by Michelle Coppedge

This year, eight graduate students received the Graduate School's Centennial Awards for research that contributes to North Carolina. Here are snapshots of their work.

transitions

"In exploring North Carolina's sweeping post-World War II transformation, we used oral history interviews to shed light on parts of this story that were little understood," says Joe Mosnier, a history doctoral student. He and colleagues Angela Hornsby, a doctoral candidate in history, and Katie Otis, a history doctoral student, worked on the larger Southern Oral History Program project, "Listening for a Change: North Carolina Communities in Transition." (See Endeavors, Winter 2002, United by Stories.)

Right: Graduate students (left to right) Joe Mosnier, Katie Otis, Angela Hornsby, and Mahyar Mofidi. Photo by Jason Smith; click to enlarge.

By interviewing leaders of furniture, textiles, and other declining industries along with executives from "new economy" sectors such as banking and pharmaceutics, Mosnier investigated structural changes in North Carolina's economy, as well as the uneven growth that has left some behind. "It was poignant to talk with people whose industries have waned, such as textiles — and fascinating to draw these folks out on the related hows and whys," Mosnier says.

Hornsby documented effects of Latino immigration on the historically African American community of northeast central Durham. In interviews with residents, she heard stories of difficulties as well as efforts to reach out. "The project became a nuanced investigation into how Latino immigration was transforming the state's neighborhoods," Hornsby says. "The tensions of bridging difference while staying anchored to their own cultural identity challenge African Americans and Latinos alike."

Otis studied how the devastating flooding following 1999's Hurricane Floyd affected residents of eastern North Carolina. She examined relief efforts and spoke with elderly survivors. "How does a disaster like this fit into a seventy-, eighty-year-old life?" Otis asks. "Older folks have experienced lots of difficulties throughout their lives — the Depression, war, the death of a spouse. They are stronger than you would expect, but at the same time, their health is delicate."

welfare reform

Susan Yackee, who recently received her doctorate in political science, and Christine Kelleher, a political science doctoral candidate, studied welfare reform. "Our project was motivated by a lack of information concerning welfare policy changes in North Carolina after the 1996 federal legislation moved to states," Yackee says. She and Kelleher wondered how counties responded when welfare-related policymaking power devolved to them.

The pair gathered survey data from 425 county officials, collected case-study reports from twenty-three counties, and tracked welfare spending in all 100 counties. "County governments played a significant role in implementing welfare reform policies and programs across the state," Kelleher says. She and Yackee discovered that the decentralization of power had shifted county officials' responsibilities, altered perceptions of county-state relationships, and encouraged county programming efforts to assist the poor. (See Endeavors, Spring 2002, How Is Work First Working?)

hogs and health

Rachel Avery, an epidemiology doctoral student, studied the health effects of exposure to airborne emissions from industrial hog farms. "This was work initiated by citizen complaints," Avery says. Hypothesizing that the stress associated with repeated exposure to noxious odors from industrial hog operations may affect people's immune systems, Avery studied fifteen non-smoking adults who live within one and a half miles of such operations. Participants reported odor intensity and provided saliva samples twice daily over a two-week period.

Avery found that exposure to the bad odors did appear to suppress levels of salivary secretory immunoglobulin A, the body's first defense against inhaled or ingested pathogens. These results suggest that something physiological is going on. "People aren't just reporting symptoms," Avery says. "It's psychologically mediated, in that we're talking about stressors, but the exposure appears to have a physiological effect as well."

access to dental care

Mahyar Mofidi, a doctoral student in health behavior and health education, explored the struggles of low-income families to access dental care in North Carolina. A dentist who previously practiced in an underserved community, Mofidi wanted his research to address the disparity he had witnessed firsthand. Through eleven focus groups with seventy-seven caregivers of Medicaid-insured children, Mofidi learned that obstacles such as locating a provider, arranging transportation, and encountering judgmental attitudes from dental staff often prevented caregivers from meeting their children's dental needs.

Before Mofidi's project, no research had been done on caregivers' perspectives of dental care. "These stories validated a lot of what we knew was true," Mofidi says. "Parents and other caregivers had to negotiate multiple barriers, and once they were in the dental care setting they perceived the care they were getting as substandard."

fish migration

Bradley Lamphere, a doctoral student in ecology, studied fish immigration. "I'm essentially doing fish psychology, trying to figure out why fish move," Lamphere says. Ecology population models simulate birth and death rates well but tend to underestimate immigration into and out of populations. "Individual movement has a big impact on population sizes, but it's poorly understood in a number of species," Lamphere says.

Lamphere used a fish called the mottled sculpin as a bioindicator — a representative species known to be sensitive to a habitat's threats — for North Carolina's coldwater streams, a "diversity hot spot" threatened by development. For two years he did mark-and-recapture surveys of populations in Nantahala River tributaries, discovering that fish moved up to six times farther than previous studies had shown. Lamphere will study movement over even greater distances by combining these results with DNA data.

research for North Carolina

Each project directly benefits North Carolina. Otis organized a public forum, including documentary photography and flood survivors' voices, to be held in October in Grifton, North Carolina. Hornsby and Mosnier presented curricular materials based on their work to public school history educators at a statewide seminar, and Hornsby organized a neighborhood cultural event in northeast central Durham. Yackee and Kelleher met with state officials to share their welfare reform findings and distributed a book they compiled to all 100 counties. Avery is confident that her research on the health effects of hog operations will influence policy at local, state, and federal levels, as similar research has done recently. Lamphere's work with sculpin populations also has applications to other species' long-range movements, thereby enhancing state conservation efforts. And Mofidi, who hopes his findings will inform state Medicaid policy, intends to practice dentistry at a local health center for low-income families — while he finishes his dissertation.

Michelle Coppedge is editorial assistant for Endeavors magazine.