Murray Center Granted $1M

The Henry Murray Research Center of Radcliffe College has won a total of $1 million in grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to compile studies relating to African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans and Latinos.

"Demographic shifts over the next decades will make the United States an ever more diverse country," the center's director Anne Colby said in a press release. "We need research that takes into account not only the experiences of diverse racial and ethnic groups broadly defined, but also ethnic, class, regional and gender differences within those groups."

The grant money will enable the center to "get data sets, process them and make them available to researchers to do new studies and ask new questions of the same data," Colby said in an interview yesterday.

She said the data compiled by this project is especially important for scholarly research.

"We need research that takes into account not only the experiences of diverse racial and ethnic groups broadly defined, but also ethnic, class, regional, and gender differences within those groups," Colby said.

The archived data will enable researchers to have access to information which would have taken years to compile on their own, according to Colby.

Colby said the grant money will also fund an advisory committee made up of "very distinguished social scientists who are members of groups that we are studying."

The research collected using this grant money will enhance the center's 200 minority studies which include Cynthia Fuchs Epstein's "Black Women Lawyers," Harriette McAdoo's "Extended Family Support of Single Black Mothers" and Carlos Arce's "Mexican Origin People of the United States."