2018 Manners Awardees
Howell  ·  Pallatino ·  Hanson

“The Role of Local Government in Allegheny County’s Neighborhood Transformation from 1986 to 2018”

Junia Howell, PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Sociology
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT: Academics and the public alike debate who gentrification benefits and what is driving the change. Although much work has been done on the topic, few have explicitly linked contemporary processes of neighborhood change to the role racialized land appraisals pay in perpetuating change. This project will investigate how changes in home appraisal values correspond with changes in neighborhood racial composition, using data from the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center’s Allegheny County Property Sale Transactions dataset and the Allegheny County Department of Real Estate. These data will be geocoded and merged with data on neighborhood demographics, crime rates, and school quality. This project will highlight local processes that have and continue to cultivate neighborhood change in Pittsburgh, with particular attention to the role the City of Pittsburgh has played in recent housing and commercial development. The project will contribute to larger theoretical conversations regarding urbanization processes as well as local policy decisions on gentrification.

"Co-occurring Intimate Partner Violence and Substance Use: Understanding Barriers to Collocated Integrated Services"

Chelsea Pallatino, PhD
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MPH, Postdoctoral Associate
Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, &Reproductive Sciences; Lecturer,
Department of Behavioral & Community Health Sciences
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT: Despite the high prevalence of co-occurring substance use disorders (SUD) and intimate partner violence (IPV) among pregnant women, these issues are treated separately, and women experiencing both are often provided referrals with little follow-up. This study will involve interviews with pregnant and postpartum women with co-occurring IPV and opioid use disorder (OUD) and stakeholders interfacing with women with co-occurring OUD and IPV. Studies have found support among IPV and SUD providers for service integration, and this study will assess service integration feasibility. Stakeholders will include providers who are currently engaged in prenatal, IPV, substance use, harm reduction, addiction medicine, law enforcement, criminal justice, batterer intervention, and child protective services, and the welfare service provision setting. Provider conversations will focus on service provision experiences with women with co-occurring IPV and SUD, perceived ability to connect and engage women with SUD and IPV-related services, service provision barriers and facilitators, record-keeping and information dissemination practices regarding program outcomes, and evidence-based SUD and IPV treatment practices for pregnant and postpartum women with OUD. Conversations with pregnant and postpartum women with OUD will focus on experiences accessing SUD treatment, IPV, healthcare, social, legal, and health services; service quality; perceptions of treatment by providers; and experiences of service refusal due to history of SUD or IPV. Participants’ insight will help researchers identify evidence-based practices to improve outcomes for women with co-occurring SUD and IPV and their children across the lifespan.

"Leveraging ecological momentary assessments to understand associations between poverty, stress exposure, and environmental volatility"

Jamie Hanson, PhD
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Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology; Research Scientist, LRDC
University of Pittsburgh

ABSTRACT: Poverty is associated with a 20% increase in subsequent aggression, oppositional behavior, and other forms of “externalizing” psychopathology. Despite the shocking prevalence of poverty in our society and the profound influences of this early life stress, limited progress has been made on understanding the mechanisms linking poverty to later problem behavior. Particularly salient and missing from past conceptualizations of poverty are the daily-experiences of youths and families residing in these challenging conditions. While many features of poverty have been unexamined in past approaches, particularly surprising is an absence of studies linking physical chaos, caregiving volatility, and day-to-day stress exposure. Previous work has examined these factors in isolation and with methodology that is subject to recall and other biases. In this investigation we will attempt to answer interlinked questions about the role of chaos and physical and socioemotional volatility in creating risk for externalizing problems in the context of poverty. We propose to use ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to assess behaviors as they occur in individuals’ natural environments. We first propose to examine day-to-day physical chaos and parental inconsistency (assessed by EMA) in a sample of families from across the SES spectrum. We believe these factors will explain relations between SES and externalizing behaviors. We also aim to connect day-to-day stressors to physical chaos and parental inconsistency. We predict periods of day-to-day higher stress will be linked to increased levels of physical chaos and parental inconsistency. This project has the potential to increase our understanding about the daily experiences of individuals and how this may create risk for aggression and externalizing problem behaviors. These results would have important implications for applied questions related to education, child development, mental health, and interventions for at-risk youth.