Using Schools to Improve Child Health, Why Black Families Choose to Homeschool Their Kids, and What Drives Inequity for People with Disabilities

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

There's a different perspective on how to conduct research in applied research than the one you would find in academia. When you step out of academia and start looking at it from a practitioner's point of view, you start realizing, you know, like, we care about outreach. We care about how this is going. We care about implementation. When you start feeling you can put together a story that -- and this is a story that you can communicate and that this is something that eventually will change lives, then when you realize, well, this work that I've done can -- even though, you know, it may have its flaws, like, I understand that I can talk to with many people who have, like, real levers of power to help improve life based on the information that I produce.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

I'm J.B. Wogan from Mathematica, and welcome back to On the Evidence. Every year, early career scholars join Mathematica in the summertime to work on independent research related to improving public well-being. The deadline to submit applications for this year's Summer Fellowship Program is February 29. As doctoral students consider submitting an application, we're making available a recent interview with last year's summer fellows who are Carla Wellborn, Laurin Bixby, and Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio. Carla is a PhD student at Vanderbilt University in Leadership and Policy Studies. Laurin is a PhD student at the Sociology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Laurin is also pursuing a master's degree in Statistics and Data Science at UPenn. And Luis is a PhD student in Economics at Vanderbilt University. During our interview, we spoke about the focus of their policy research, what's at stake in the questions they're investigating, why they're interested in applied research, and what they found both difficult and rewarding about applied public policy research. A full transcript of the episode is available in our show notes, and on a blog at mathematica.org/OnTheEvidence. I hope you find our conversation useful.

Thanks so much for being available to talk with me today. And I'm sure that students who are -- or doctoral students who are considering the Summer Fellowship for 2024 will very much appreciate hearing about your experiences and learning a little bit more about a past cohort who's gone through the summer fellowship. And I think also people who listen to the podcasts are always interested in what the next generation of public policy researchers are interested in and what motivates them. So I hope we get a chance to talk a little bit about that today. I wanted to start by talking about what is the focus of your respective research and how each of you became interested in that topic. And, Luis, if you don't mind, let's start with you. What's the focus of your research, and how did you become interested in that topic?

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

Yeah. So I do research in the intersection between development economics and economics of education. In particular, the kinds of questions that I want to answer relate to how people living in low and middle income countries decide whether and where to go to school. So I think my interest in this question is related to a little bit my own experience, growing up in a middle income country when we realize, like, how many -- how people have, like, many difficulties to go to school, how the experience is very different for people who are in different parts of the socioeconomic -- with very different socioeconomic backgrounds. So to me learning, you know, why are some people who are trying to participate in society that want to improve themselves, why is it that they just can't reach one of the most important, like, ladders for social mobility, which is education. So trying to understand why some people cannot have access to these education and, in particular, how policy can help overcome those obstacles.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

So where did you grow up? You mentioned you came from a --

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

Yeah. I grew up in Colombia. So, you know, and had the experience of going to school where you see, like, there's lots of variation there. So some places you see, like, very destitute schools where there's one single teacher who's doing everything. But then you also see the private schools where -- with teachers who are educated in the US and where parents pay multiple times the minimum wage to send their kids to school. So understanding those differences was something that piqued my interest.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

And you mentioned that there are certain challenges you're interested in understanding about what maybe prevents someone from -- from student achievement or pursuing school at all. Were there certain things you observed in your own life back in Colombia?

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

Yeah. So I think it has to do lots of things related to poverty, like access to education and no knowledge of the opportunities that exist, the perception of how valuable education is. So I think it's a matter of a combination of factors that come into play there.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Okay. Great. Well, hope we can dig a little bit more into that and what the substance of your research while you were here at Mathematica and in your dissertation or how it relates to that overall topic. Laurin, I'd like to turn to you now. Tell us a little bit about the focus of your research and how you became interested in it.

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Sure. So I'm interested in sort of the intersection of disability and health policy, trying to identify and address really the social and structural barriers to health and economic well-being among people with disabilities. And so, for my dissertation and some of the work that I did as a summer fellow at Mathematica, I was focused on the state-level patterns of unemployment, inequities by disability and considering some of the state policy drivers of these patterns, so looking at Medicaid or long-term services and supports policies. And my interest in this kind of area of work really does, as well, come from my own personal experiences. 

Growing up, I moved around and lived in several different states and kind of got to see what it means to live in rural areas, as well as urban areas in the Southeast and the Northeast, further out West in Oklahoma. And, as a disabled person, someone with kind of more complex healthcare needs, I got quite familiar, I guess, with the healthcare and long-term care services and support systems across different states and kind of realized how terribly unequal these systems are across states. And so, for example, when I lived in Oklahoma, I might wait eight months for a service that I could get probably the next day here in Philadelphia. And so access to care and quality of care just kind of shocked me how much it can depend on where someone lives in. And so I'm kind of motivated to understand these processes so that where someone lives doesn't necessarily kind of influence their access to resources and that everyone has access to high-quality healthcare or whatever they need to live their lives to their fullest potential.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

You anticipated my follow-up. I was going to ask if there was -- I wasn't going to ask you to shame any states but if there was a certain place in the country that you thought was doing it better than others. Is Philadelphia the best place you've lived in terms of healthcare access and access for people with disabilities? Or is there another place that you would call out?

[ Laurin Bixby ]

I would say Philadelphia has been the best in my experience. It's the only large city that I've lived in. And so I think that probably has something to do with it. There's just more supports in place. There's better services in terms of centers for independent living. The healthcare system is -- so not only in proximity accessible, more accessible but also it has a wider variety of services and more physicians practicing across specialties in ways that it's definitely been better in my own experience, at least.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Well, I'm glad. I'm glad you've ended up in a good place. Carla, I want to turn to you. Tell us a little bit about your focus of research and what brought you to that topic.

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Yeah. So, broadly, I'm really interested in social policy and the relationship between social policy and, like, agency in education but particularly thinking about the agency of communities and families. So my dissertation is kind of a deep dive into one particular groups of Black families who homeschool and trying to understand what's the sociopolitical context within which they make that decision but then also trying to understand -- so it's mixed methods, so that's more quantitative, but also using qualitative methods to try to understand how do they conceptualize well-being? And how do they think about what education should look like that's towards the well-being of their children. 

And so I use more ethnographic data and interview data to try to explore that among a specific subset of families. I think it's interesting, when I came to the PhD program, I was a lot more interested in studying cross-sector collaborations in community schools, particularly as a way to kind of build the capacity of school districts that serve Black and brown children and trying to see if that's a creative way to be able to flow more resources into schools that are a little more underresourced. However, I think I got curious about, okay. Well, as we're reimagining what these schools look like, what do Black parents want? Like, what do these parents of these children want schools to look like? And when we think historically about common schools, they are not necessarily a group that's ever been asked often what they want schools to look like and had a powerful voice in the creation of schools. 

And so that kind of led me down this path towards homeschooling. I was personally homeschooled, so it's not a super foreign topic to me. But I thought, okay. Well, this is actually a subset of parents who's creating what they think school should look like. And so they could be a really interesting group of people to explore. What do you do when you take control over your own child's schooling? What does that look like, and what can we learn from those folks? So this summer I did a lot of work on building out kind of the first phase of the dissertation, which is more quantitative and looking at the admin data and then also starting the ethnographic portion and then move into the interview study a little bit later.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Well, as we talked about on our planning call, you definitely picked a topic that has become, you know, hot. It's maybe, you know, fast, fast growing or maybe the fastest growing, did you say, fastest growing type of schooling; is that -- is that correct?

[ Carla Wellborn ]

According to The Washington Post, it is the fastest growing type of schooling in the US today.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Yeah. So certainly owing in part to the pandemic and schooling choices during the pandemic, but you were ahead of the curve and were interested in this before -- before it became part of the Zeitgeist. So kudos to you for having a -- having some forecasting ability there. So, in past years, I've asked summer fellows to talk a little bit about their research findings. But what I've learned is that a lot of times, they're not quite there yet. They haven't defended their dissertation or haven't published the findings in a peer-reviewed journal yet. 

So, rather than put you on the spot and have you discussed findings that aren't finalized, what I was thinking is perhaps you could talk a little bit about what's at stake with the questions you're investigating in your dissertation and that you were investigating during your summer fellowship with Mathematica. And what I mean in terms of what's at stake, I'm really thinking about how might your findings inform future policy decisions in connection with Mathematica's mission of improving public well-being, you know, how might this not just inform policy decisions but actually affect people's well-being down the line? And we went with Carla last time to start, so let's go with Laurin this time, if you don't mind kicking us off at this question.

[ Laurin Bixby ]

No. I do have some preliminary findings. I am hoping to defend my dissertation this spring, so hopefully they're close to final. But I have found that there's really tremendous variation across states in terms of unemployment disparities between disabled and nondisabled people but that there's really larger variation among people with disabilities. And so these gaps are really kind of driven by the way that state contacts -- state contexts interact with the outcomes of people with disabilities. 

And so I think these findings, before even looking at state policies, are important in terms of understanding that it's not just the kind of inevitable consequence of disability that disabled people experience socioeconomic disadvantage but that there's something going on, in this case at the state level, such as state policy contexts that might be playing a role in patterning and producing these inequities that we observe. And so I think that then when I look to the state policy drivers, I'm finding that states that have more generous Medicaid policies that eliminate administrative burdens, that have more generous eligibility criteria so that more people have access to Medicaid coverage, as well as states that have designated a larger percentage of their long-term services and supports budgets towards home- and community-based services rather than institutional services are really showing that they have smaller disparities in unemployment between people with and without disabilities. 

And so I think in terms of the policy implications thinking about policies that really prioritize home and community living for people with disabilities that kind of expand access and don't require people to kind of be trapped into these low asset limits that force people to -- into poverty or to sacrifice employment opportunities are going to be important, as well as thinking about how to improve and strengthen the home- and community-based services that do exist. So how can we address -- there's currently a major workforce crisis of not enough care workers to be providing these services. And also thinking about policies that might give disabled people more autonomy and choice over who's providing their services and perhaps paying family members, for example, or friends that they have chosen. And we're going to be making some important public policy implications that I'm finding and just in general kind of more equitable and consistent policies across states so that there is not this relationship between the state someone lives in and their access to employment opportunities and other resources.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Do you think the solution might be some sort of a federal baseline in terms of the generosity of a safety net so that you aren't so dependent on which state you live in? Or are you thinking that it's more a matter of every state kind of figuring out a way to sort of meet that baseline in their own way based on their own political and policy context?

[ Laurin Bixby ]

I think that we're going to need some sort of federal kind of policy lever at play to create that baseline. I think given what we know about the hyperpolarization of states right now and how that has really increased in recent years, that I think that federal kind of action would likely be helpful for trying to kind of create that consistency across states. And then working with state Medicaid agencies, as well as LTSS providers, to try to also kind of ensure that it's not just up to states alone because, as we've seen, it's sort of resulted in these vast inequalities at this point.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

I'm sorry. That acronym, LTSS. Long-term --

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Sorry. Long-term services and supports.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Long-Term services and supports. Okay. All right. Great. I try to catch the acronyms when I can. All right. Luis, let me -- let me switch to you. Talk a little bit about what's at stake with the questions you're investigating and how your findings might inform future policy decisions.

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

Yeah. Sure. So I think that I -- I want to put a little more context in the questions I investigating. So the question I was looking at during my time at Mathematica has to do with what is the effect of providing safe drinking water at schools on student outcomes. So this is important because, even though there is this sustainable development goal from the United Nations, that there has to be universal access to safe drinking water by 2030, there are still 30% of schools worldwide which enroll more than 500 million children which don't have access to water. And water is essential for maintaining a healthy learning environment. 

And this is part of a broader strategy that has been commonplace in many developing settings, which is using schools as a medium to deliver interventions that are improving a child's health, the idea being that, because there's a broader educational infrastructure that is set in place than health infrastructure, so we can use the resources that are already in place to help children get these very important medications or helping them be better -- better fed and avoid diseases. So water is a key element in that strategy. And an interesting way is that, in the particular intervention that I'm exploring is doing this in a very labor intensive way, which is built -- by building a miniature water treatment facility at school, very similar to what you would find in a municipal water -- water utility. 

And my findings suggest that here there's -- this is an intervention that is coming to schools that vary a lot in terms of how well-prepared they are to deal with a piece of infrastructure that is fairly sophisticated, that requires continuous maintenance, that requires someone to be taking care of it. So this variation informs how effective these type of interventions at school can be because they -- all these interventions, like, there's the oldest benefits that, yeah, going to school increases take-up. Going to school reduces cost of implementation. But then there is real concern, because are we asking schools to do too much? 

So I think that my -- with my question, what I want to sort of like highlight is that there is this trade-off between the convenience of using schools but also, like, the cost that this could have in terms of unintended consequences for the delivery of education, which is, as we know, the primary mission of schools.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

That's super fascinating. 

Not to go too far off on a tangent, but I -- maybe 13 years ago, I was with my dad, who was -- he's now retired, but he was a physician. And he was on a volunteer medical mission. And back then my Spanish was much stronger than it is today. I'm very out of practice. But I was helping translate. And we were in Honduras in a rural area in the Santa Barbara region, and they didn't have a clean -- they didn't have clean drinking water. And it was really fascinating to see, like, there was -- it was a manifestation of economic inequality because you had the wealthier residents, they were avoiding some of issues of like dysentery and urinary tract infections because they were buying all kinds of sodas and sugary drinks, like bottled drinks. But then they had bad -- their teeth were rotting from all the sugar. And after many years of this mission coming every summer to treat the symptoms from this problem, they eventually figured out that would help a lot is if they just -- the Rotary Club helped raise money to build a face -- sorry, a safe drinking facility so that there was the actual, like, municipal infrastructure that could provide free safe drinking water to everyone. 

I can't tell you -- I don't know if there was ever any kind of evaluation like the one that you're conducting to say what the impacts were, but they thought that it would have kind of an equalizing effect and would be really beneficial from public -- a public health perspective. It's interesting to hear about how the -- in this case, it sounds like you're talking about potential educational benefits, as well as public health benefits from having that safe drinking water provided by the schools, even though there would be this trade-offs of logistically trying to get them to maintain and manage that infrastructure.

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

And it's fascinating because it sort of acknowledges the role of schools in different communities, that schools in these communities tend to serve as hubs. So the community goes to school, goes to school to do things like you're going to do community meetings. We're going to do events. So you're recognizing that schools do much more than just providing education. And here, like, the role of the school is that it solves this collective action problem where, you know, it's like you're going to have this piece of infrastructure that you have to maintain. Who -- who is -- who in these communities has at least some training to deal with this complex infrastructure? Usually the answer is the teacher. So understanding, you know, like how, how schools end up being much more relevant to outcomes that are normally not thought of as education-related, I think it's fascinating.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Yeah. We talk a lot about social determinants of health here at Mathematica. I noticed there's a little bit of, like, it's bidirectional where people in the human services side are recognizing how if -- you know, if the health -- health can benefit things like educational outcomes. But then, on the health side, our health researchers are recognizing that, if the rest of somebody's life is stable, they might -- their health might be better. So, like, if they're housed or if they have better access to food, then their health would be better. It's interesting how, you know, each side is sort of noticing the mutual benefits of those other aspects of our lives. Carla, you've been waiting patiently. I want to hear a little bit about your research. So tell us a little bit what's at stake with the questions that you're investigating and how they might inform policy decisions and people's well-being in the future.

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Yeah. Absolutely. 

So I think, you know, when we imagine who's homeschooling, like, if you were to just picture a typical homeschooler in your mind, most of us imagine a White family, middle income, rural, may be doing it for religious reasons. And, you know, that imagination is informed by data, that that is the typical homeschooler in the United States. But I think what is kind of important to me about this work and particularly why I take a critical perspective is that, when we start building policy that is related to homeschooling, there's so much increased attention to it, like you mentioned earlier, that that will likely lead to some type of a policy response. 

I was watching the John Oliver show, and he was asking, Who are these kids? And what are they doing? And are they being abused? You know, and there's just -- these are valid questions sometimes. Like, no one really knows a lot about homeschooling. It's a very private group of people, and I think of -- maybe for good reason. But when there's so much attention and there's so many students that are moving into this particular type of education, a fail -- like a problem or trap we could fall into very easily is building out policy or infrastructure related to homeschooling that focuses just on what you would imagine to be the typical homeschooler. And critical theory kind of guides us to think very explicitly and carefully about how things affect folks that exist on the margins. 

I think Laurin has talked about this a little bit, even with her work but, like, thinking about people and how policy affects not just the folks who are the average but other people. And so, when I look at Black families who are homeschooling, I think a big fear is that any policy that's written related to homeschooling could be so focused on people who look very -- nothing like them, live in communities nothing like theirs. And so there's a real possibility for harm if we don't think carefully about the implications of anything that we build out for other -- for people who are not the majority of the homeschooling population. 

And then I think it's also important to note that everything that I've read so far about folks who have been starting to homeschool kind of post-COVID-19 pandemic, it's a very diverse demographic of people that have just recently joined that community. 

And so it's important for us to be thinking a lot about folks that sit on the margins. And Black families who homeschool have been a very small percentage of the homeschooling population. But, in 2020, the household poll survey shows us that they jumped from 3.3% of Black households with school-aged children who are homeschooling to 16.1%. And so there's been a big jump. And so they're an important population to be thinking about as we -- as we take a policy perspective to what homeschooling should look like at the state level. 

But then I also think -- and I know you mentioned that I did decide to study homeschooling a little bit before I knew it was going to get this crazy in the media. But there have been people who have been doing a lot of work studying Black homeschooling over the past few years. And I have to mention Cheryl Fields-Smith, who's at University of Georgia at Athens, who's written the bulk of the canon related to Black families who homeschool. And I think another important implication of this work that she's starting to do, as she kind of reflects on the body of work that she's written and that I'm trying to build upon, is this idea that Black families who homeschool could be an important indication to school districts that serve Black children on what Black parents are hoping schooling could look like. And, you know, it's not a one-to-one comparison. There's so much you can do in homeschooling that you can't do in traditional schools and vice versa. But I think she's working on a book that's looking at kind of the implications of her research on practice and traditional schools. And I do think that, as we think about Black parents and what they're hoping schooling should look like, my goal is that this work would also translate to school districts and practitioners as ways to maybe probe or explore a little bit deeper what the parents and families in their communities are hoping schools could look like and kind of push our imagination a little bit further to what's possible in Black education.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Is there -- sorry. Maybe -- I think you said it, but I apologize if you did hint at this. But is there any sense yet from the evidence as to why Black families in particular are choosing homeschooling?

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Yes. So, of the literature that exists, they suggest that it is the desire to resist or leave or protect their children from perceived racial harm in schools. The work that I'm doing, the qualitative work certainly supports that. And part of the quantitative work is trying to understand what that looks like, based on the kind of factors that exist in their communities. But there seems to be -- that seems to be driven by a couple of different things: discipline practices, biased, either sped referral or inability to get into more advanced courses in their schools or just experiencing racial harm, especially if they're racially isolated in their school district.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

And did you say sped referral? Is that special ed?

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Special education. So there is a big issue of Black children being perceived as needing special education at a higher rate than their peers of other races. But that has come up as a major theme in the literature that does exist for Black families who are choosing to homeschool. They pull their kid out because they felt like they were going to be labeled, placed in lower track classes, and kept there for the rest of their schooling experience. And so they thought the only opportunity to give them a different type of experience was to pull them out. And then I'm also finding in my own work that there's just a different understanding of special needs with the parents compared to what we might as educators be thinking about. And so some of the parents are saying, well, yeah. You might say that my child has an attention issue. But I think that's normal for a seven-year-old to have an attention issue. And so they're dealing with it a little bit differently and didn't feel comfortable with the ways that they felt the school district wanted to handle it.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

One issue that we've featured a couple of times on the podcast is the growing interest in diversification of the teacher pipeline and making sure that the teachers come from a similar lived experience and demographic background as the students they're teaching. And I know there's a concern that there aren't enough Black teachers, enough Black male teachers in the public school system. Seems like homeschooling would sort of solve that problem. If your parents -- if you're Black and your parents are Black, that sort of guarantees that your teachers are going to be Black. I don't know if that's the main reason, but that might be another consideration.

[ Carla Wellborn ]

I think one thing that I found in ethnographic work that I'm doing is it is truly a family affair, the schooling of these children. Like, it's not just the parents. It's a grandparent who does morning schooling, the parents who do afternoon homework, the uncles that come in and do other classes and aunts and best friends. And, I mean, it is truly a community effort to educate the kids. So I think you're right about that, that it is. And it's interesting because the -- even in the midst of maybe living in a racially isolated community, I'm not sure the kids know that because of how much they're exposed to throughout the entire day to their families.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Luis, I'm going to turn to you now. 

Part of becoming a summer fellow at Mathematica means engaging in applied public policy research. So I'm curious what appealed to you about the fellowship and specifically about conducting applied research.

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

So I would say that what I was attracted to was that there's a different perspective on how to conduct research in applied research than the one you would find in academia. So I think that there is a lot of very similar ways in which people are thinking about the same questions. But I think that, when you step out of academia and start looking at it from a practitioner's point of view, you start realizing, you know, like, we care about outreach. We care about how this is going -- we care about implementation. 

There is a number of questions that I feel like are sort of less explored in academia that are more relevant for the -- for the people who work on policy on their day-to-day basis. So learning about that, which I think was a very -- was one of the things that attracted me towards pursuing the fellowship. And also the fact that at least in economics, I feel like we still need to have like a better conversation with other social sciences. And that is something that, in Mathematica, I found. I think that there's like these complementarities between --between teams, people who are doing more quantitative research but people who are also more on the qualitative side so, you know, understanding their different methods and how they reach the similar question. It's been interesting. 

And, you know, when -- when we talked about -- when I talked about this with the experts at the International Research Unit, the consensus was, you know, we are -- we are better together. So we -- our experiences as quantitative researchers can be very well-complemented by -- by work that is done a little more qualitative, learning about the experiences of people. So I think that trying to incorporate that in some way in my research was sort of like a little motivation for me to go -- to go into the fellowship.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Awesome. Yeah. It sometimes feels like Mathematica is itself like a little university in terms of it's got all of these different disciplines that represented so many different experts across the social sciences. And it is nice to be able to see those, like the cross-pollination of ideas and expertise come to fruition in a research project.

Carla, let me turn to you now. So what appeals to you about applied policy research? And why did you want to give it a try here for the summer fellowship?

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Yeah. I came from the world of practice. So I was a teacher for several years, then moved into nonprofit. And that was focused on kind of building relationships between school districts and businesses for workforce prep and mentoring. And so I was motivated to get the PhD mostly because, in every area of my practice, I felt like there was kind of a ceiling to the impact that I could have because of these larger forces that I didn't really know how to name that I felt like were impacting my students, kind of regardless of how much effort I put into the classroom or how much effort we put into our programming. And so I just wanted to be able to name them, understand them, and then -- and then be able to do evaluations or studies that I thought would have like a real-life impact on those kids and families. 

And so, yeah. I would say that I have always been very drawn to the more applied aspects of this work because I am motivated by seeing the impact of the work. And I think that Mathematica's really interesting because you have an infrastructure that's already in place to be able to do that work very quickly and to work not only kind of alongside or with people who are doing practice or policy work but that you can kind of build on each other's strengths in that way and do work that's meaningful, not just for a strong research design but also mean something practically for policy workers and for practitioners on the ground. And so I've always been really interested in that. 

My first year at Vanderbilt, I worked with a research practice partnership that was focused on doing kind of iterative improvement work with a school district in Florida. And that was a great experience right off the gate, like, seeing how what we're learning in our courses to do kind of applied research continues to help us, like, think through how to work with folks who are on the ground, doing things with the students, with leadership, with families, and the community and that kind of are different strengths that we're bringing to the table, have a real-life impact on students and families. And that's just kind of been important to me throughout.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Yeah. It does seem like one of the things that's exciting about working in a place like Mathematica -- and, obviously, we're not the only ones doing applied public policy research. But when the questions we're trying to answer are coming from government partners and you know that they're going to be -- like, the -- that they're answering questions that they've asked, so they're more likely to be informing actions down the road. That seems to be -- I think it's interesting. It seems like, when I talk to the researchers who work here at Mathematica, that they find that more meaningful and exciting. So I'm glad, glad to hear that you've enjoyed that as well. 

Laurin, don't believe we've heard from you yet. Could you talk a little bit about what appealed to you about applied public policy research and the summer fellowship at Mathematica.

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Of course. So I think that my interest in applied public policy research have developed as I'm going through my doctoral program. And sociologists, I think, have a lot of tools to help understand the world. But, often, policy is not our strong suit. And I was part of a Health Policy Research Scholars Fellowship that kind of was a -- my first exposure, I guess, into more of -- into interdisciplinary work and really focusing on how to kind of translate research into action and inform policies that promote health equity. And so through that I kind of came, I think, across Mathematica and started learning through the Center for Studying Disability Policies, like, newsletter at Mathematica. And that made me really excited about kind of bringing disability into the not only research but also policy discussions and bringing, as others have mentioned, the qualitative and quantitative approaches together and bringing everyone's different expertise together to create more evidence-based solutions. And I just think it creates better research when we are working together. And so I -- and I definitely found that to be the case during the summer fellowship. I met so many incredible people who are not only just astoundingly brilliant people in what they do and experts in Medicaid or long-term services and sports policies but also just so passionate about engaging in applied public policy research in a way that definitely got me excited.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

What was the name of that fellowship you just -- you were referencing the beginning?

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Health Policy Research Scholars. It's a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation program for underrepresented doctoral students across different disciplines who are interested in creating research that helps inform policies to build a better culture of health.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Okay. Yeah. There's a -- there's a group called the Scholars Strategy Network. I don't know if you all have come across them. But they also seem to be really focused on connecting the research and policy communities, and they have -- have one of the best podcasts about policy research, the No Jargon podcast. I would recommend to listeners of On the Evidence. It would definitely be a good -- a good second podcast to subscribe to if you like ours. 

So the last question I would ask you all was, based on your experiences so far as doctoral students and recent summer fellows, what has been the hardest part about applied public policy research? And what has been the most rewarding part? 

Carla, do you want to kick us off?

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Yeah. Sure. So I have a mentor at Vanderbilt who actually I think does a lot of work with Mathematica, Ellen Goldring. And she's famous for telling first years in our department, okay. You can be two types of researchers. One, you find a dataset, and then you ask your questions; or, two, you ask your questions, and then you scrounge wherever you can to find data that will help you answer these things that you're passionate or curious about. It's obvious which one she thinks we should be. 

And I think that what I have found to be challenging about being that type of researcher in, like, applied public policy world is, when you're interested in something that people haven't studied a lot, it's can be really hard to find the appropriate data or the right data or data that people have advice about how to use or -- and so the challenging thing for me with my dissertation has certainly been getting access to the right data, being able to use it in the way that I need to answer the things that I'm curious about. It's been really rewarding. And I'm grateful for the folks, especially people at Mathematica, that have really helped me especially go through kind of restrictive use data access and some of those things. But it has been a practice of creativity to be thinking through how to find the right data to be that type of researcher that she often encourages us to be. But it's been definitely rewarding. 

But I would say that the most rewarding thing that I have found about this type of work so far has definitely been relationships. I -- not only with my dissertation, but I'm also -- I'm a part of a research collaborative with Dr. Chezare Warren at Vanderbilt and another doc student named Deja Wood where we are studying kind of like transformational anti-racist discipline practices in schools, especially schools that have shifted their practice after kind of a reckoning with how their discipline practices might have affected students of color in their communities. 

And it has been so rewarding to go into schools and to really be presenting ourselves -- it's so important for the research team to present ourselves as, like, partners in the work and work alongside students and teachers and admin to ask questions. We have a team of student researchers that are developing their own research questions and asking them and kind of have their own wings to be important members of the research team as well. And I think that that type of approach has been really valuable for me in thinking through what does it mean to walk into a space as a researcher and not necessarily take up all the power in the room and to spread it out among different actors in the process. So that's been a really cool and rewarding experience for me.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Luis, I saw you had -- you -- you're nodding vigorously as Carla was describing her pain with finding the right data for the questions you're -- you're investigating. So maybe we'll go with you next. 

Tell us a little bit about what you have found to be the hardest parts and the most rewarding parts of applied public policy research.

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

I definitely agree with Carla. One of the hardest parts is realizing, you know, there is a question that you are sort of like creating a process. I mean, you're starting with a big question, and then you want to have the answers. But then you realize along the way that finding the right data and the right methods is difficult. Like, most of the data that you want is not available or that you -- or that the data is not telling you what you expect so -- or that the stories that you want to tease out are difficult to measure with the data. So, you know, understanding that some of the questions are fundamentally untestable, it's difficult when -- and especially when you realize, well, this is something where whatever I say as an expert will be will have real-world implications. So I have to be very careful of what I say. I have to be very careful about how I present this information, but the information that I want is not there. And, like, I will have to do, like -- I was, you know, sort of like thinking about creative ways of getting at these questions is difficult. And sometimes you face a lot of skepticism where people are thinking, like, is this really what you're measuring? Is this a mechanism that you have in mind? And, you know, so like trying to deal with the idea that, in social sciences, there is lots of opinions and that there is nothing that is set in stone because, you know, just as humans are imperfect, so is social science research where you have this many, many different interpretations of the same set of results. So I think that that's a very challenging part. But, also, that is what I find rewarding. 

When you start feeling like you can put together a story, that -- and this is a story that you can communicate and that this is something that eventually will change lives. There, when you realize, well, this work that I've done can, even though, you know, it may have its flaws, I can understand that I can talk to this with many people who have, like, real levers of power to help improve life based on the information that I produce. So I think that, you know, realizing, like, the outreach you can have with your work is really what's been the most rewarding experience for me.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Laurin, take us home. Hardest part of applied policy research and most rewarding part that -- so far in your in your journey.

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Similarly, data has been such a challenge. And I think part of that is one of the hardest parts for me is getting people to really care about disability in both policy and research spaces. And a lot of research, I guess, that does consider disability is often looking at how can we prevent or reduce disability. And so trying to kind of flip that to look at disability really as an axis of inequality and trying to, you know, do research that looks at how public policies then can reduce these inequalities experienced by disabled people has been hard. But even when people start to care, there's the problem of there's just not a lot of data out there. And that the data that does exist on disability often is sort of found to be inaccurate measures of disability or undercounting people with disabilities. 

And I think part of what I am interested in is understanding, you know, these systems of inequality that are embedded in the data collection process that produces the data that we have, and how can we change that and use more creative and rigorous approaches to really improve the measurement of disability in survey data. And improving the quality and availability of disability related data I think is really important for advancing research that addresses health and economic inequities and sort of these different forms of disadvantage that are experienced by people with disabilities. 

But I guess, on the other side of things, I think the most rewarding part has really been getting to work and collaborate with people to try to make a positive impact that really moves us closer to a collective liberation where no one is left behind, not only in the data process but in life more generally. And so I don't take for granted. I think that perspectives like mine are often excluded from an academic and applied public policy research spaces. So I take kind of the opportunities and resources that I've been given and really try to kind of elevate the perspectives of the disability community. And that I think has been incredibly important and rewarding and trying to, I think, remember that, as I'm sitting behind a computer and crunching numbers, or my code is crunching numbers, I should say, there's really -- remembering the people behind those numbers and that that's what really matters. And so I really strive, I guess, to bring those who are most impacted by multiple systems of oppression, I think it should be Black and brown and queer and trans disabled people who are leading this research process and guiding kind of where the research goes. 

And so, though there are many challenges, I do think that both my experience as a summer fellow and as a doctoral student have definitely been very valuable in terms of hoping to inform policies that do improve societal well-being and build a more equitable world.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

All right. Great. I think that's a great place to end on. Laurin, Luis, Carla, thank you so much for talking with me today. And good luck with whatever the next stage is in your respective research careers.

[ Carla Wellborn ]

Thank you.

[ Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio ]

Thank you for having us.

[ Laurin Bixby ]

Thank you so much.

[ J.B. Wogan ]

Thanks again to our guests Carla Wellborn, Laurin Bixby, and Luis Carlos Carvajal-Osorio. And thank you for listening to another episode of On the Evidence, the Mathematica podcast. 

This episode was produced by the inimitable Rick Stoddard. 

If you like what you heard here, please consider subscribing. We're on YouTube, Apple podcasts, Spotify, as well as many other podcasting platforms. To learn more about the show, visit us at Mathematica.org/OnTheEvidence.