Annual Report 2017-2018

Domestic Violence Policy Examined at Day-Long Conference

On October 9, 2017, the PPC's Politics and Policy Research Program hosted the Conference on Gendered Violence, a day-long event focusing on international, national, and state and local problems concerning domestic and sexual violence policy. The conference brought together practitioners and researchers to learn from each other and discuss problems and possible solutions.

One highlight of the conference was the keynote presentation by Sarah Super. Super, a rape survivor and activist, described her experience with the legal system and the psychological ramifications of trauma. Her organization, Break the Silence, engages in community truth-telling events, demonstrations, and remembrances. Recently, they gained approval from the Minneapolis Park Board to build the nation's first permanent memorial to honor survivors in the Twin Cities. The conference also featured art installations by Melissa Kreider, Jessica Pleyel, and Rachel Williams from the University of Iowa.

Presenters at the conference brought a diverse set of experiences and knowledge. Michele Leiby from the College of Wooster presented her analysis of sexual abuse of political prisoners in Peru. Carolyn Hartley of the School of Social Work at the University of Iowa discussed her work on civil legal remedies for domestic violence survivors in the U.S. Iowa State Representative Mary Mascher and Kristie Doser, head of the Domestic Violence Intervention Program in Iowa City, focused on state and local challenges for domestic violence funding and policy change.

Kreitzer Returns as 2018 Summer Scholar

In May of 2018, Rebecca Kreitzer, Department of Public Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Tracy Osborn of the University of Iowa political science department, participated for a second year in the PPC's Summer Scholar Program. They focused on their ongoing project about women's representation in state legislatures. Their question is simple: can organizations focused on recruiting women to run for office improve the number of women in the U.S. state legislatures? Even though there are nearly 600 of these organizations, little to no research exists that evaluates the success of these organizations as a policy strategy to increase women's representation.

During the summer scholar program in 2018, Kreitzer and Osborn finished a number of tasks on their project. Most important, they executed a survey of each women's recruitment organization in the U.S. The online survey asks groups to evaluate their success, their funding, the kinds of women they recruit, and their tactics to train candidates for success. Jenna Pokorny, a University of Iowa undergraduate in the Department of Political Science, assisted with the execution of the survey.

Kreitzer and Osborn also finished two publications from the initial census of groups they completed in the 2017 Summer Scholar Program. The first publication, "Women's Recruiting Groups in the U.S.," will appear in Politics, Groups and Identities as part of a symposium on women's recruiting groups. The second piece, "Recruitment and Training Organizations for Women as Candidates," will be part of a new edited book, Good Reasons to Run: Women and Candidacy, from Temple University Press.

The authors will present the first analysis of the new survey at the 2018 meeting of the American Political Science Association in Boston, MA, in September 2018. Eventually, along with interviews with groups and legislators, they will turn the entire project into a book about women's recruitment organizations.

Bruch Receives Grant for Equity Implemented Partnership

The PPC and the Iowa City Community School District (ICCSD) have received a $400,000 grant from the Spencer Foundation's Research-Practice Partnership Program to support the Equity Implemented Partnership led by Sarah Bruch, Director of the Social and Education Policy Research Program at the PPC, in coordination with Kingsley Botchway, Director of Equity and Engagement at the ICCSD.

The Equity Implemented Partnership leverages social science and education policy research and practitioner knowledge to more effectively address persistent problems of policy and practice and improve students' educational opportunities and outcomes. The broad aim of this research partnership is to improve the equitability of school experiences for students in our school district by providing research expertise and capacity to conduct data collection and analysis, and to project, implement, and design research-based solutions to existing disparities. Over the past two years, the Partnership has created a strong structure and process for collaboration, created trusting relationships, institutionalized multiple data collection instruments, and begun evaluating equity programming initiatives in the District.

"The partnership benefits the District by giving it the capacity to assess and address its needs," Bruch said, "but it also benefits the University, by giving faculty and students the invaluable experience of working with community partners on real world issues of pressing concern."

The grant will be used to build on this foundation to enhance the role of the Partnership in the District, to engage in collaborative research that furthers knowledge on student experiences of school climate, and to build ICCSD capacity. The funding will strengthen research efforts to investigate the connection between student experiences and outcomes, and to examine the link between racial disparities in student experiences and outcomes. The funding will allow the Partnership to use a district-based liaison who will coordinate and enhance the District's efforts at addressing equity, and use a school-based strategy working directly with teachers to connect school goals and practices with school-specific data on student achievement and experience disparities.

Understanding the Dynamics of Conflict Escalation

Knowing the dynamics of conflict escalation has important implications of understanding individual-differences in interpersonal violence and can inform interventions designed to reduce retaliatory actions, and has been a core research interest for the Crime and Justice Policy Research program.

In the past year, Mark Berg and Ethan Rogers have worked on interpersonal conflict research through the support of two national grants funded by the National Institute of Justice. The first project, "Situational Factors and the Victim-Offender Overlap," gathered original data on a sample of inmates and their contacts in the community on the situational dynamics of their interpersonal conflicts. The second project, the "Interpersonal Conflict and Resolution (iCOR) Study," was designed through a partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago. This 31-month project collected data on the frequency and nature of conflicts from a nationally-representative sample of young adults and their intimate partners. Here are just a few research questions that have been addressed from these projects:

1. Why are offenders and victims often the same people? Berg and Rogers, along with co-authors from Penn State, explored potential explanations for the strong association between offending and victimization – known as the offender-victim overlap. Their results revealed that the overlap may be in part due to the tendency to become involved in verbal conflicts. Verbal disputes create opportunities for violence and, as a result, individuals with greater tendencies for verbal conflict are more likely to become either offenders or victims. This study was published in the Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency.
2. What accounts for the link between affective impairment and interpersonal violence? From the iCOR study, Berg, Rogers, and colleagues investigated the mechanisms through which adverse mental health states increase physical aggression. The findings suggested that social psychological mechanisms underlying conflicts are important interactional processes that may hold the clues to understanding this association.
3. What motivates bystanders to take sides when conflicts erupt? Rogers, Berg, and colleagues at Penn State explored the processes that predict partisanship during disputes. Specifically, they examined how the gender of the people involved in disputes may motivate or deter bystander involvement and examined the potential mechanism underlying the gender effect.

A general theme across these studies is the mechanisms that are responsible for conflict escalation.

Reyes and Peek-Asa Seek to Implement Farm Equipment Road Safety

Dr. Corinne Peek-Asa and Michelle Reyes are conducting an Instrumented Farm Vehicle Roadway Study, examining crashes between farm equipment and other vehicles, and focusing on vehicle interactions that contribute to rear-end and passing crashes. The goal of the study is to implement a farm equipment roadway safety program at the community level.

Each year in the Midwest, more than 1,100 crashes between farm equipment and other vehicles are reported. Usually, these crashes are caused by the non-farm vehicle and occupants of the non-farm vehicle are also more likely to be injured. The most common types of crashes with farm equipment involve rear-end collisions, passing, and turning. However, very little is known about the interaction of farm equipment with other vehicles on the roadway. Thus far, intervention programs have focused on policies to increase farm vehicle visibility and "share the road" campaigns.

Phase 1 of the study is a collaboration with researchers in Electrical Engineering to develop a rear-facing data collection device to be mounted on farm equipment. Triggered to record when the speed of the farm equipment is greater than 15 mph, the device will capture video that will allow us to observe the frequency and characteristics of cars as they approach farm equipment. The device includes a GPS module so we can quantify the equipment's exposure to the roadway and contains its own power supply. The passive device will not interfere with visibility for any driver. The primary targets are sprayers/applicators and grain carts. A local agricultural business will collect pilot data during Phase 1.

Phase 2 will use information from the videos to implement a community-wide intervention to increase farm equipment roadway safety. The intervention will aim to draw the attention of the general public to the presence of farm equipment on the roadway.

Boehmke et. al Develop Database on Policy Innovation

Fred Boehmke was part of a team that assembled the State Policy and Innovation Diffusion (SPID) database on the Harvard Dataverse. The database includes policy adoption dates for the 50 states for over 700 policies and was collected with the support of the National Science Foundation.

The SPID data includes information on the year of adoption for 728 policies in the American states, documenting the year of first adoption of each policy, for each state. Adoption dates range from 1691 to 2017 and includes all fifty states. Policies are adopted by anywhere from 1 to 50 states, with an average of 24 policy adoptions. The data were assembled from a variety of sources, including academic publications and policy advocacy/information groups. Policies were coded according to the Policy Agendas Project major topic code.

The standalone Dataverse was created for the SPID and related data and studies. Related data or outputs of SPID will be posted on their own study pages and others are encouraged to contribute related materials.

Columnist Evan Horowitz used the SPID Dataverse to demonstrate how Massachusetts appears to be less innovative in adopting new policies than it used to be, in this June 4 Boston Globe opinion piece.

Doctoral Student Works to Improve Safety of Farm Vehicles

UI doctoral student Kayla Faust is working to change farm injury statistics through the use of a specialized driving simulation.

Faust began working with the Transportation and Vehicle Safety Policy Research program as an undergraduate, and is now working as a research assistant at the National Advanced Driving Simulator (NADS. An impaired-driving study she assisted with sparked her interest in using the simulator in research. Her love of agriculture prompted her to extend the use of the simulator to improve the safety of farm equipment when meeting dangerous and unavoidable circumstances.

Faust uses the miniSim, a smaller version of the large-scale simulator, with customized controls and simulations to mimic what a farm equipment operator would experience in a real tractor. The simulation puts farmers on rural roads, fields, and driveways, simulating the environment of the cab of a farm vehicle.

To achieve accurate data, Faust sought out tractor drivers to advise on the accuracy of the simulation. Her goal was to have at least 100 farmers over the age of 65 to participate in the study.

Sukalski Wins Graduate Student Merit Award

Jennifer Sukalski, a Graduate Research Assistant in the PPC's Health Policy Research Program, was awarded the Leverett Graduate Student Merit Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dental Public Health for Master and Doctoral Degree Students in Dental Public Health and Dental Public Health Residents at last week's (April 16-18) National Oral Health Conference (NOHC).

Her poster, "Periodontal Treatment Needs in a Medicaid Expansion Population," which she presented at the conference, took the second place Leverett award. Sukalski is pursuing a PhD in Oral Sciences with an emphasis on dental public health and health policy, and is expected to graduate in 2021. Her research is focused on the effects of health care reform on overall health, dental health, and access to care, as well as dental workforce trends in Iowa.

Also presenting at the conference from the PPC was Dr. Julie Reynolds with her poster, "Comparison of Iowa Dentist Participation in a Medicaid State Plan Versus a Private Carve-out Plan for the Medicaid Expansion Population." Dr. Susan McKernan gave an oral presentation entitiled, "Environmental Scan of Medical-Dental Integration in Public Health Settings: Targeting Cardiovascular Disease." Graduate Research Assistant Aparna Shivanand Ingleshwar attended the conference, as well.

Students Represent Equity Implemented Partnership at Research in the Capitol

PPC students Kaelynn Heiberg and Rachel Maller presented at the annual Research in the Capitol event. Their poster, "Evaluation of Educational Equity Interventions," highlighted the importance of the Equity Implemented Partnership between the Iowa City Community School District and the Public Policy Center Social & Education Policy Research Program.

The research event showcases the work of outstanding student researchers from the Iowa Regents Universities.

Maller said this about the event, "It was a great experience presenting our research at the Capitol and sharing the importance of the Equity Implemented Partnership. This opportunity skilled us with how to make an effective academic poster, how to communicate our research, and ways to engage in discussion with policy makers and student researchers. We were encouraged to share the influence research has had on our future goals and advocate the importance of undergraduate research."

Heiberg added, "Research in the Capitol was a great place to present research for the first time! There were so many accomplished students there to talk with and discuss diverse research topics. The Iowa legislators that we talked to were interested in our evaluation of the ICCSD professional development programs, they asked us a lot of questions and I hope that we showed them that the University of Iowa is a great resource for information on education policies in the future."

Wonk Wednesdays Showcase PPC Research at Iowa City Library

A new monthly series, Wonk Wednesdays, featured PPC researchers presenting within their areas of expertise, in their choice of format. The events were intended to draw university and community members alike to discuss topics such as immigration policy, the Affordable Care Act, and school nutrition, and were held at the Iowa City Public Library.

The inaugural Wonk Wednesday, "Mr. Cwiertny Goes to Washington," featured David Cwiertny, director of the PPC's Environmental Policy Research Program and professor of civil and environmental engineering in the UI College of Engineering. Cwiertny spent the 2016-17 academic year as a staff member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, and shared antecdotes from his year in DC.

In October, Rene Rocha, researcher in the PPC's Politics and Policy Research Program and associate professor in the Department of Political Science in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, invited a panel of experts to discuss how U.S. immigration policy changed in the first year of Trump's presidency, and the impact those changes have had on immigrants in Iowa.

Wrapping up the fall series was Peter Damiano, director of the PPC and its Health Policy Research Program, talked about the current state of health care policy at the state and federal level, and the impact of the Affordable Care Act.

Tracy Osborn, director of PPC Politics and Policy Research Program and Associate Professor in the UI Department of Political Science, led the spring series with "How Do We Recruit More Women into Politics?" talking about groups that recruit, train, and fund women to run for office.

Natoshia Askelson, assistant professor in the College of Public Health and PPC Health Policy researcher, led a panel of local experts on the topic of school meals and their role in students' health.

Silvia Secchi, associate professor in the Department of Geographical and Sustainability Sciences and PPC Environmental Policy researcher, wrapped up the series with her presentation, "America Out of Paris: The State of Global Climate Change Policy," as a part of various Earth Week activities.