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Volume 21, Number 17 December 23, 2002
marburger, branscomb addresses highlight lively cossa annual meeting
Reaffirming a theme that he has articulated several times this year, Presidential Science Advisor John Marburger opened the COSSA Annual Meeting by stating that the government “can take more advantage of the social sciences, and that the challenges of our times can be engaged more effectively if we use the knowledge and the techniques developed in” these disciplines. This assertion set the tone for the meeting, held November 18 in Washington and attended by a wide range of social and behavioral scientists, government officials, and association leaders.
Marburger, who also serves as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), used his remarks to both praise and exhort the social and behavioral sciences. After noting that these disciplines are “undervalued,” he discussed opportunities for the social and behavioral sciences to win acclaim by taking advantage of emerging tools and tackling the key challenges of the post-September 11 era.
Marburger jumped into this argument by focusing on the “revolutionary transformation” spurned by information technology breakthroughs. He declared that the internet, access to powerful computing, and new forms of collaboration and communication among researchers should spark “a sense of change, of excitement, of entire new landscapes of opportunity opening out before” social and behavioral scientists. He followed this by asserting that “it is a time for speaking out with optimism, for vigorous public education, for coming together within and among disciplines to forge new boundaries and new forms of organization to take advantage of the new tools.”
Turning to the emerging challenges of homeland security, Marburger noted that Jim Griffin, OSTP Assistant Director for Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences, Norman Bradburn, National Science Foundation (NSF) Assistant Director for the SBE Sciences Directorate, and Raynard Kington, Director of the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research, co-chair an interagency working group on SBE issues to analyze Federal research related to homeland security. This body has identified several topics that may warrant additional investment, including: behavioral and risk management research; research on terrorist-related crime and networks; information infrastructure development; public health and crisis response intervention research; and socioeconomic intervention and international policy research.
Marburger concluded by promising to continue preaching “the importance and the opportunities of the social sciences within” the Bush Administration.
The Role of the Social Sciences in Countering Terrorism
The meeting’s second keynote address was delivered by Lewis Branscomb, Emeritus Professor and Emeritus Director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. He also recently served as Co-Chair of the National Academies Committee on Science and Technology for Countering Terrorism. (See Update, July 8, 2002).
Branscomb’s remarks focused on his work with the terrorism panel. He gave some background on the Committee, noting that the Academies committed $1 million of their own funds to the endeavor and that 119 experts served on the contributing subcommittees and another 46 individuals reviewed the final report. His fellow Co-Chair was Richard Klausner, a former Director of the National Cancer Institute.
The theme to Branscomb’s speech was the need for the social and behavioral sciences to convince Federal officials that research in these fields is an “indispensable element of (the U.S.) security strategy.” To aid in this process, he outlined a course that researchers could use to identify areas where study is needed. First, scientists should identify national vulnerabilities and the means for mitigating them and this will allow experts to pinpoint research strategies and priorities to ascertain the role of the social and behavioral sciences. Doing this leg work will provide these disciplines with tangible proof of their relevance to the government’s homeland security mission.
Focusing on the recently authorized Department, Branscomb noted that a strong transition effort is underway. He concluded by underlining the top social science research priorities for the Agency’s science and technology programs, which include: understanding terrorists’ target priorities; uncovering the roots of terrorism and U.S. foreign policy options; understanding people’s response to terror; public administration – making the new Department work and promoting Federal, state, country, city, and industry collaboration; and balancing domestic intelligence with civil rights and liberties.
SBE Priorities at NSF
A panel of officials from the NSF’s Social, Behavioral, and Economic (SBE) Sciences Directorate addressed the Foundation’s upcoming priority area, entitled Human and Social Dynamics. Their presentations gave background on the priority area, solicited research topics from the social and behavioral science community, and focused on general approaches for the SBE sciences at NSF.
Richard Lempert, Director of the Social and Economic Sciences Division, opened by asserting that we are in a positive era for the social sciences, saying, “there is a true sense of relevance to these disciplines.” To support this argument he noted that Director Rita Colwell and the rest of the NSF leadership have been very supportive of social and behavioral research in both word and action. He also explained that, for the last decade or so, the Foundation has used priority areas to boost individual fields, both programmatically and financially. Human and Social Dynamics is the first such focus on the SBE Directorate.
As background on the priority area, Lempert stated that other NSF Directorates will be investing in the initiative. Thus, it is important to give it a multi-disciplinary focus wherever possible. Philip Rubin, Director of the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences Division, picked up on that thought by asserting that there has been a convergence of disciplines at the Foundation of late. He mentioned four areas where this trend can be seized by the social and behavioral sciences: information technology research; biocomplexity and the environment; the NSF Science of Learning Centers; and the NSF Science and Technology Centers.
Both Lempert and Rubin also urged the audience to contact the SBE Directorate with advice as to where funding is especially needed in the social and behavioral sciences. Sally Kane, Senior Adviser to Norman Bradburn, NSF Assistant Director for SBE, focused her comments on seeking topics related to the priority area. She also urged a multi-disciplinary concentration and to prompt ideas, she gave a list of representative themes: globalization; disasters (both natural and terrorist-related); adaptation and social learning (change in society); and aging of the population (demographic shifts).
The priority area will run from FY 2004 through FY 2008 in the NSF budget, with a proposed $10 million preamble in FY 2003. For more information or to submit an idea, please e-mail Sally Kane at skane@nsf.gov.
Aging Research
National Institute of Aging (NIA) Director Richard Hodes discussed his Agency’s Behavioral and Social Research (BSR) Program. He explained that BSR supports basic social and behavioral research and research training on aging processes and the place of older people in society. This includes focusing on how people change with aging, on the interrelationships between older people and social institutions, and on the societal impact of the changing age composition of the population.
Six major areas have been identified by BSR for emphasis over the next several years, Hodes observed: 1) health disparities; 2) aging minds; 3) increasing health expectancy; 4) health, work and retirement; 5) interventions and behavior change; and 6) genetics, behavior, and the social environment. Within this last area, topics include: behavioral genetics; genetic epidemiology; population genetics; ethical, legal and social implications (ELSI) of human genetic and genomic research; evolution, genetics, and aging.
According to Hodes, these six identified areas represent: 1) new and important perspectives or emphases that have not been adequately highlighted in the past; or 2) are areas that have a potential for major scientific advancement; or 3) have important implications for policy, and for the future well-being of older persons in the United States. New program announcements, he further explained, are under development in each of these special initiative areas to show where BSR will be focusing its own efforts and the Agency’s staff time. The areas are broad and cut across most of BSR’s topics and disciplines. He explained that NIA’s attention to these areas does not preclude grant submissions in other areas or on topics the Institute has emphasized in the past. “We are not narrowing BSR,” he asserted.
Hodes also highlighted the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), a topic of a previous COSSA seminar, and the NIA Centers on Demography and Economics of Aging. HRS interview topics include: demography, health, cognition, family structure, housing, employment, work/health disability, expectations, assets and income, capital gains and widowhood and divorce, health care utilization, events, insurance, and modules.
The Centers on Demography research topics include: biodemography of aging, costs of aging-related illness, health and disability, health economics, intergenerational transfers and family support systems, international, comparative, life cycle economics, linked data confidentiality, long-term care, morbidity and mortality risks, population and economic forecasts, SES and health – health disparities, and work, retirement, and health.
The Policy Relevance of Research
Paul Brathwaite, Policy Director for the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), expressed how social and behavioral research is used within the Caucus to assess its legislative agenda. Brathwaite, who is responsible for coordinating all domestic and foreign policy legislative initiatives for the Caucus, explained, “in the agenda, we (the CBC) thematically talked about issues of concern for the Caucus.” The CBC’s agenda for the 107th Congress, under the leadership of Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX), included: election reform, voter education and participation, education reform, parental and community involvement, healthy children, juvenile justice, trade and global economic empowerment, eliminating health care disparities, and HIV/AIDS initiatives.
Charting the group’s progress, Brathwaite noted the CBC was instrumental in getting “H.R. 3295 passed in the House and Senate and signed by President Bush, a bill that invested in correcting the election system.” (See Update, November 4, 2002). He explained that the CBC will be selecting a new leader for the 108th Congress, either Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) or Rep. Bobby Rush (D-IL). With the Republicans increasing their majority in the House, the all-Democratic 39 member CBC will set a new agenda in the coming months. Brathwaite concluded his remarks by stating, “social science and analytical research is needed to analyze and measure productivity and the economy.”
Analyzing the Elections
To comment on the 2002 congressional elections, Paul Herrnson, University of Maryland, and Catherine Rudder, George Mason University and former Executive Director of the American Political Science Association, served together on a panel.
Herrnson focused his presentation on several vital factors that contributed to the outcome:
· Voter support in the U. S. is equally divided between Democrats and Republicans
· Redistricting (which took place in 2001-02) usually lends many competitive races, but in this case incumbents from both parties worked together toward self-preservation
· The issue environment, which often favors the party out of the White House, was dominated this time by homeland security and concerns about Iraq – topics that favor Republicans
· The campaign for resources and financial support favored incumbents as it always has
· Forty-five percent of voters understood the Republican message as opposed to only 20 percent for the Democrats
· President Bush’s campaigning around the country had a big influence in close races
These trends, he noted, allowed for a “somewhat historic” result in which the President’s party gained both House and Senate seats in a midterm election.
Rudder opened her remarks by noting that the collapse of the Voter News Service polling on Election Day makes analyzing the elections much more difficult. Picking up on Herrnson’s final point, she noted that control of the Senate turned on a very small number of votes in a few key states, thus demonstrating Mr. Bush’s skill as a campaigner. She also noted a few broad trends that were manifested in the elections: 1) The party shift from Democrats to Republicans in the South has firmly taken hold; 2) There has been a general ideological shift towards the right that was started by Ronald Reagan – and President Bush is a philosophical child of Reagan; 3) The Republicans did not have too many seats to lose – the Democrats had made Congressional gains in the last three elections (1996, 1998, and 2000); and 4) Science will not suffer from GOP control of the government. Health research funding has been very popular with a broad range of Republicans and the incoming Chair of the NSF’s appropriations subcommittee, Sen. Christopher Bond (R-MO), is an advocate of doubling the Foundation’s budget.
Orlando Taylor Elected COSSA’s Next President
On November 17, the COSSA Board of Directors elected Orlando Taylor, Dean of the Howard University Graduate School, as the Consortium’s next President. Taylor replaces former U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Janet Norwood, who will remain on the Board of Directors. He will serve a two-year term beginning January 1, 2003.
In addition to serving as Graduate Dean, Taylor also holds a faculty position at Howard as Professor in the School of Communications. He is also a member of the Board of the U.S. Department of Education’s Jacob Javits Fellowship Program. Prior to his appointment as Dean, he served in several posts at Howard, including as Executive Assistant to the President, Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs, Dean of the School of Communications, and Chair of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences. Before coming to Howard in 1973, Taylor was a member of the faculty of Indiana University. He has also served as a Visiting Professor at Stanford University.
Taylor is a former President of the National Communication Association and Immediate Past President of the Northeastern Association of Graduate Schools. He is a former member of the Advisory Committee of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and has served on an advisory council at the National Institutes of Health. Much of his work focuses on increasing the number of minority Ph.D. recipients. He has a bachelor’s degree from Hampton University, a master’s degree from Indiana University, and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.
In addition to Norwood, also appointed for new two-year terms as at-large members of the COSSA Board were: Ann Masten, Institute of Human Development, University of Minnesota; Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Dean, Graduate Studies, UCLA; Wallace Oates, Economics, University of Maryland; and Gregory Ward, Linguistics, Northwestern.
The 107th Congress completed its lame-duck session without enacting the remaining 11 appropriations bills to fund the government’s programs in FY 2003, which began October 1. Only the Defense Department and Military Construction spending bills have been signed into law by the President. Before leaving, Congress passed another Continuing Resolution to keep the other agencies running at FY 2002 spending levels until January 11.
The new Republican-controlled 108th Congress will open for business on January 7, 2003. The White House has told the Congress that the President expects the FY 2003 appropriations bills to be completed by January 28th, the date of the State-of-the-Union address. The White House and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have also made it clear that they expect the overall spending figures for the remaining bills to reflect the President’s desire to limit spending increases.
This means that the Senate Appropriations Committee will need to reduce by $9 to $10 billion the total it used to provide funding during its Summer and early Fall markups. The VA, HUD, Independent Agencies panel might have to cut $2 to $3 billion off its allocations. That would make it very difficult to sustain the 12 percent increase given to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The House provided NSF a 13 percent boost within its bill, but did not provide any funding for the Corporation for National Service, a budgetary maneuver whereby the House expects the Senate to fund this program. With the Senate bill now under constraints, the FY 2003 down-payment on the doubling for NSF becomes problematic. At a recent appearance, Senator Christopher Bond (R-MO), the incoming Subcommittee chair, noted that his fervor for doubling NSF’s budget has not diminished, but that the budget situation has clearly diminished its prospects in the short-term.
Other programs and agencies are also caught up in the budget squeeze. How the Labor, HHS, Education bill will manage to complete the doubling of NIH and still fully fund the “No Child Left Behind” education reforms will be an interesting feat. The increases for the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey necessary to continue its ramp-up are probably not going to happen.
New Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens (R-AK) continues to make appeals to OMB and the White House for some flexibility and the possible use of budget gimmicks to help provide some extra funds. So far, buoyed by their success in the November elections, the Administration is holding its ground.
Appropriations staffers are spending their pre-holiday time crunching numbers to make everything fit. The expectation is that a large omnibus spending bill will be ready for the new Congress’s consideration in January. Then it is on to the FY 2004 budget, which President Bush is supposed to reveal on February 3.
CONGRESS PASSES DATA SHARING AND CONFIDENTIALITY BILL
As the lame-duck session drew to a close on November 15 both the House and Senate passed by unanimous consent the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act of 2002. The legislation will provide a uniform set of confidentiality protections and extend these safeguards to all individually- identifiable data collected for statistical purposes under a pledge of confidentiality. It will also permit the sharing of business data by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the Bureau of the Census (see Update, September 23, 2002). The legislation was included as part of the E-Government Act of 2002 (H.R. 2458).
The bill was the result of a long effort through many administrations to shore up confidentiality protections and to permit some limited data sharing among statistical agencies for statistical purposes. In the recently concluded 107th Congress, Rep. Stephen Horn (R-CA, now retired) became the legislative champion. The White House Office of Statistical Policy, led by Katherine Wallman, also played a significant role in the enactment of the bill. In addition, many social scientists and statisticians advocated for the bill’s passage.
Adjusted Census 2000 Numbers to be Released
Responding to a 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals decision, the Census Bureau will release statistically-adjusted figures from the 2000 decennial Census that have been the subject of much partisan wrangling. The move was mandated when the Bush Administration opted not to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court.
The verdict came in response to a lawsuit filed by two Democratic state legislators from Oregon, who were denied the data through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The Bureau refused the request on the grounds that the data fit into the FOIA’s “deliberative privilege” exception. The three-judge Appeals Court panel unanimously disagreed, upholding a lower court decision and finding that the adjusted figures were not “predecisional,” as government lawyers had claimed.
The controversy dates back to early 2001, when Census officials first recommended the Administration withhold the numbers, asserting they were too unreliable to be used in the Congressional redistricting process. Commerce Secretary Donald Evans, who oversees the Bureau, concurred. Democrats had argued for their release at that time, contending that the adjustment process would compensate for millions of overlooked Americans in major urban areas that typically vote for liberal candidates. Republicans countered that any use of the data would be unconstitutional. (For additional background, see Update, March 12, 2001).
It’s not yet clear how the figures will be used, what sort of legal standing they will be granted, if any, and how soon they will actually be released.
IOM Report Addresses Public Health Professional Education
Public health professionals must “look beyond the biological risk factors that affect health and seek to also understand the impact on health of environmental, social, and behavioral factors,” observes a recently released Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, “Who Will Keep the Public Healthy: Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st Century.”
Commissioned by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the IOM’s Committee on Educating Public Health Professionals for the 21st Century, stressed that these individuals must be “aware of how these multiple factors interact in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their interventions. . . It is through this understanding that public health professionals will be able to more effectively address the challenges of the 21st Century, including globalization, scientific and medical technologies, and demographic transformation.” Co-chaired by Kristine Gebble, Columbia University School of Nursing, and Linda Rosenstock, University of California at Los Angeles School of Public Health, the Committee emphasized that public health professionals must understand this ecological model.
Acknowledging that the core areas of epidemiology, biostatistics, environmental health, health services administration, and social and behavioral sciences remain important for public health professional education, the Committee highlighted eight content areas it believes “are now and will continue to be significant to public health and public health education in programs and schools of public health.” These eight areas include: communication, cultural competence, community-based participatory research, global health, policy and law, public health ethics, informatics, and genomics. According to the Committee these areas are “natural outgrowths of the traditional core public health sciences as they have evolved in response to ongoing social, economic, technological, and demographic changes.”
Research
The Committee explained that public health research “differs from biomedical research in that its focus is on the health of groups, communities, and populations.” It also noted that the most striking change in public health research in the coming decades will be the transition from research dominated by single disciplines. There will also be a move toward more intervention-oriented research. “The study of interventions will, in turn, dictate the third sea-change in public health research: community participation.”
Accordingly, the committee recommended that public health schools reevaluate their research portfolios as plans are developed for curricular and faculty reform. “To foster the envisioned trans-disciplinary research, schools of public health may need to establish new relationships with other health science schools, community organizations, health agencies, and groups within their region,” notes the report.
Policy
According to the study, policy education at many schools of public health is minimal and stressed the need to address education in policy analysis, policy development, and the application of policy. The area of law is also underscored as “another essential component” of policy education. Practical political skills, ethics, and consideration of the relationship of human rights to health are further cited as important to politics and policy development.
While the report focuses primarily on schools of public health, the committee notes that other programs, schools, and institutions play major roles in educating public health professionals. As a result, the committee emphasized that “to provide a coherent approach to the education of public health professionals . . . it is important to examine and understand the potential contribution these other institutions and programs can make.”
Noting that physicians have historically played a central, though not exclusive, role in insuring the health of the public, the Committee strongly recommended that:
Few Resources Devoted to Prevention Research
The report further documents that “comparatively few resources have been devoted to supporting prevention research, community-based research, trans-disciplinary research, or the translation of research findings into practice.” Current funding for research is focused almost entirely on two components of the ecological model of health – biological determinants and medical cures. While the Committee acknowledges that it is not realistic at this time to propose a shift in funding for public health research to levels commensurate with the burden of need, it “believes significant steps in this direction are now amply justified and warranted.” Therefore, the committee recommends that:
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