13 September 2010 12:00AM
Senior Suanna Oh investigates the roles of hereditary and environmental influence on child development. The Davies Fellowship allowed her to have a different kind of research experience this summer. In her own words, Oh explains her project and experience:
I spent the first half of my summer at Duke, doing research as a Davies Fellow. I started on my research in the second semester of my junior year, taking a class on labor economics with Professor McElroy. I became interested in the nature vs. nurture debate, investigating the roles of hereditary and environmental influence on children’s development.
I started exploring the topic with another classmate from the same class, and we came across a dataset collected by Bruce Sacerdote, a professor at Dartmouth College. Sacerdote had surveyed over a thousand families who adopted a child through Holt International Children's Services program during 1970-1980.
Through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, we were able to access the complete data set, which comprised approximately 2800 Korean American adoptees who are aged 26-36 at the time of the survey in 2006, as well as their biological and adopted siblings. Although Sacerdote had already done thorough analyses with the data set, we thought the uniqueness of the data set would allow us to come up with other interesting questions that could contribute to the existing research.
Such freedom from pressure let me approach my research in a quite different way. Instead of focusing on quickly grasping the main points of a paper before moving onto the next one, I could re-read the same paper multiple times in order to completely understand the assumptions and implications of each model presented in the paper. I had enough time to browse through other papers that were tangentially related to my paper, which I could not afford to do during the busy school semester.
My professor encouraged me to take advantage of the abundance of my time to comprehend the bigger picture that leads to my research questions, and also to focus on the details of the previous models, which would help me develop my own model. Thus, I was able to use much of my time to actively “think,” expanding my research with newly formulated questions. Now my research also investigates the impact of having a large sibling size on children’s development, both for biological and adopted children.
- By Suanna Oh, Davies Fellow 2010
Learn more about undergraduate research opportunities including the Davies Fellowship.
Economics Department