The Economic Opportunity and Community Lab at VCU (Principal Investigator: Victor Chen) is currently working on two projects, The Structural and Cultural Context of Deaths of Despair and The Mark of Segregation: Redlining’s Impact on the Relationship Between Racial Diversity and Social Capital.
The Structural and Cultural Context of Deaths of Despair: A Qualitative Study of Urban and Rural Joblessness and Precarity. This study, funded by the Russell Sage Foundation, looks at the special vulnerability that less educated Americans have to falling into downward spirals of financial, social, and psychological breakdown due to a lack of personal resources as well as family support. Their difficulties in finding secure and well-paid employment, maintaining healthy relationships, and avoiding dangers in their environment can build upon one another, pushing them toward harmful behaviors like drug use at key pivot points in their lives. These self-reinforcing risks may help explain why Americans without college degrees experience dramatically higher rates of opioid-related overdoses and other so-called deaths of despair as well as a host of poor health outcomes.
We are currently recruiting interviewees for face-to-face interviews (see details in the flyer).
The Mark of Segregation: Redlining’s Impact on the Relationship Between Racial Diversity and Social Capital. This research, funded by a state-sponsored 4-VA grant, examines the degree to which racial and ethnic diversity at the county/neighborhood level influences various dimensions of social capital as well as prosocial behaviors like volunteering and event organizing. It also explores how historically rooted racial inequalities (captured in redlining and urban renewal data) moderate the relationship between contemporary levels of ethnic heterogeneity and social capital.
Contact Victor Chen with any inquiries about these research projects.
Victor Tan Chen 