CAPHE. CAPHE has two main over-arching goals. And these came from, were named by residents of Detroit who have been grappling with these issues for a very long time. Our goals are to develop a multi-level, integrated and scientifically informed, sounds cool, doesn't it? Public health action plan to reduce the adverse effects of air pollution on the health of Detroit residents and to promote the implementation of that plan. CAPHE is made up of a number of community-based organizations and academic researchers based at the School of Public Health. Very briefly, historically, Detroit has faced multiple challenges with air quality.
0:49:25: There are multiple pollutant sources from the industrial history of the area as well as the contemporary bridge which brings in volumes of diesel traffic which is particularly harmful to health into heavily populated areas. So there are large, exposed populations within the City of Detroit. There are disproportionate levels of adverse health outcomes including, to name a few, excess risk of asthma, cardiovascular disease, and adverse birth outcomes, all of which are linked to air pollutants. Because of the proximity of manufacturing to neighborhoods in Detroit, there are large numbers of residents of vulnerable communities that are disproportionately exposed and affected. This photo shows a playground that, it's adjacent to People's Community Services, which is a community organization in Detroit and right behind it, you can see the water treatment facility in Detroit. You can get a sense of how proximate, how close some of these manufacturing sources are to where children are playing and the kinds of exposures that might come from that. So our goal was to bring scientific evidence to bear to create a set of recommendations to reduce some of these exposures and to try to get some of that work done. One of the things that we did as part of this process was to map where there are high levels of exposure.
0:51:00: This map shows the levels of diesel pollutants in the Tri-County area. So Oakland, Wayne and Macomb County. And what this shows, the yellow areas are the areas with the lowest level of exposure and increasingly dark red areas, with the highest level of exposures in the red areas. The next slide I'm gonna show you, shows how this maps onto community characteristics. So here, what we're seeing is communities, census tract's rank ordered by the levels of poverty, the proportion of people of color, the proportion of children under the age of five who are particularly vulnerable to adverse effects of air pollutants and the proportion of people over 60 who again are particularly vulnerable. And you can see that there's a fair amount of inequality in the distribution of risk with communities that are more vulnerable, being more highly exposed. We also quantified some of the adverse health effects. This slide shows the number of deaths, the number of hospitalizations, the number of missed school and work days that are attributable to air pollutants and tries to put a number on the annual cost associated with air pollution in the Tri-County area. Based on this, we came up with a set of recommendations. Here are strategies we can use to reduce air pollution. We also looked at where are we gonna have the biggest impact on the most vulnerable populations and incorporated that into our recommendations.
0:52:38: We took the recommendations to the community, talked to community residents about them, included, engaged them in a conversation about them and their recommendations and ideas were included in our final set and in our final public health action plan. You guys can ask me about this one during the break. It's one of the very nice things that's happened as a result of the work. I wanna speak just really quickly before I close about community-engaged research and its relevance to some of our core values here at the University of Michigan. First, it's an approach to conducting research which, of course, we value very highly at this institution. It actively engages multiple perspectives, insights and knowledge in a process that stands to create a more robust and complete understanding of a given phenomenon by bringing those very rich and varied insights to understanding it. Second, it offers opportunities to build relationships with communities who we care deeply about here at the University of Michigan. I work with community partners with whom I have worked at this point for almost 20 years and together, we have opportunities to create knowledge that we might not otherwise be able to.
0:54:01: I also want to just point out that CBPR is consistent with the university's deep commitment to diversity and equity in our work. The engagement of multiple perspectives, multiple insights, multiple epistemologies and multiple lived experiences in the process of co-creating knowledge is something that is central to our mission as a university and it pushes us to think a little bit harder about the I in our DEI initiatives. We often talk about diversity, equity and inclusion, but it seems to me that if we truly want to achieve diversity and equity in this institution, we need to push beyond inclusion and really think about institutional transformation in a manner that can effectively engage the multiplicity of knowledge and epistemologies that are out there. They can help us really build a robust body of knowledge. And I am also overtime, I apologize, Cleo, I want to thank everybody again for hanging in there to the last session of the day. I wanna thank the organizers and most especially I wanna thank my colleagues in Detroit and here at the University of Michigan who have made this work possible.
[applause]
[background conversation]
0:56:09: Okay. Good afternoon everyone. [laughter] And everybody gets a gold star for staying through the very end, I'm not saying bitter end, the wonderful glorious end. [laughter] I wanna thank Cleo of course, and certainly I wanna thank the organizers of this incredibly enriching gathering. Susan Collins and David Lam. I am truly honored to be here. When I entered... I don't know if I'm close enough. Okay. When I entered the University of Michigan as a graduate student in the early [chuckle] 1970s, okay I admit it. The discipline of psychology and the social sciences more generally were in a very different kind of place, in a challenging place, particularly with respect to the study of populations of color and others here, these last couple of days have also noted, we've come a long way. My entry actually coincided with the hiring of the first ever, African-American psychology professor. And James Jackson who like the black students of that period had spent many of his formative years immersed in the civil rights movement. Indeed, I had the privilege of participating in a real celebration of Jackson's transformative contributions, marked of course by his receipt of the University of Michigans, distinguished diversity scholar career award which from now on it's gonna carry his name.
0:57:46: In fact, I stood in this very place last week. Also, the very last person on that [chuckle] symposium. So I guess that's my job from now on. The dismal state of psychology in the 1970s I think was well captured by Bob Guthrie's brilliantly titled work, "Even the Rat was White" which also refered to the fact that they were using white rats in experiments but also middle class and upper middle class white sophomores to do the basic experiments in psychology and unfortunately the people doing the research are also pretty homogeneous. So, in many studies at that time, African-Americans in particular, but certainly also other ethnic and racial groups were often compared unfavorably with whites, with differences typically explained by some version of deficit modelling. But what soon followed right here at the University of Michigan in the institute for social research, was what I conceive of as a revolution. A revolution of thought, a revolution of conduct that really has what I view as a profound impact on a study of populations of color today and the way we carry out survey research today. It's also created a large and truly engaged cadre of social scientists, that I firmly believe would never have existed without the program that I'm going to describe.
[background conversation]
0:59:32: I'm talking about the survey of African-Americans, of black Americans as it was called then, that was conducted between 1978 and 1980. And I'm gonna talk about how that one research project launched a revolutionary transformation of social science research, addressing ethnic populations in the scientific work force. So I'm gonna take you through a historical journey, I hope a brief one. And I'd have to call it a love letter really to the people I worked with, the people who have become my life-long friends. That outlines the impact of that one study. And, in David's terms, it is good news. It's all good news. That journey began for me with my fortuities enrolment in the University of Michigan and subsequent encounters I had with James Jackson, Pat and Jerry Gurin, Libbie [1:00:27] ____ Duvan, Frank Yates, and a set of truly exceptional fellow students.
1:00:31: Some are here today. Who became life-long collaborators and best friends including Phil Bowman, Woody Neighbors, Linda Chatters, Robert Taylor, Shirley Hatchet, [1:00:43] ____ Litha Tudie. So The Civil Rights movement as I mentioned before really was a prologue for what happened. When James was hired in psychology he was a young man in his mere 20s, and most of us were barely out of adolescence, but revolutionary fervor was high then. Most of us had engaged in various forms of social protest during those years, during our college years. We were quite accustomed to pointing out injustices, to pointing out biases, prejudices, racism, injustices. And James had been struck by the impact of one very classic study, Americans [1:01:23] ____ mental health. Which had told us a lot about factors affecting well-being in the general population.
1:01:31: Jerry Gurren had actually been one of the Co-PIs on that project. So James approached Jerry about doing the same thing for black people. With a nationally representative sample of African-Americans. And although I was just a freshly minted doctorate myself, PhD in social psychology, in psychology. They asked me to be a Co-PI on that initial grant, which was actually funded eventually by the National Institute Of Mental Health. Now what is revolution? One definition is that it's a sudden, vast change in a situation. A discipline, or the way of thinking or behaving. And I think that's really what happened at that point in time. So, what was so revolutionary about this one study? Certainly, its focus on African-Americans in and of themselves.
1:02:31: And it's probably gonna be difficult for many of you in this audience to believe, but at that time you could not do a project, a survey certainly on African-Americans without, what they called a white control group. And I can remember well when James was presenting to the scientists at ISR in a big forum on the sixth floor what his ideas were, they pushed back. They said, "how on earth can you do a study without a white control group?" The implication for us was that black people and Latinos, and Asians, and Native Americans and so on only mattered in relation to whites. So the study broke a fundamental convention in social sciences research. It's also the first national representative probability sample of African-Americans. We were proposing to do something that had never been done. We were seeking information on all kinds of African-Americans in the United States.
1:03:33: Living in every kind of circumstance, and in so doing we were declaring that African-Americans really weren't this single monolithic group that was implied in many of the studies that had been done in the day. They could be urban, or rural, they could be rich or poor, they could live in Iowa or Georgia, in black or white neighborhoods, and so on. So this rich tapestry was in fact the black experience. Which had not really been recognised until that point. The study was fundamentally multi and interdisciplinary. That is, it was based on the assumption that was rare at that time, that no single disciplinary lens was sufficient to understand mental health or even human behavior more generally. So, this project that was led by a social psychologist, also incorporated many others areas of psychology including developmental and personality.
1:04:28: But also, economists, sociologists, political scientists, psychiatrists, and other physicians, anthropologists, political scientists and public health specialists. Anybody who could inform our models. And not withstanding Michigan's eventual embrace of interdisciplinarity it really was pretty rare at that point in time. We also challenged what at the time was the methodological orthodoxy. We deviated from standard operating procedure in a number of ways in order to minimize the impact of race on the interview itself. But also to interrogate the meaningfulness of the constructs that we were using. We really could not be sure that of the other standard measures that were typically used in social surveys were relevant for the African-American populations that we were examining. So in addition to using only African-American interviewers from the geographic regions where people came from, so you didn't have somebody in the South being interviewed by somebody with a Northern accent.
1:05:36: We employed several other very specific strategies. And I'm actually not gonna describe those in detail because I'm running out of time. But that included interviewer respondent matching obviously, but something called the Random Probe, that Howard Schuman who had been a legendary ISR scientist had come up with, a technique to develop the respondents shared understanding of a construct. Back translation, a linguistic tool that we used to figure out whether or not the respondent truly understood what we were asking. Converging operations using several different methods to understand the meaning of a construct.
1:06:20: Now, I'm gonna describe in a bit more [1:06:23] ____ detail, one final methodological strategy that had more to do with efficiency and cost effectiveness, and some of you already know about this, but it was critical in terms of ensuring a truly representative national sample, which I must emphasize again, had not been done before. So, James Jackson had a dream one night, and those of you who know this story, know it well, and it concerned our sampling strategy. How do we get that rare sample of blacks? The people who live in white neighborhoods. Typically when a study over-sampled blacks, they'd get blacks who lived in black neighborhoods, because that was easy and that was cheap.
1:07:01: So, James suddenly realized that if you just went to these white neighborhoods, and asked where the black people lived, you could probably find out with a fair degree of certainty where they were. And in fact, this was proven to be the case. All you had to do was go to those neighborhoods and they'd point out where the black people lived. It turned out to be a fool proof method and he named it The Wide Area Sampling Procedure, WASP. It's now used internationally actually, to screen for rare samples of all sorts.
1:07:41: Finally, and this is the most important point I think, especially in terms of the meeting we're having today. But this program really was a vehicle for generating a new cadre of social scientist. So just as critical and innovative as our methodological advances were, was the stated goal of using a survey as a vehicle to train ethnic minority students and postdoctoral scholars in the fine art of survey research, as had been rebranded by this project. Graduate students were involved in absolutely every part of that project, including proposal writing, research, design, questionnaire development, sampling, interviewer training, coding, data analysis, write up. Eventually training programs became an integral part of that program. And it's a measure of that... And it is on this measure, I think, that the program was successful beyond anyone's wildest dreams. And I have to remind people we did this before the internet, before computers. So we'd stay all night typing drafts. I know a few of you can't even imagine this.
[pause]
1:08:57: So, the NSBA actually inspired a host of other studies. The NSBA itself became a panel study with reinterviews at eight, nine, and 12 years, creating not just the first national representative survey of black Americans. But also the only four-wave study. The national Chicano survey. And I forgot the national election studies of course, that had been done. The Chicano National Survey done by Carlos Arce and Pat Gurin also inspired The National Chicano Research Network. The National Black Election Study, which I just mentioned buoyed by the success of the NSBA, of course, and inspired by Jesse Jackson's run for presidency. Four panels of that study were also done. And of course the National Survey of American Life, which many of you know about, but also added an adolescent sample. And for the first time allowed researchers to tease out the impact of race and ethnicity by incorporating a Caribbean ancestry study, as well as another white study.
1:10:08: Now, importantly a parallel study was also launched by my good friends Maggie Alegria and David Takeuchi. And this study, allowed for the first time, the same kind of investigation to take place within Asian American populations and Latino populations. But it doesn't stop just there, because it also infused some of our training activities. The Family Research Consortium was a repeated five year training project that brought family researchers together every summer for an institute. We'd have 100 or 200 people and it also had a post-doctoral program. David Takeuchi, again these names keep coming back, I wish I could do a network analysis of everybody who had been associated with this project. But David Takeuchi and Andrew Fuligni where my co-principal investigators on that project. We brought together people who were already professionals, faculty members, researchers, physicians who wanted to learn more about survey research. And we trained them in the use of these data samples.
1:11:20: We heard yesterday about Tom LaVeist's Hopkins Center for Health Disparities, also based on this model. So the impact of this project has been huge and ongoing. Many hundreds of graduate students and postdocs, trained directly by the PRBA faculty of course. Universities and colleges throughout the world, employee faculty influenced by this program. Thousands more are indirectly influenced by the program through second generation scholars. I doubt there's been a more impactful research program conducted in social sciences at the university of Michigan, in terms of transforming the work force as well as how we conduct social science research. So, I thank you, and I thank everybody here for, Michigan, for my career, for providing me a set of colleagues, and collaborators that have lasted in fact, my entire life. I am gonna be retiring next year, but I'm proud to say that I have remained close to this family of researchers for my entire career, and I enjoy coming back every few years when they ask me, every week it seems. [laughter] So, thank you so much.
[applause]
1:12:37: Wonderful, may I ask all the speakers to come forward please.
[pause]
1:12:57: As you can see, our intent was to really have a wide variety of methodological approaches that people have used to do their work. Not have the same theme, but rather to really expose you to the different types of things that people have been doing, that definitely represent this idea of innovation. So, we wanna open up the audience now. Any questions that you might have for any of our speakers. Yes, do we have our mics?
[background conversation]
1:13:48: So, thank you for your presentations. I really appreciate the insight, and your shared experiences, and for coming back home. One question I had for you, Dr. Nelbett, am I pronouncing it correctly? For your narratives that you had your participants listen to, I was curious if you chose to do audio recordings versus them being read out loud? And also, I was curious about the authenticity of the scripts themselves. If they were based off of actual lived experiences, or if they were more creative based on ideas of certain lived experiences? How did you come up with those scripts, and how were they evaluated? How did you select what those scripts, how did they read?
[background conversation]
1:14:36: Thank you for your question. So, the recordings were actually audio recordings, that's a fairly straightforward answer. In terms of the development of the scripts, we consulted prior work that had used similar scenarios. So, some of the work done by Dr. Harrell, as well as work done in other areas that's not race-based, so Scott Vrana's work at VCU. And then, the piece that I think you're alluding to was... Our lab sort of looked at the scenarios and thought about ecological validity, and put all that together to come up with the scenarios.
1:15:25: Questions? Fired.
[laughter]
1:15:32: Well, I'm gonna ask Shinobu to go back to his closing statement where he talked about the relationship between the work that he's doing, 'cause again, he's dealing with culture, and he's dealing with the brain, and he's taking a very innovative approach. But, you also talk about a connection with discrimination. Could you say a little bit more about that?
[background conversation]
1:15:58: That's an extremely interesting question. We have not done any [1:16:05] ____, in this context, but we have used survey research with biomarkers to investigate some potential influences of social status. And so, let me share one little finding we are getting. So, if you, what we are getting is that [1:16:38] ____ status appears to be very different depending on statuses assessed, in terms of objective markers. In this case, say educational attainment, and occupational prestige. Just the higher status is good for your health, for example, [1:17:00] ____ inflammation, and cardiovascular problems, and stuff like this. And if status is low, if your life is miserable, it's hard. However, we are finding one interesting thing, which is that subjective status, sometimes has very mysterious effects, and subjective status is extremely good for white American male.
1:17:29: However, higher subjective status appears to have some cost, as well, because maybe you may be beaten up, because you are presenting yourself as higher than you are supposed to be. You are deviating from where you are supposed to be, for example. And that kind of effect, we are finding among American women, white women in this case, and we haven't really looked into black people, African-Americans, but probably something interesting to look into. And especially among Japanese men, higher status appears to be very damaging. Again it's very hard to draw any causal, [laughter] except in this case, inflammation of cardiovascular problems may not necessarily increase your subjective status up or down. So I'd imagine that one interpretation is that in Japanese context anyway higher status, subjective status seems to be inviting more stress. So this is just by way of illustrating this future possibility that the status component, that the hierarchical aspects of culture or society may have a very nuanced effect depending on which segment of the society or general culture they might be.
1:19:03: Thank you. Any other questions at this point? So I'll continue on my list. Oh, see he wanted to stop me, okay.
[background conversation]
1:19:26: It was an extraordinary panel. And I'd love to hear your dreams for social sciences and innovation and research methods for the next 15 years. So what would Michigan 2030 look like in the context of social science, whether it would be through ISR or through our own home institutions?
1:19:53: Well, starting first here, since I'm closest to you. I'd actually like to see us figure out a way to influence policy. I think we have a lot of information, but we don't seem to have a strategy for using that information to change the lives of people. I mean we have some clues and we have some small projects, but I think that's been the underline theme of this gathering. How can we use this information more effectively? So I'd like to see the people who come after us because I'm ending my career, figure out how best to do that. And we've had clues, about how you deliver the message, and ways not to say it and ways you should say it to speak to those with the resources and the power to make a change, but I don't think we've done enough in that area.
1:20:53: I'm not sure of my answer yet, but were you thinking about in terms of innovation, methodology or just more broader than the method?
1:21:03: [1:21:03] ____.
1:21:03: Okay.
1:21:07: Can I chime in?
1:21:08: Yeah, yeah.
1:21:09: Well, I think some of those comments came out, especially Belinda from you, it is true that it used to be the case that you needed a white control group in examining African-Americans in your case. In my case I used to receive reviews from [1:21:31] ____, hey what does this mean? You really need a white reference group, to make any sense out of this. And, at some point, comparison can provide some interpretation, but we have come a long way. Now social and behavioral scientists now seem to share this assumption that humans are very much dependent on social context. And I think no question asked about this point in a way that's very different from 30 years ago, humans are conceptualized autonomous being that is very well packaged in a scalp or a body and once you peel clothes and skin everything identical, so what's the point of studying culture or a race? Actually I was told if you have any talent in psychology, why do you study anything like culture? [laughter] So [1:22:42] ____ changed, that's great however, if you go to natural biological science department that's not necessarily the case.
1:22:53: And one thing I heard from your talk, and that's something I tried to express which is that, surely humans are biological entity, but humans are designed to be kind of functional, after engaging in socio-cultural environment and I think I'd like to see David take initiative in basically educating the rest of the people, especially in biological science field, neuroscience, genetics included, to just convey what I see as a fundamental realization or finding from social sciences in the last half century.
1:23:53: That's a tough question Jose, but I think one of my hopes for this institution moving forward would be that we can continue to be self-reflexive about the ways that we go about the process of constructing knowledge. And in particular, about the ways that we can have blinders on just in the ways that when all the researchers were white, there were blinders and there was embedded racism in the ways that people conducted their research. And opening the institution to different lived experiences, different perspectives, different knowledges, challenged that and moved us forward in the ways that we construct our knowledge. I would hope that we could continue down that path and really think about the diversity and the multiple ways of knowing the multiple epistemologies that are out there.
1:24:53: I do feel that institutions of higher education can become very closed off and focused in on positivist science. And I think we risk... There's a great risk in that process of closing ourselves off to other ways of knowing, things that can really enrich our ways of understanding the world. And that those are deeply embedded with inequalities, the theme of this panel, in terms of what kinds of knowledge, who's voices are valued, who's perspectives and lived experiences are considered legitimate knowledge. And I think that if we can continue to push that envelope, we will only end up with a richer science and a richer understanding of the world and I think it will push us towards, I hope, greater equity.
1:25:45: I'll just comment briefly. I think my colleagues have given great answers on this. One thing I've been thinking about is we do better in terms of the range of populations that we study now. So it's not just black or white, but there still are many groups for which we don't know a lot about. And the population dynamics that are changing, thinking about the multiracial population, there's still groups that are still in the infancy. And so I'm hoping that 2030, whenever we're talking about, the science is really reflective of the rapidly changing demographics and different groups that we're seeing come into the fore.
1:26:35: So I have sort of two interrelated questions. But the first is for Enrique. And there's an article by an author in psychology named Lilienfeld that I assume that you might be aware of based upon your research, where he sort of criticizes research on microaggressions. Essentially as not having an empirical or a theoretical base, if I'm correct, in that argument. And I have some observations about the article but first, could you give me some observations from a psychological perspective? And then I can go on to my second question after that.
[background conversation]
1:27:24: I think my general reaction to [chuckle], let's see how I can answer this...
[laughter]
1:27:30: Diplomatically.
1:27:32: Diplomatically.
1:27:32: Knowing that you're being recorded.
[laughter]
1:27:37: What I will say is that... Rob Sellers and I were talking about this work the other night. I think there's a, I don't know, maybe it's not a hidden agenda [chuckle] in terms of the reactions to the microaggressions literature. I do think, and I don't know if this will surprise you, that we have work to do in the field of microaggressions. I think some of the criticisms are important, and we need to understand them. And that there is room for improvement in terms of the work we do so I don't think we should just take all of the critique and throw it out. I actually do think some of the points made could be considered valid. Some I certainly do not. But I think my gut reaction to it is that there are some other things operating in terms of the lens and the selection of the data that's presented to make arguments about the strengths or weaknesses of the field that need to be addressed. I'll just leave it at that.
1:28:48: So that relates to my second question, 'cause the main problem I have with the argument, or his argument, was that he essentially said there's no real research been done in that area. However, it's very clear, that he had not read any of the sociological, any of the epidemiological, any of the social work... I can go on. He didn't cite David Williams, he said... And let's get this straight. There's been research in sociology and epidemiology and public health for 20 years in this area. Okay, but none of that was cited. And so to say there's no empirical base is clearly flawed. But this gets to my second point. So the second point is that what I see in psychology, and especially sociology, is that these are very, and as the years have gone by, very siloed disciplines. And so you see, in that article, a person who did not read outside of the field of psychology, did not cite anybody outside of the field of psychology. And what you see with the program for research on Black Americans, we're very interdisciplinary, but none of us are working in a sociology or psychology department. All of us...
1:30:12: Belinda's in psychiatry. Cleo's in public health. I'm in social work. And then we're all trained in the disciplines. I don't think that's an accident. David Williams is in Afro-American studies in public health. I don't think that's an accident. I think that as the disciplines become more siloed, that instead of embracing team science, they're going more and more away from team science. So that's my bigger observation, and to the question that Jose asked, in terms of the future, whereas some fields tend to be going more towards a future of team science, other fields, especially sociology where I'm trained, it seems to be more and more siloed. So if I can get some general observations from the panel about that.
1:31:00: Very brief, because our time is really up.
1:31:02: Well, we were actually discussing some of this at lunch today. [laughter] That very question. And I said that UCLA seems extremely siloed, to me. Michigan has made strides that most other universities, I'm suspecting, have not made. But you point out that even here, there are other kinds of silos.
1:31:27: Well, I guess... I'm a sociologist who also ran to public health, too.
[laughter]
1:31:31: Which is a very multi-disciplinary, interdisciplinary field. To the extent that that is happening, I think it's a real challenge for us, and I worry that even within the institution, when we talk interdisciplinarily, we still need to push against those silos and be engaging, I think, a more engaged scholarship with people outside of academia is also really critical for us.
1:32:00: Yes, yes. You're right.
1:32:01: Politicians and others.
1:32:05: I'm really grappling with this right now. I've been in psychology for about 10 years now, and because of the things I study, it's increasingly clear to me that psychologists are missing... [chuckle] Don't have all the answers. What's interesting to me is that a lot of programs think they're becoming more interdisciplinary, and you're seeing a cropping up of all these, oh, you have an opportunity to work with this and this, but I think we still have a long way to go to actually get there. And I think there is inter-institutional variability. So I trained here at Michigan, unfortunately, for whatever reasons, I never had the opportunity to interface with PRBA. So my training was, I worked with Rob as a psychologist. And as I've gone out into the world and tried to figure out how do I study these complex topics, I've had to reach out and find other people. So I think, how do we take what Michigan and PRBA has done here and disseminate so that other folks are able to use the same model, I think would be beneficial.
[background conversation]
[chuckle]
1:33:29: I thought Michigan was great. Now, if this university has a real problem like this, it would be a real problem. And I think at the same time, well, in my case, I would not be able to do neuroscience extension of my [1:33:51] ____ work, if I had been in other institutions. I'm very sure... Maybe UCLA could be a potential exception. But this university is very open in many ways. But even then, a kind of problem is happening. I'm sure it's happening, that's a problem. But on the other side of the story is that, if you are doing... I'm a psychologist all the way through. If you want to persuade your psychology colleagues about the significance of race, or the significance of culture in my case, you really have to be narrow and go deep and try to figure out the kind of jargons they are using. The discourse structures that define the field and so on. And then you really have to sneak in and make some argument that those things can matter. So that's a very interesting task. I think this really presents a real challenge to all of us, that is, you really have to go deep in the discipline, while at the same time, we need to bring in all the socio-cultural, political, social structural considerations, which most of my colleagues are entirely ignore it, or maybe they are not interested in it at all.
1:35:27: So, uphill battle in many ways, but I think that's a very important question. And for us grappling with issues of methodology, it's a very important one. Because I do think disciplines matter. I remember when I was in training, I was told that it's your job to do the good science. It's not your job to translate. I'm in public health because I wanna translate. Because people may not translate my work the way it should be translated. And certainly there is opportunities for influences, 'cause I also wanted to work with communities, in terms of understanding what it is that we were doing and whether or not it had any relevance at all to communities. So I think this is a really important topic and it's not gonna end here, but I am thrilled that we have our scholars with us today that have taken many different approaches to methodological issues that are gonna be top notch. So I wanna thank the panel for being here today and I wanna thank you for being here today as well.
[applause]
[background conversation]
1:36:37: Oh, thank you. I'll just make a few final comments. Thanks to those of you who stayed around and those who've been watching on our livestream. I think I just wanted to... Susan and I were talking before, I just wanted to make a few comments thanking everybody and just saying this turned out amazingly like what we imagined two years ago when we started talking about it and got this great committee together from across campus with Cleo and Liz Cole, Jorge Delva, who had to go across the hall to the MICHR meeting and Carlo [1:37:13] ____ from education. We had six units involved in the committee. As much as we've said how Michigan strengths in doing cooperation across campus and doing inter-disciplinary interactions, I think, in fact, we don't do things like this that much that have six units involved and, in fact, there is nine units represented among the 30 alumni that presented and many disciplines and it's just been great, very gratifying, and I had a blast the last two days and have learned so much and it's really been a wonderful thing. So I also just wanna thank, we had some amazing staff. The other great thing, it was a real collaboration especially between ISR and the Ford School where our staff's really got together to make it happen.
1:37:58: So Tara [1:37:58] ____ Inghome did an enormous amount, worked with everybody who was coming, Anna Massey, who's from ISR, helped a lot with the food and all those things. We also had great cooperation from the Alumni Association with Shelly Conner and Catherine Carver, and from the Ford School, Emily Hickey and Laura Lee and many others who were involved and I just wanted to thank them. It was a real big effort to put it all together, and I think it was a huge success. So thanks to all of you and hopefully we'll do this again in another 100 years.
[laughter]
[applause]