Does obesity play a role in employment disability? Can certain neighborhood designs influence residents' physical activity? Does level of education relate to whether people will start or quit smoking? Can daily telephone interviews capture how busy working parents cope with family meals?

These are questions now being addressed by researchers in the New York State College of Human Ecology at Cornell University with Innovative Research Program Awards from the Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center at Cornell. The awards, each up to $10,000, aim to help researchers pursue collaborative, multidisciplinary research on studies that affect quality of life and families. The goal also is to enhance the likelihood that researchers will obtain funding outside of Cornell for related projects.

To study the role of obesity in job disability, Richard Burkhauser and John Cawley, professors of policy analysis and management (PAM), will use the federally sponsored Panel Study of Income Dynamics database of more than 7,000 families.

"During the 1980s and 1990s, the number of U.S. working-age adults receiving income from the Social Security Disability Insurance program rose by 60 percent and the percentage of U.S. adults who were clinically obese doubled," notes Burkhauser. The researchers seek to determine whether obesity causes some employment disability and if so, how and whether the relationship between obesity and employment disability varies with age, gender and race or ethnicity.

To assess whether neighborhood design can influence residents' physical activity, Nancy Wells, assistant professor of design and environmental analysis, will follow a group of about 120 low-income, mostly black, families before and after they relocate to either a pedestrian-oriented neighborhood or to a car-oriented suburban community.

"Certain neighborhood features, such as sidewalks, more front porches and central community spaces, are being heralded as mechanisms to increase levels of physical activity," says Wells. "Despite such claims, however, there has been very little research to systematically assess the impact of neighborhood design on physical activity."Four PAM researchers – Rosemary Avery, Donald Kenkel, Dean Lillard and Alan Mathios -- are collaborating to assess whether levels of education play a role in consumers' decision to start or quit smoking. "For example, we seek to understand whether schooling helps consumers respond to new information about the health consequences of behaviors, such as smoking," says Avery.

The researchers also will look at how health information flows to consumers with different levels of schooling and how the information might influence the onset or cessation of smoking. This portion of the research will use an archive of print advertising that includes data from about 12,000 issues of more than two dozen magazine titles from 1985 to 2002.

Earlier this year, Cornell nutrition researchers reported on the ways that working parents, especially those with low-paying jobs and inflexible hours, struggle with feeding their families well. Building on this work, Carol Devine and Carole Bisogni, professors of nutritional sciences, and Elaine Wethington, professor of human development, will test the usefulness of daily telephone interviews as a way of learning how working parents cope with daily stressors at work and at home, and how these stressors spill over into family food choices. They seek to further study the relationship between work and family and the diets of low- and moderate-income parents.

"We seek to better understand the nutritional implications of societal trends in parents' work and family roles, and how working parents make food choices for their families despite demanding work and family roles," says Devine.

The Bronfenbrenner Life Course Center fosters collaborative research, outreach and educational efforts dedicated to understanding the forces and experiences that shape human development throughout all stages of the life course.