PhD Candidate Liwei Zhang Receives Poster Award From The Society for Research in Child Development

NYU Silver PhD Candidate Liwei Zhang has received the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Student and Early Career Council Poster Award for the paper entitled “Multidimensional Poverty and Children’s Socioemotional Trajectories,” which she presented at SRCD’s Biennial Meeting held on March 22, 2019 in Baltimore, MD.

The paper, which she co-authored with Professor and PhD Program Director Wen-Jui Han, presents a more dynamic picture of poverty experience and the impact it has on children’s development than prior studies that examined poverty from a unidimensional approach. The authors used an advanced statistical method—latent class analysis—to measure poverty by depth, volatility, and duration simultaneously, and investigated how these complex poverty patterns shape children’s socioemotional trajectories during early school years. The paper abstract can be found on the SRCD Biennial Meeting’s website.

According to Dr. Han, “SRCD is the most prestigious professional organization of child development researchers and its biennial conference attracts submissions from the top social scientists in the field. Liwei’s receipt of this award is a tremendous achievement that signals the impact I expect she will have over the course of her career. We are proud of having her and are blessed to be part of her trajectory in becoming a promising young scholar.”

Liwei’s overall research agenda focuses on the role of multidimensional poverty patterns in shaping children’s health and well-being, particularly for children of immigrants. Her award-winning paper is drawn from a portion of her dissertation research. An expected May 2019 graduate, Liwei has spent four years at NYU Silver working on longitudinal-designed projects that serve to identify how economic/poverty experiences, as well as other familial and sociocultural factors (e.g., parental work schedule, immigration background) interact in a dynamic way to shape children’s health and well-being. Her short-term goal upon completing her doctoral studies is to continue working on large-scale datasets to advance and test the framework on multidimensional poverty patterns and their impact on child health and well-being. Liwei’s long-term goal is to integrate this framework to inform policymakers and professionals in providing appropriate policies and programs for economically disadvantaged families and children, particularly for children of immigrants.