Seminar Series

Major longitudinal studies of aging, including the Survey of Health and Ageing in Europe (SHARE), have used retrospective life history (RLH) interviews to collect earlier life course exposures. However, reliability of RLH data has not been comprehensively evaluated against prospectively collected information. We present initial results from an adaptation of the SHARE RLH interview, fielded with the long-running American's Changing Lives (ACL) study (ACL-LIFE). Retrospectively and prospectively collected reports about different kinds of life events and statuses reveal varying levels of mismatch in reports of the occurrence of events like health shocks, bereavement, and others, with even more discordance in the reported count of events and their timing. The implications of these mismatches and their nonrandom occurrence is discussed in the context of life course analyses of the social determinants of health.

The first half of the 20th Century saw a dramatic transformation of mortality in the United States, as infectious disease went from ubiquitous and unpredictable and rare and controllable. This revolution in mortality may shape U.S. population health even today. Diverse evidence suggests that infectious exposures in the first year of life can have lasting consequences for individual health and development, as well as altering population composition through intense early mortality selection. The cohorts born in the first half of the twentieth century United States experienced rapidly and unevenly changing infectious exposures. How might that affect health, and inequality in health, today? This talk establishes some basic descriptive facts about how infectious disease exposure was distributed by space, race, and place, and how this changed during the first half of the twentieth century. Results track the evolution of exposures over this period from uniformly high, to extremely mixed and variable, to uniformly low -- albeit only for whites. These patterns suggest new hypotheses about population health today, and may also ultimately be used to investigate what thresholds of exposure, within the range typically experienced by real cohorts, matter for subsequent health.

Much evidence suggests a strong causal association between social relationships and health and mortality risks. Research acknowledges social relationships as a “double-edged” phenomenon—social support favors longevity, while social strain fosters cumulative disadvantages in health. However, little research explores social relationship dynamics over the entire life course. Using four waves of HRS 2006-2018 data, I identify four group-based trajectories of perceived social support and social strain to examine the degree of exposure to social support and social strain and their effects on psychological and physical health among older populations in the U.S. The preliminary results show mixed effects on health selection and social causation. Specifically, people with persistently low or steadily decreasing perceived social support from spouses and children are less likely to have good self-rated health. However, people who perceive increased social support from their children are more likely to be in poor health. In contrast, persistently high and increased social strain from one’s spouse is associated with lower chances of good health; low social strain from children is less likely to be associated with poor health. Interestingly, people who perceive persistently high or increased social strain from family and friends are less likely to have poor health, which indicates a strong health selection effect. These findings suggest a differential effect of social support and social strain from close ties (spouse and children) compared to weaker ties (other relatives and friends).

While evidence suggests a durable relationship between redlining and population health, we currently lack an empirical account of how this historical act of racialized violence produced contemporary inequities. In this paper, we use a mediation framework to evaluate how redlining grades influenced later life expectancy and the degree to which contemporary racial disparities in life expectancy between Black working-class neighborhoods and White professional-class neighborhoods can be explained by past Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC) mapping. Life expectancy gaps between differently graded tracts are driven by economic isolation and disparate property valuation which developed within these areas in subsequent decades. Still, only a small percent of a total disparity between contemporary Black and White neighborhoods is explained by HOLC grades. We discuss the role of HOLC maps in analyses of structural racism and health, positioning them as only one feature of a larger public–private project conflating race with financial risk. Policy implications include not only targeting resources to formerly redlined neighborhoods but also the larger project of dismantling racist theories of value that are deeply embedded in the political economy of place.

Grit, hardiness, resilience, and mindfulness are attributes associated with performance under, and mitigation of the effects of, high-stress environments over time. Studying these attributes often requires simulating high-stress in a controlled setting. Over the past four years, our multi-institutional research team has studied the contributions of these psychological characteristics (and a limited number of biomarkers) to performance and completion of Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training (BUD/S), one of the most high stress environments possible outside of combat. Exposure to cold, sleep deprivation, and intense physical activity are leveraged to understand the ability of students to withstand the high levels of stress that produces an attrition rate of 65-85%. Here, we discuss the overall goals and challenges of the project, and we briefly present results from three published papers investigating: (1) the measurement of grit, hardiness, and resilience among the BUD/S trainee population; (2) the relationship between resilience, mindfulness, and successful completion of BUD/S; and (3) patterns of change in grit, hardiness, and resilience over the course of training.

This paper aims to unite three distinct literatures in considering how siblings may exacerbate life course disparities. First, recent calls to expand the one-parent one-offspring model of intergenerational inequality have been met primarily by extending analyses vertically, to a three-generation model that incorporates grandparents. To more fully understand how complex intra-familial dynamics contribute to the transmission of (dis)advantage, however, a nascent literature suggests that we must incorporate siblings into the theoretical and analytic framework. Second, Torche (2015, p. 346) laments that existing literature reveals “very little about causal processes and mechanisms for the persistence of advantage” and urges researchers to start “moving beyond these specific factors to assess how institutional contexts shape intergenerational opportunity”. A robust collection of research illuminates the consequences of criminal justice contact for youth, but has developed largely independently of the scholarship on intergenerational transmission. And third, a spirited literature in cultural sociology investigates children’s own expectations and aspirations for the future—yet little contemporary work scrutinizes parents’ expectations and aspirations for their children. Therefore, in this work in progress, I expand the familial transmission of inequality model to consider how sibling criminal justice system impact children both directly and indirectly (via their influence on parent expectations and aspirations). Using data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN), my initial results suggest fairly large deleterious effects of sibling troubles on parent expectations and aspirations, and these effects seem to be concentrated primarily among focal children who have higher levels of behavioral issues.

How many calories do you burn each day? How does our daily energy expenditure change with age and exercise? In this talk, we’ll discuss new research investigating human metabolism. Dr. Pontzer will present work with hunter-gatherers and other small-scale subsistence populations around the globe, exploring the way our bodies use energy in different settings and across the life course. We will discuss how our evolved metabolic physiology shapes our lives and our health today.

Jail leasing is the practice by which states enter into contractual agreements with local governments and rent beds in jails to house individuals who would normally be confined in state-operated prisons. In this paper, I examine differences in mortality risk for individuals experiencing incarceration in jails as the result of a leasing agreement compared to the broader jail and prison populations. I do so by describing the deaths of individuals from the jail, prison and leasing population in the US between 2013 and 2019, and calculating the crude and standardized mortality rates for these populations. I find a lower mortality risk for the leasing population compared to the prison population and the general jail population, largely driven by the fact that individuals subjected to leasing agreements are simultaneously insulated from the long sentences experienced by the prison population and from the deaths of despair experienced by the unconvicted jail population.

Mass incarceration is a term that describes a historically, comparatively, and demographically unique situation in the United States. It is historically unique because the incarceration rate—especially the prison incarceration rate—grew fourfold in just 30 years, after a long period of relative stability. It is comparatively unique because the U.S. leads the world in incarcerating its citizens. And it is demographically unique because the burden of incarceration is borne disproportionately by men of color. The objective of this study is to document the ways that the experience of incarceration reverberates across many life course domains: employment, education, marriage, fertility, mortality, and health.