Nena Stracuzzi
Assistant Research Professor
Nena Stracuzzi is an assistant research professor at the Carsey Institute. She began as a post-doctoral fellow in 2006, shortly after receiving her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of New Hampshire. While in graduate school her primary research interests were in motherhood, family, gender, and medical sociology. These have been put to good use at Carsey as most of her research revolves around family and parenting as well as issues involving women and work. Her understanding of medical sociology has also proved valuable in two recent research projects. Along with a team of researchers, Nena recently finished a policy brief that looked at New Hampshire Healthy Kids (NHHK), the non-profit corporation that administers Medicaid and the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) for children. They found that NHHK is one of the key factors responsible for achieving and maintaining the state’s third highest health insurance rate in the nation.
Other recent projects include an assessment of the relationship between the availability of and accessibility to healthy foods and diet-related health outcomes in New Hampshire. While NH boasts one of the lowest incidences of household food insecurity in the United States, food insecurity still affects as many as 32,000 households. Nena is also combining her interests in family and parenting with her burgeoning interests in rural communities and youth development by working with a team of Carsey Fellows to collect data from middle- and high-school students in Northern New Hampshire to examine the social factors associated with a successful transition to adulthood and to the development of human capital in rural New Hampshire.