Dr Hernandez’s research is concerned with children and their family situations. In the recent period, he has focused especially on children in immigrant families. In two encyclopedia articles and several articles and book chapters, he explores the wide variety of circumstances in which US children are being raised. This variety implies the need for public-policy sensitivity to these variations, and his work points toward a spectrum of policies and programmatic approaches that would foster the social integration of these children and their families.
He has been particularly concerned with estimating the degrees of poverty affecting children; and drawing on work by the Economic Policy Institute, he has developed a geographically sensitive measure of the adequacy of the financial resources of children’s families, an alternative to the standard poverty measure, which does not take into account differences in the cost of living, nor the cost of childcare and work expenses. This new basic-budget poverty rate acknowledges the historical changes in the U.S. standard of living that have occurred since official measure was developed in the early 1960s, thus addressing a major limitation to the official measure identified by a National Research Council panel. For children in immigrant families, more than half of some groups are living in families whose basic budgets are not adequate for a minimal standard of living. These results are reported in a chapter, “Child Poverty in the U.S.: A New Family Budget Approach with Comparison to European Countries,” coauthored with CSDA associate Nancy Denton and Suzanne Macartney. In assessing the cross-national validity of the basic-budget approach, the study demonstrates with data from the Luxembourg Income Study that the most widely used approach to comparative poverty substantially underestimates poverty in the U.S. compared to European nations, because it does not take account of policy and program differences, notably the universal government-guaranteed access to health insurance coverage, child care, early education, and paid maternity and parental leave commonly found in Europe.
With these collaborators, Hernandez has also examined early childhood education and the demographic trends of school-age children in the U.S. in two forthcoming chapters. In opposition to the notion of cultural preference, particularly among Hispanics and Asians, as the explanation of low enrollment of children from immigrant families in early childhood education, this research shows that low enrollment is a function of the cost of early childhood education and the availability of programs. When early childhood education is free, as is true for kindergarten, children from immigrant families are no less likely enroll than those from native families.
Hernandez is the PI on a grant (with Nancy Denton) funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, “Newcomer Children in California,” to examine the demographic, educational, economic, housing and neighborhood situations of children by immigrant status and generation and race-ethnicity at varying levels of geography. He also has an NICHD grant to study the geography of opportunity of children in the U.S., and recently held a W.T. Grant Foundation award to study children in newcomer and native families in NYC. At present, he has an Annie E. Casey Foundation grant to compile census-based resources for Kids Count grantees and a Foundation for Child Development (FCD) grant to investigate race/ethnic, immigrant and socioeconomic disparities using a modified approach to the FCD Index of Child Well-Being.
Work in progress and
pending/planned research projects
Hernandez is finalizing a set of nearly 200 indicators of the family, economic, educational, and immigrant circumstances of children and, with fellow CSDA associate Nancy Denton, of the social and economic neighborhood segregation experienced by children from various groups. These indicators are being developed by race/ethnicity and immigrant origins for the U.S. as a whole, the 50 states, 100 metropolitan areas, and other levels of geography. In another project, he has developed and is implementing an alternative method for calculating the Foundation for Child Development’s Index of Child Well-Being in order to assess disparities in overall quality of life among children in different race-ethnic, immigrant, and socioeconomic groups. He also is using this approach to assess the trends in well-being before and after welfare reform. In related research, he is leading the development of a UNICEF project which will create similar, internationally comparable, indicators for children of immigrants and non-immigrants in countries of Western Europe. Hernandez is also planning a project to analyze historical changes in the lives of children in immigrant and non-immigrant families during the past 150 years using historical Census and other data.
Hernandez serves as a resource to other associates, who draw on his extensive experience with microdata sets from the Census Bureau’s decennial censuses, American Community Survey (ACS), Current Population Survey (CPS), Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), and Survey of Program Dynamics (SPD). His indicators on the social and economic resources available to children in immigrant families by specific country of origin are a valuable resource for researchers and policymakers and will be available on the CSDA website by early 2007.
Hernandez’s research intensively uses the computing infrastructure available through CSDA, particularly for help with the large and complex microdata files from current and historical decennial censuses, CPS, SIPP, and SPD. He also uses the Administrative Core for help with submission and monitoring of grants, and his work benefits from statistical consultation and information resources.