Seminar Series

India is home to one-sixth of all people, one-fifth of all births, and one-fourth of all neonatal deaths. Why is death so likely at the beginning of life in India — even more so than in many poorer countries? This talk explores the evidence for one important reason: poor maternal nutrition.

Nearly twenty-five years ago, Susan Watkins asked, “How do women appear on the pages of Demography?...what does Demography indicate about the way we as a scientific community, as authors, reviewers, and readers, understand women?” Her questions were about women, but also about gender, and they led her to conclude, among other things, that “a more general implication is that we should be more attentive to the fit between gender as it is constructed in the pages of Demography and gender as it is constructed in the societies we study.”

Whether older adults reside in their long-term communities or move to other locations, the characteristics of the places where they experience the aging process likely have profound consequences for their abilities to adapt to changes such as bereavement, retirement, and ill health, as well as to maintain independence. The Chicago Health and Activity Space in Real Time (CHART) study will provide one example of the use of new technology to address fundamental questions in social capital accumulation, urban sociology and in life course studies of older adult health. CHART employs innovative smartphone-based methods for the identification of older adults’ activity spaces (i.e., locations of routine activities in daily life).

The social and symbolic boundaries that define rural America are highly ambiguous. Paradoxically, the majority of rural Americans today live in metropolitan areas—at the periphery of big cities and suburbs. Since 1990, 746 or nearly 25 percent of all U.S. counties were redefined by OMB as metropolitan, shifting nearly 70 million residents from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan America.

Self-harm is a critical health risk in adolescence, a life course stage when peers are important for healthy development. Theory suggests adolescents self-harm to quell mental distress and to meet explicitly social objectives, both functions that can be shaped by peer networks. To date, however, no study has systematically examined how self-harm relates to social integration.

This talk presents results from four separate papers, which illustrate the importance of intimate relationships as the immediate context of whether young women get what they want in terms of their reproductive behaviors. The analyses are based on the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life (RDSL) study, conducted by Jennifer Barber, Yasamin Kusunoki, and Heather Gatny. The four papers compare a woman's desires and expectations across different times within a relationship using fixed-effects models. 

While workplace flexibility is perceived to be a key determinant of maternal labor supply, less is known about fathers' demand for flexibility or about intra-household spillover effects of flexibility initiatives. Maya Rossin-Slater examines these issues in the context of a critical period in family life---the months immediately following childbirth---and identifies the impacts of paternal access to workplace flexibility on maternal postpartum health.

In the psychology literature it’s not uncommon to read speculation about whether adult age differences in behavior are due to “biological declines” OR “motivational changes”. The implication of these alternatives is that motivational change or preservation is not biological. The authors speculating are not necessarily dualists, but rather these questions have emerged as an artifact of the tools being used to study adult age effects on cognition and motivation. There has been a historical incompatibility in the field between motivational theories that are largely verbal and based on behavioral evidence and cognitive theories which are often more computational and based on a combination of behavioral and neurobiological evidence. In this more theoretically leaning talk, I will briefly present a series of findings from studies using fMRI and PET imaging of the dopamine system that are beginning to provide a neurobiological account of motivation and aging. In addition to resolving dualistic accounts of aging, the studies have identified preservation of motivational systems that may be used to further enhance function in older age. These discoveries have led to a shift in our lab research from primarily studying financial health to also studying physical health behavior change.

The U.S. is the only advanced industrialized country without a national policy providing paid family and medical leave. In recent years, a handful of states and localities have begun to enact state or local legislation in this area. The effects of such laws on outcomes for employees have been studied, but we know relatively little about impacts on employers. In this talk, Jane Waldfogel will present findings from a program of research to address this gap that she has undertaken with colleagues Ann Bartel, Christopher Ruhm, and Maya Rossin-Slater.

Duke University's Cheryl Elman discusses the relationship between development and disease in the twentieth century American south. Plantation croppers, disproportionately African American, were generally malnourished, poorly housed, and legally tied to farms through debt to plantation owners and local merchants. The southern population through the 1940s was also exposed to poor sanitation and parasitic diseases of malaria and hookworm.