FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The third annual Ferritor Lecture in Community will feature Donald Hernandez, professor of sociology at Albany State University of New York, speaking on “Children in Immigrant Families in 21st Century Arkansas” at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 3, in Lecture Hall 107 of the Agricultural, Food, and Life Sciences Building next to the Pat Walker Health Center. His visit is being sponsored by the Jones Chair in Community of the department of sociology in the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. 

Hernandez formerly served as a special assistant in the U.S. Census Bureau, and between 1996 and 1998 was study director for the Committee on the Health and Adjustment of Immigrant Children and Families, Board on Children, Youth, and Families of the National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine. In that position he had responsibility for the National Research Council report From Generation to Generation: The Health and Well-Being of Children in Immigrant Families and the companion volume, Children of Immigrants: Health, Adjustment, and Public Assistance.

Hernandez is also author of America’s Children: Resources from Family, Government, and the Economy, the first national research effort focusing on children to document the timing, magnitude and reasons for revolutionary changes experienced by children since the Great Depression in terms of family composition, parent’s education, father’s and mother’s work and family income and poverty. This research is summarized in Trends in the Well-Being of America’s Children and Youth: 1996.

Hernandez recently co-authored a comprehensive report on Immigration in Arkansas funded by the Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation. He recently completed research using Census 2000 to produce 140 indicators of children’s family and economic circumstances for various race-ethnic and immigrant groups for the United States, the 50 states, the District of Columbia and 200 metropolitan areas. He just finished work on an alternative poverty measure for the United States that overcomes limitations of the current official measure, and on assessing the extent to which socioeconomic disparities versus cultural differences can account for the low enrollment in early education programs among Hispanic children in immigrant and native-born families.