Fong Receives National Science Foundation Award

Associate Professor Vanessa Fong was recently given a five-year CAREER award by the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cultural Anthropology Program, which will enable her to continue the longitudinal research project she began 12 years ago, Teaching Mixed Methods, International Research, and Comparative Perspectives through a Study of Childbearing and Childrearing under China's Fertility Limitation Policies.

Fong will resurvey the 2,273 Chinese vocational high school, college prep high school, and junior high school alumni she last surveyed in 1999 when they were aged 13-20, as well as conduct interviews with about 100 of those participants. She hopes to learn "how the education and childrearing experienced by my respondents when they were adolescents affects their decisions about the bearing, rearing, and education of their own children."

"My project will provide opportunities for interdisciplinary, hands-on training for students, as well as consolidate the foundation for a long-term longitudinal project that I will continue working on throughout my career," Fong says. "My mixed-method, longitudinal approach will enable me to explore cause and effect in the lives of the same individuals and families over time."

According to the NSF, the grant was awarded to Fong, in part, because her research helps social scientists understand the "social dynamics of childbearing and childrearing at a time when issues of population pressure and population ageing are increasingly pressing worldwide."

Fong follows the cohort of youth born under China's one-child policy throughout the course of their lives. The first phase focused on the children while they were in grades 8-12. The current phase of this project examines how they are dealing with work; pregnancy; childbearing; parenting; physical and psychological health maintenance; cultural, national, and political identities; the provision of medical and nursing care for their aging parents and grandparents; and, in some cases, study abroad in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, and North America. Drawing on participant observation among, interviews with, and resurveys of the same people surveyed in 1999, she is now examining how the
parenting, gender socialization, educational experiences, academic achievement, and academic interests they had as adolescents shape their decisions about work, transnational migration, childbearing, parenting, health habits, and elder care now that they are young adults.

The NSF's Cultural Anthropology Program supports basic scientific research about the causes, consequences, and complexities of human social and cultural variability. The program encourages innovative research that contributes to building spatially and temporally specific theory that extends understanding beyond individual case studies.