A powerful new lens on poverty: Notre Dame expands access to landmark family study
This article was originally published by Frederick LaBrecque on University Strategic Framework news on November 12, 2025.
How do family dynamics, schools, and the justice system shape inequality across generations and communities?
These are the kind of questions that drive Anna Haskins’s research. Haskins, the Andrew V. Tackes Associate Professor of Sociology, explores how the education system, the family, and the criminal legal system interact in ways that both preserve and mitigate social inequality.
A new data hub will supercharge research into these questions and more, giving scholars at Notre Dame the tools to study poverty, inequality, and contemporary social life from multiple angles. Joining Princeton and Columbia universities, Notre Dame is poised to host a Midwestern hub of The Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS).
The FFCWS is the longest-running and only contemporary US birth cohort study of young adults, based on a national sample, that follows children from birth through young adulthood. It has become a crucial component of the country’s research infrastructure, enabling researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to understand the effects of poverty, family structure, education, employment, income, health, housing, and resource sharing on human development. For the past 25 years, the FFCWS has served as a vital public resource, with more than 8,700 researchers across disciplines using its data to generate insights that inform research agendas, public policy, and social programs.
“Our aim is to build capacity to leverage these unique data to ask and answer the critical poverty-related questions that drive policy change, generate real-world solutions, and advance knowledge — all of which will cement Notre Dame's leadership in poverty research,” Haskins said.
Since its founding by scholars at Princeton and Columbia, the FFCWS has been led exclusively by researchers at these two Ivy League institutions. This changed in 2024 when Haskins was named as a new co-Investigator. Haskins has spent nearly two decades utilizing FFCWS data to examine how the education system, family, and criminal legal system connect and interact in ways that both preserve and mitigate social inequality. This appointment presents a timely opportunity to develop a Midwestern research hub focused on the utilization of FFCWS data.
In collaboration with Notre Dame Population Analytics, Haskins will grow FFCWS research at the University through two primary mechanisms. First, by recruiting and hiring postdoctoral fellows with experience working with this data set who can support the research efforts of Notre Dame faculty across various units. Second, by offering data workshops to train faculty, postdoctoral researchers, predoctoral researchers, and students, including hands-on instruction and project ideation with senior researchers. The first of these workshops, to be held on campus in the spring of 2026, will primarily target Notre Dame attendees, but future events will expand to include peer institutions in the region.
Notre Dame Population Analytics harnesses the power of people, computing, and data to equip Notre Dame researchers who are exploring some of the most pressing demographic questions in order to inform policy solutions that shape lives and communities. Notre Dame Population Analytics addresses a variety of topics and questions, including but not limited to mental health access, challenges relating to the aging population and workforce needs, and the opioid crisis.
This work is supported by Notre Dame’s Poverty Initiative, a University-wide effort to create a world intolerant of poverty by expanding knowledge about how to solve it.
“I’m very excited to spearhead efforts to build FFCWS data use and infrastructure at Notre Dame in partnership with Notre Dame Population Analytics and with the generous support of the Poverty Initiative,” Haskins said.
