Dr. Denton’s research over the past three years relates strongly to CSDA’s signature themes of spatial inequality and vulnerable populations. Together with Richard Alba and Walter Ensel, Denton is engaged in research on immigrants in smaller communities, looking at both their own adjustment process through in-depth interviews and the response of the natives to them through a telephone survey. The pilot of this project, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, is currently in the field in Newburgh and Poughkeepsie, two small cities in the Hudson Valley that have received few immigrants since the first half of the 20th century. Early results raise interesting questions about immigrant-African American relations, and how natives’ opinions about immigrants and immigration become more positive if the immigrants are in their own community.
Denton is continuing her research with associate Donald Hernandez to examine the social and economic characteristics of children in immigrant families by specific location in the U.S. One unique aspect of this research concerns the estimation of poverty: rather than use the official poverty rate, which does not vary by location, the team expanded the approach of the Economic Policy Institute by adjusting for the cost of living in each location, including housing, childcare, travel, etc. One part of the project looked at children in California according to different scales of geography and produced indicators of family, household and neighborhood disadvantage for 30 different groups of children by race/ethnicity/immigration status. Similar research for all states and metro areas is forthcoming in several book chapters: one, in Children's Economic and Social Welfare compares child poverty in the US to that in European countries; a second, in Kindergarten Transition, Early Learning Opportunities, and School Readiness, focuses on early childhood education for children in immigrant families; a third develops a new method for adjudicating between cultural and structural explanations of low enrollment at young ages by immigrant children and will appear in The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth and Families in Comparative Perspective.
Denton was President of the Eastern Sociological Society for 2005-06
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During the past three years Denton has been Co-PI with Hernandez on grants from NICHD and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation to support the work on the children in immigrant families and with Alba and Ensel on the Russell Sage Foundation grant to support the study of new immigrants in the Hudson Valley. In addition she actively participated in the submission of the EXPORT Center proposal.
Denton has just completed a paper on residential segregation in Puerto Rico with graduate student Jacqueline Villarrubia and a review piece about methodological issues in the study of race and ethnicity with associate Glenn Deane. Her future plans are to continue work on children and on immigrants to non-gateway areas and to resume her work on housing and segregation. Together with Alba and Hernandez, she is part of a project (recently favorably reviewed by NIH) to use the confidential census data at the New York RDC to study the incorporation patterns of the second generation.
Denton is Associate Director of the Center and spends much of her time there. If the current R24 application is funded, she will be heading the Developmental Core, which will administer the Junior Scholars program and organize the colloquia series and technical workshops, and working toward formalizing the pre-doctoral training program. As Associate Director she also assigns graduate-student space in the Center, consults with researchers and graduate students about problems and issues that arise and also reads proposals for junior scholars to give them early feedback on their work. Her role as President of the Eastern Sociological Society enhanced the visibility of the Center.
Denton has made extensive use of the computing infrastructure, as well as of the library and of grant preparation and administrative services.