Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons^™

Support From Adult Children And Parental Health In Rural America, Shelley Clark, Elizabeth M. Lawrence, Shannon M. Monnat

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

Adult children are a primary source of care for their aging parents. Parents in rural areas, however, live further from their adult children than parents in urban areas, potentially limiting the support they receive and compromising their health and ability to age in place. We use two waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (2013 and 2017) to investigate the relationships among geographic proximity, adult children’s instrumental and financial support, and parental health. Rural parents live further from their adult children and receive less financial support, but they are more likely to receive instrumental assistance. In addition, rural parents …

Rural Population Health And Aging: Introduction To The Special Issue, John J. Green, Shannon M. Monnat, Leif Jensen, Lori Hunter, Martin Sliwinski

Journal of Rural Social Sciences

This special issue of the Journal of Rural Social Sciences (JRSS) focuses on rural population health and aging. It showcases the work of scholars from several backgrounds and social science disciplines to advance knowledge in a critical field of investigation. Assembled through an open call for submissions coordinated through the National Institute on Aging (NIA) funded Interdisciplinary Network on Rural Population Health and Aging (INRPHA), the collection of articles helps inform a more nuanced understanding of the factors associated with rural places, which often have different health outcomes and aging patterns than their urban counterparts. The authors achieve this through …

Same Environment, Stratified Impacts? Air Pollution, Extreme Temperatures, And Birth Weight In South China, Xiaoying Liu, Jere R. Behrman, Emily Hannum, Fan Wang, Qingguo Zhao

Population Center Working Papers (PSC/PARC)

This paper investigates whether associations between birth weight and prenatal ambient environmental conditions—pollution and extreme temperatures—differ by 1) maternal education; 2) children’s innate health; and 3) interactions between these two. We link birth records from Guangzhou, China, during a period of high pollution, to ambient air pollution (PM10 and a composite measure) and extreme temperature data. We first use mean regressions to test whether, overall, maternal education is an “effect modifier” in the relationships between ambient air pollution, extreme temperature, and birth weight. We then use conditional quantile regressions to test for effect heterogeneity according to the unobserved innate vulnerability …

Aging And Hypertension Among The Global Poor—Panel Data Evidence From Malawi, Iliana V. Kohler, Nikkil Sudharsanan, Chiwoza Bandawe, Hans-Peter Kohler

Population Center Working Papers (PSC/PARC)

Background: Hypertension has a rapidly growing disease burden among older persons in low-income countries (LICs) that is often inadequately diagnosed and treated. Yet, most LIC research on hypertension is based on cross-sectional data that does not allow inferences about the onset or persistence of hypertension, its correlates, and changes in hypertension as individuals become older.

Data and methods: The Mature Adults Cohort of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health (MLSFH-MAC) is used to provide among the first panel analyses of hypertension for older individuals in a sub-Saharan LIC using blood pressure measurements obtained in 2013 and 2017.

Findings: …

Rural Working-Age Adults Report Worse Health Than Their Urban Peers, Shannon M. Monnat, Danielle Rhubart

Population Health Research Brief Series

Self-rated health is considered a strong predictor of chronic disease risk and premature mortality. This brief analyzes data from the National Wellbeing Survey (NWS), a sample of approximately 4,000 U.S. working-aged adults (ages 18-64) conducted in Feb-March 2021 to examine differences in self-rated physical health among residents of large urban counties (counties in a metro area of 1+ million people), medium/small urban counties, rural counties that neighbor a metro area (metro-adjacent), and rural counties that do not neighbor a metro area (remote rural). Results show higher shares of poor/fair self-rated health among residents of rural and small urban counties than …

America At A Glance: An Update On Rural-Urban Difference In Disability Rates, University Of Montana Rural Institute

Independent Living and Community Participation

For this report we analyzed the most recent disability data from the American Community Survey (ACS 5-year estimates 2015-2019) to examine what has changed over the last decade. Our key findings are:

• The disability disparity between rural and urban persists, with higher rates of disability in rural counties
• Rates of disability across rural and urban have increased slightly
• Rates of disability are higher in rural counties across disability type, age, race, and ethnicity

Disability And Health In African Americans: Population Research And Implications For Occupational Therapy Community-Based Practice, Emily Schulz, Debarchana Ghosh, Eddie M. Clark, Beverly R. Williams, Randi Williams, Lijing Ma, Crystal L. Park, Cheryl L. Knott

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Background: Population-based research and community-based interventions are integral to occupational therapy’s scope of practice, yet they are underdeveloped in actual implementation. Therefore, this paper focuses on some health challenges facing the African American population, guided by the Person-Environment-Occupation-Performance Model.

Method: Using data from an observational cross-sectional nationwide telephone survey of African American adults, we examined differences between African Americans who are receiving disability payments (RDP) and those who are employed full time (FTE) on several physical health behaviors and psychosocial health indicators. We further compared the differences between African Americans RDP versus those FTE on those physical health …

Long-Term Care Insurance Financing Using Home Equity Release: Evidence From An Online Experimental Survey, Katja Hanewald, Hazel Bateman, Hanming Fang, Tin Long Ho

Population Center Working Papers (PSC/PARC)

This paper explores new mechanisms to fund long-term care using housing wealth. Using data from an online experimental survey fielded to a sample of 1,200 Chinese homeowners aged 45-64, we assess the potential demand for new financial products that allow individuals to access their housing wealth to buy long-term care insurance. We find that access to housing wealth increases the stated demand for long-term care insurance. When they could only use savings, participants used on average 5% of their total (hypothetical) wealth to purchase long-term care insurance. When they could use savings and a reverse mortgage, participants used 15% of …

Barker’S Hypothesis Among The Global Poor: Positive Long-Term Cardiovascular Effects Of In-Utero Famine Exposure, Alberto Ciancio, Jere R. Behrman, Fabrice Kämpfen, Iliana V. Kohler, Jürgen Maurer, Victor Mwapasa, Hans-Peter Kohler

Population Center Working Papers (PSC/PARC)

An influential literature on the Barker's hypothesis (or the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease, DOHaD) has documented that poor conditions in utero lead to higher risk of hypertension, diabetes, stroke and heart disease in middle age in middle- and high-income contexts. One of the main explanations is that periods of high calorie intake after birth are inconsistent with the adaptations that the fetus makes to prepare for a poor resources environment (thrifty phenotype hypothesis). Using data from a persistently low-income country, Malawi, we find that individuals exposed in utero to a substantial famine in 1949, have lower levels of …

Urban Pastures: A Computational Approach To Identify The Barriers Of Segregation, Noah Gans

Honors Projects

Urban Sociology is concerned with identifying the relationship between the built environment and the organization of residents. In recent years, computational methods have offered new techniques to measure segregation, including using road networks to measure marginalized communities' institutional and social isolation. This paper contributes to existing computational and urban inequality scholarship by exploring how the ease of mobility along city roads determines community barriers in Atlanta, GA. I use graph partitioning to separate Atlanta’s road network into isolated chunks of intersections and residential roads, which I call urban pastures. Urban pastures are social communities contained to residential road networks because …

The Isolated As The Revolutionary: How “Leftover” Men In China Challenge Heteronormativity, Ruwen Chang

Theses and Dissertations--Gender and Women's Studies

In contemporary China, demographers estimate that 30 million men are single because there are simply not enough women in the Chinese population, and the 2020 Chinese census shows that there are 34.9 million more men than women. These men are called guanggun, which can be directly translated to “bare sticks/branches,” a slur that indicates a lack of marriage and sex. In this project, I demonstrate that guanggun’s singlehood marks them as the marginalized at the intersection of heteronormativity, patriarchy, globalizing capitalism, and pronatalist governmentality. In a highly heteronormative and patrilineal culture, guanggun are branded as abnormal/incomplete. However, because …

The Influence Of Sociopolitical Factors On Adolescents’ And Youths’ Development, Banafsheh Aghayeeabianeh

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

Youths and adolescents are one of the major perpetrators of antisocial and deviant behaviors, which have deleterious consequences for both the perpetrators and society. Although there is extensive literature on youth and adolescent antisocial behavior, some correlates of youth antisociality are not known yet. As such, the present study is devoted to understanding the micro- and macro-level predictors of youth and adolescents’ antisociality in three contexts. Three empirical studies applying bioecological systems theory and analyzing data from the International Dating Violence database using Mixed Effects Models were conducted to investigate the ecology of the development of antisocial behaviors among youth. …

Intended And Unintended Consequences Of Two Paradigms Of Urban Planning, And Their Social Justice And Human Health Impacts, In Portland, Oregon, Steve Kolmes

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article describes two contesting paradigms of urban planning employed successively in Portland, Oregon; (1) urban planning typical of the US in the first half of the 20th Century that was focused on traffic and infrastructure, and (2) progressive urban planning focused on neighborhood livability and connections. It gives a history of their implementation in Portland, focusing on issues of racial and socioeconomic justice in the Albina neighborhood. Recent knowledge about air pollution’s impacts on human health, and infant and childhood development, are integrated into the discussion of urban planning. It describes racially and socioeconomically disproportionate access to urban green …

Asian Americans In Massachusetts Including Boston And Other Selected Cities: Data From The 2020 Decennial Census And American Community Survey, Shauna Lo

Institute for Asian American Studies Publications

The data in this report are drawn from multiple U.S. Census Bureau datasets: the 2020 Decennial Census, the 2019 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, the 2015–2019 American Community Survey 5-year Estimates, and the 2015-2019 American Community Survey 5-Year Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS). Note that data from different datasets are not directly comparable. The dataset used for each table and chart is indicated.

Limited data was available from the 2020 Decennial Census at the time of publication.

Population data in this report may be for racial groups “alone” (one race only) or “alone or in combination” (one or more races), …

Changing Age Segregation In The Us: 1990 To 2010, Debasree Das Gupta, David W. S. Wong

Kinesiology and Health Science Faculty Publications

Age segregation adversely impacts health and wellbeing. Prior studies, although limited, report increasing age segregation of the US. However, these studies are dated, do not comprehensively examine the spatiotemporal patterns and the correlates of intergenerational segregation, or suffer from methodological limitations. To address these gaps, we assess the spatiotemporal patterns of age segregation between 1990 and 2010 using census-tract data to compute the dissimilarity index (D) at the national, state, and county levels. Results contradict previous findings providing robust evidence of decreasing age segregation for most parts of the country and across geographical levels. We also examine factors explaining adult-older …

“It’S Real”: Experiences Of Family Homelessness In Fort Worth, Texas, Bernd Scheffler, Dale Brooker Phd.

Pursue: Undergraduate Research Journal

Introduction: Despite the common public image of homelessness (read: a single “vagrant” person), families with children represent one-third of the homeless population—an especially-serious social problem since family homelessness has long-term negative impacts on two generations simultaneously. This interdisciplinary study examined the complexities of family homelessness in Fort Worth, Texas.

Methods: A literature review outlined pathways into family homelessness, shared experiences, and common intervention strategies. An original qualitative study followed, employing a phenomenological approach to interview families in a local rapid-rehousing program. Open-ended questions allowed free descriptions of personal realities. Audio-recorded responses were analyzed for relevant themes, commonalities, and variations.

Results: …

Inequalities In The Structure And Delivery Of U.S. Health Care, Rebecca Anna Schut

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Although healthcare inequalities by race-ethnicity and nativity have been widely explored, more research is needed to investigate how these inequalities result from structures of racial stratification and immigrant exclusion operating within U.S. health care. My dissertation employs hand coded restricted-access medical record data, linked survey data, and rich administrative data to examine the factors generating healthcare inequalities experienced by both patients and physicians. I contextualize these inequalities within a broader U.S. landscape characterized by structural racism and nativism. In the first chapter, I examine the impact of state immigration policy contexts on healthcare access of U.S. agricultural workers representing various …

Three Essays On Internal Migration And Risk Factors For Non-Communicable Diseases (Ncds) In Low- And Middle-Income Countries (Lmics), Weilong Li

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) have been experiencing extensive internal migration, which is closely associated with the increasing prevalence of risk factors for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). In this dissertation, I study the impact of internal migration on main NCD risk factors across three diverse LMIC contexts: China, Indonesia, and Malawi. In Chapter 1, I introduce the background, motivation, and research goals of this dissertation. In Chapter 2, I use data from the 2011 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to examine the associations between rural-urban migration and three main NCD risk factors, hypertension, obesity, and abdominal obesity, among older …

Three Essays On Mental Health And Pain In The United States, Morgan Peele

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

This dissertation contains three chapters on adult mental health and pain in the contemporary United States, paying special attention to social inequalities therein. In the first chapter I use data from the 2002-2014 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files (NHIS-LMF) to explore sociodemographic differences in the intersection of physical and psychological pain (referred to as the “pain–distress nexus”) and its relationship to mortality among adults ages 25 to 64. I find the combination of both high distress and high pain is most prevalent and most strongly predictive of mortality among socioeconomically disadvantaged, non-Hispanic Whites. In the second chapter I …

Racialized Patterns Of Inequality In United States Birth Outcomes, 1990-2018, Hannah Olson

Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations

Low birthweight is a pernicious public health problem that has seen little to no improvement in the United States for over 50 years. Being born low birth weight carries an increased risk of a broad range of adverse health and development outcomes and has been identified as a likely mechanism through which health and socioeconomic inequality is reproduced across generations. Racial disparities in birth weight are particularly stark. However, despite considerable attention to the issue, existing research fails to fully explain the social, institutional, and historical processes that operate to uphold racialized inequality in adverse birth outcomes. In light of …