Impact Report: Social Policy

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Building a better world through policy

Helping children and families thrive. Preventing gun violence. Bridging the racial wealth gap for Black Americans. Three Sanford researchers continue to lead these fields with decades of research and innovative solutions.

For more than 40 years, Kenneth Dodge has examined one of the most critical issues in the world: how to foster healthy environments for children to thrive, grow and succeed. Dodge’s work has positively impacted the lives of children and families.

In 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced it would empower Dodge with a MERIT Award worth more than $8 million to study how to prepare families and children, from pregnancy to kindergarten, for academic and social success.

The prestigious award, chosen through a rigorous review process, will support five years of research and the opportunity to extend funding for an additional five years.

Dodge, with Ben Goodman, a research scientist at the Sanford School, and Professor Debra Best of Duke’s Department of Pediatrics, have created a novel program of family primary care. This comprehensive initiative works with families across the lifespan of pregnancy through kindergarten matriculation.

Through previous research, Dodge has found that life success is better predicted by early social and emotional competence than standard test scores. With that knowledge, Dodge has created and tested classroom curricula in social-emotional learning (SEL) and intensive early-intervention programs.

His groundbreaking research spotlights a consistent point: learning starts at birth, and waiting until public education starts puts children at a disadvantage.

Further supporting families through his work, Dodge created Out of Durham Connects in 2008 and a larger program that grew out of it called Family Connects International. The research-based, universal nurse home visiting program for newborns aims to prevent child abuse. The program has been shown to reduce community-level child abuse rates by one-third. It is now being disseminated nationwide through an independent nonprofit organization. The state of Oregon established a Universal Home Visiting program modeled on Family Connects.

Dodge’s work for children and families showcases Sanford’s strength in social policy, as does another major award received by another faculty member for his research on one of the most urgent issues of our time.

More than 251,000 people worldwide died from gun injuries in 2016, up 20 percent since 1990. Economist Philip J. Cook is working to solve this crisis.

In 2020, Cook was awarded the Stockholm Prize in Criminology for his decades of research on gun violence and its wide-ranging effects on society.

The Stockholm Prize is awarded annually by the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation, a permanently endowed charity funded by The Torsten Soderberg Foundation, the Government of Sweden and other donors. It is administered by the University of Stockholm. Cook and a fellow winner Franklin Zimring, the William G. Simon Professor of Law at the University of California at Berkeley, shared the prize of about $150,000, which was awarded in Stockholm in June 2021. Cook was the second Duke faculty member to receive this high honor.

In its announcement, the Stockholm Prize in Criminology Foundation said the laureates’ influence has “guided an entire generation of gun injury scholarship, strengthening the evidence for governments to take more effective action against the massive suffering caused by guns.”

In their book Gun Violence: The Real Costs (2000), Cook and Ludwig developed a new way to calculate the toll of shootings in the United States each year, arriving at an estimate of $80 billion in 1998. The book provided a new perspective on the burden of gun violence that focused not on actual injuries but on apprehension, avoidance, and trauma by which gun violence impacts communities and beyond.  A revised edition of his book, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, co-authored with Kristin A. Goss, Sanford professor of public policy, was released in 2020.

Professor William Darity, Jr. has been at the forefront of economic solutions for the racial wealth gap for decades. 

These ideas include “baby bonds” (taken up by Senator Cory Booker), a federal jobs guarantee (endorsed by the Center for American Progress, among others), and reparations for descendants of enslaved people (his work has been cited in several state conversations about enacting reparations). 

Darity was invited to testify to a House Judiciary subcommittee on June 19, 2019, and submitted his written testimony about reparations. Darity also has testified in Congress on discrimination and economic impacts. His research resulted in an award-winning book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, written with folklorist and arts consultant A. Kirsten Mullen.

In 2021, Sanford launched a six-part podcast series called the ARC of Justice: From Here to Equality based on the book. The series aired on North Carolina Public Radio/WUNC in September 2021, and was offered nationally to NPR stations by American Public Media. The series aired in several major markets including Washington, D.C. and has won three major accolades: an award from the National Association of Black Journalists; a Gracie for projects produced and hosted by women; and a 2022 CASE Bronze Circle of Excellence Award for podcasts produced by higher education institutions.