Bowling Green State University recently was awarded three grants for sociology research totaling nearly
$2 million.  
According to a release, the largest grant is $1.1 million from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National
Institute of Child Health and Human Development/National Institutes of Health for the support of the
Center for Family and Demographic Research.
The center was formed on BGSU’s campus in 2000, and has been continuously funded by NICHD since 2002.
Fewer than 25 universities are funded for a population research center in the country.
The other two grants are for the studies “Pathways Linking Parental Incarceration and Child Well-being”
for $500,000, funded by the National Institute of Justice; and for the “Social Influences on the
Long-term Cessation of Violence” for $384,000, funded by the National Science Foundation.
The grants were written by Wendy D. Manning, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology; Peggy C.
Giordano, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology; and Monica A. Longmore, Professor of Sociology.
The three professors have been working together on research at the University since the late 1990s.  

“We are happy to have support for the Center for Family and Demographic Research,” said Manning, who is
the director of the CFDR and the principal investigator on the NIH grant, in the release. “The Center
grant is an infrastructure grant that provides work space, security, conference rooms and skilled staff
to support research at Bowling Green on health and well-being of children, youth and families.”
Since its inception in 2000, research at the Center has aligned with the Population Dynamics Branch
scientific mission with a focus on family demography, fertility and reproductive health, and social
contexts and well-being. The CFDR has yielded research on issues in demography including new work on
same-sex couples, family trajectories of reproductive health, and the role of the criminal justice
system in families and well-being.  
The grants for the Pathways and Cessation of Violence projects will allow the researchers to expand their
longitudinal studies. Getting this kind of grant “is something we’re all really proud of,” Longmore said
in the release, noting that it places BGSU among elite universities.
Not only has the Center provided important demography data, but BGSU students have benefited from
research training.  
“The students have been involved in the actual data collection,” Giordano said in the release. “In social
science, a lot of times people are moving to using existing data sets, so they don’t actually learn
vital skills, how you actually have to go out and find people and how you construct questionnaires and
manage the data once you complete the interviews. So, our students get a really good experience in data
collection and analysis.”