Seminar Series

In this talk, Pearce will highlight key findings from her book A Faith of Their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of American Adolescents, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Clemson). Drawing on debates over the definition and operationalization of religiosity in the sociology of religion, Pearce and Denton offer a revised view of religiosity as a person-based, or categorical variable, rather than a low-to-high continuous concept.

That women live longer than men may be a well-known phenomenon. But why women live longer than men is much less well understood. I first briefly review the state of knowledge about sex differences in mortality and identify gaps in this knowledge. It is useful to revisit the old but powerful hypothesis that biology plays a role. The question is how. I lay out a framework of research that integrates biology into social demographic models and population research.

There is growing evidence that local conditions, particularly economic considerations, shape the geographic dispersion of immigrant groups. Yet our understanding of the impact of local variation in public policies on immigrants internal settlement patterns remains rudimentary. This paper takes advantage of local area variation in immigration policies and economic conditions to estimate their unique impact on changes in the size of local Mexican immigrant populations between 2007 and 2009.

Extant estimates of the number of deaths that resulted from the Khmer-Rouge ruling of Cambodia range from half a million to over three million excess deaths--a huge range considering that the country's total population size was about 8 million at the outset of the Khmer-Rouge regime. In this presentation, I describe this unsatisfactory range and investigate whether it can be narrowed with either new data or a better approach.

Executive functions are a suite of related cognitive functions that allow one to hold in mind goal relevant information and exclude from mind goal irrelevant information. Based on clinical and neuroimaging studies cognitive neuroscientists believe that these functions are central to the performance of goal directed behavior.

The results of recent evaluations of genome wide association (GWA) studies of complex phenotypic traits, including age at disease onset or life span, showed that such traits are typically affected by a large number of "small-effect-low-significance" alleles, which were excluded from further analyses in traditional GWA studies. In this talk we show that the joint influence of such genetic variants on human life span can be substantial and highly statistically significant.

Aging is an evolutionarily labile trait that is likely shaped by a diversity of sources of natural selection. Two such mechanisms are sexual selection, or selection caused by competition among members of one sex for reproductive access to members of the other, and kin selection, which can be thought of selection arising from associations between fitness and social interactions. While various models have been used to argue for (or against) their importance in the evolution of aging, strategies for direct measurements of these selective forces are lacking.

There are indications that the mean difference in socioeconomic status between homeowners and renters has been increasing in recent decades, and that these trends vary by race and ethnicity. This paper examines the roles of changes in the distribution of household demographic characteristics, the effects of those characteristics on the probability of being a homeowner, and local housing market characteristics in producing this apparent growth in inequality.

The prevailing model of migration in transitioning countries conceives of a risk-diversifying household in which members share a coherent set of preferences about the departure of one or more members to work elsewhere. Several decades of ethnographic research have questioned the applicability of this model by revealing the importance of gender hierarchies in family decisions. Some scholars argue that, in many contexts, women have little role in determining the migration behavior of spouses and other family members.

The Global Health Initiative (GHI), President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and other global health programs are putting increasing emphasis on evaluation and learning to ensure that investments in global health are effective and achieve desired outcomes. At the same time, there is a growing debate in the evaluation literature on the most appropriate methods to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of health interventions in real world situations.