Seminar Series

Global trends of fertility decline, population aging, and rural outmigration are creating pressures to consolidate school systems, with the rationale that economies of scale will enable higher quality education to be delivered in an efficient manner, despite longer travel distances for students. Yet, few studies have considered the implications of system consolidation for educational access and inequality, outside of the context of developed countries. This talk will consider the impact of educational infrastructure consolidation on educational attainment using the case of China's rural primary school closure policies in the early 2000s. The talk will share findings related to gender and ethnic disparities in the implications of consolidation for educational attainment.

COVID-19 has resulted in a staggering death toll in the US: almost 300,000 deaths by mid-December 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black, Latino, and Native Americans have experienced a disproportionate burden of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality, reflecting persistent structural inequalities that increase risk of exposure to COVID-19 and mortality risk for those infected. We present results from two studies that seek to quantify the racial and ethnic disparities in the mortality impact of COVID-19 and understand the determinants of these disparities. First, we estimate the impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy at birth and at age 65 for 2020, for the total US population and by race and ethnicity. Second, we estimate standardized relative deaths rates for Native Americans compared with other racial and ethnic groups and examine risk factors that provide insight into the huge geographical variation and high rates of COVID-19 mortality for Native Americans. We briefly examine the potential role of high-risk occupational exposure to account for high rates of COVID-19 mortality among Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans.

This presentation will discuss research on the influence of stressors, with a focus on socioeconomic disad-vantage, on both immune and infectious biomarkers. The presentation will also discuss the links between infection, immunity and cognitive health outcomes in aging populations. Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link.

The practice of diagnosing mental disorders is at a crossroads. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which provides guidelines for diagnostic practice, is being questioned, not just by the “anti-psychiatry” movement, but by detractors within the discipline itself. The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, a major funder of mental health research internationally, has called for a new approach to studying mental illness, to be shaped by investigating research domains rather than by investigating traditional categorical diagnoses. And the public is confused about what constitutes a mental disorder, a confusion resulting in “diagnosis shopping”. My thesis is that progress in conceptualizing mental disorders has been delayed by the field’s limiting focus on cross-sectional information. Mental-health professionals typically encounter a patient at one point in his or her life. This cross-sectional view fosters a focus on the current presenting disorder(s), on the assumption that diagnosis informs about etiology and prognosis.

This presentation  will provide an overview to the data in the Add Health Parent Study (AHPS). The AHPS contains new data on the parents of a subsample of the participants in the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). The presentation will describe the structure of the sample and measures collected. We also will present some initial findings from the AHPS covering such topics as intergenerational health, economic status, and other outcomes.

Research on the social determinants of health has begun to interrogate the role of multiple forms of structural racism in health. However, this research has largely failed to incorporate socio-historical features of structural racism. Meanwhile, a burgeoning body of research establishes the importance of historical racial violence, such as lynching and enslavement, in analyses of current social problems – including, but not limited to, police violence, homicide, crime policy, and political polarization. We extend this body of literature by exploring the association between historical racial violence (measured by lynching) and contemporary racial patterning of opioid related deaths. This examination serves to further interrogate our understanding of histories of racial violence against African Americans as a social determinant of health. 

Samuel Fishman, Postdoctoral Associate, Duke Sociology, presents, "Cumulative Disadvantage and Birthweight: Racial and Ethnic Infant Health Disparities across Age and Nativity" Drawing on data from over 15 million births in US natality files, the current study examines patterns of cumulative disadvantage on birthweight across race and ethnicity. The research has two parts, exploring the relationship between maternal age and birthweight across race, ethnicity, and nativity (e.g., the weathering hypothesis) and how birthweight varies across Mexican American women by race. First, patterns are consistent with the weathering hypothesis for US-born Black women and other racial/ethnic minority women, such as American Indian/Alaskan Native and US-born Mexican American women. Second, immigrant status is associated with better birthweight outcomes and weaker associations between age and birthweight for racial/ethnic minority women. Third, racial disparities in birthweight are not present among immigrant Mexican American women but emerge in later generations. The results suggest that exposure to the US racial stratification context has negative consequences for racial/ethnic minority women’s birthweight outcomes, especially for Black women across ethnicity. At the same time, immigrant racial/ethnic minority women’s birthweight outcomes may benefit from a combination of healthy immigrant selection and reduced exposure to US racial stratification.   Sarah Petry, Predoctoral Student, Sanford School of Public Policy, presents “Long-Term Health Outcomes of Medicaid Access in Childhood” In the first chapter of my dissertation, “Policy and the Life Course”, I will answer: how does access to Medicaid in early childhood impact health in mid- and late adulthood? Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) from 1968-2017, I will exploit the variations in program access to determine whether exposure to different Medicaid programs in childhood impacts adult health. Health outcomes will be drawn from prior literature and will include prevalence of high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, and mortality. Most other studies consider economic outcomes, such as increased tax revenue from those who were exposed to a given policy, to persuade policy makers of the importance of access to Medicaid or other services in early life. Instead, I will deploy life table methods to answer: how long can boomers expect to live with or without disability based on variations in early life access to Medicaid? This work is at an early stage and I am seeking feedback on the proposed data and methods

Data stewards seeking to provide access to large-scale social science and health data face a difficult challenge. They have to share data in ways that protect privacy and confidentiality, are informative for many analyses and purposes, and are relatively straightforward to use by data analysts. I present an integrated system for data access designed to meet these objectives, in which data stewards generate and release synthetic data, that is, data simulated from statistical models, while also providing users access to a verification server that allows them to assess the quality of inferences from the synthetic data. I present an application of the synthetic data plus verification server approach to longitudinal data on employees of the U.S. federal government. I illustrate the integrated use of synthetic data plus verification via analysis of differentials in pay by race and sex. Seminar draws from paper, “Providing access to confidential research data through synthesis and verification: An application to data on employees of the U.S. federal government.”

Anna Holleman, Predoctoral Student, Duke Department of Sociology  Title: The Resilience of Female Clergy: Gender and the Relationship Between Occupational Distress and Mental Health Among Congregational Leaders Abstract: Religious leaders face unique vocational challenges that place their health at risk. As the clergy profession has traditionally been male-dominated, female clergy experience greater occupational stress than their male colleagues, putting their health at additional risk. However, past research offers varied evidence on the gendered nature of clergy health, suggesting that females may be especially resilient to the difficulties of clergy work. Using panel data from the Clergy Health Initiative, a sample of United Methodist pastors from 2008 to 2019, this study examines clergy-specific occupational stress and its gendered relationship with depression. I find that, while female clergy experience higher levels of occupational stress, the relationship between occupational stress and depression is weaker for females as compared to males. This study thus offers a new perspective on the gendered nature of the pastorate: that being a female clergyperson can be conceptualized as a strength and asset. Ruth Wygle, Predoctoral Student, Duke Department of Sociology  Title: Need relief? Call your local jail. Plans for a dissertation on the topic of jail leasing Abstract: I will be using this time to present and get feedback on preliminary plans for my dissertation proposal. The overall topic of my dissertation will be jail leasing. Jail leasing is the practice of states (and in some cases the federal government) entering into contractual agreements with local governments to house individuals under the state’s jurisdiction in local jails. They “rent” beds in these local facilities. As a result of the latter, it has become increasingly common for individuals to serve some or all of their sentence for a felony conviction in a local jail rather than a state prison. This practice has received very little scholarly attention, and so, little is known about the impacts of this practice on individuals who experience long-term incarceration in local facilities. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I plan to broadly document this practice and its usage at the state (i.e., which states are and are not using this practice) and local (i.e., counties with what features are most likely to be engaging in this practice) level. I also plan to assess the impact of jail leasing on two important outcomes: mortality (both pre and post-release) and recidivism. I am also potentially interested in examining this practice from an organizational sociology lens.

A dominant narrative of US population health in the late 2010s focused on the increasing midlife mortality rates and associated poor physical and mental health indicators among relatively low-educated non-Hispanic Whites. High rates of “despair-related” mortality and poor mental health and physical functioning among low-educated Whites even led to speculation about changes in longstanding racial/ethnic inequities in US society. Then in 2020, Covid-19 hit and the nation was (re)awakened to the enormous disparities in sickness and mortality affecting America’s most disenfranchised racial/ethnic populations. Which groups of adult Americans are now at greatest risk for poor health and why? This presentation focuses on the generation of US adults who were born in the late 1970s and early 1980s, now entering their 40s. They have grown up and transitioned to adulthood in a context of rapidly rising economic inequality, innovations in technology and related transformations in work, 9/11 and two longstanding wars, the Great Recession, and the HIV/AIDS, obesity, opioid and Covid-19 epidemics/pandemics.