Seminar Series

Research has made clear that racial inequality is affected by neighborhood conditions. One important condition is the accessibility of financial establishments. We examine how living in minority neighborhoods affects ease of access to conventional banks vs. to alternative financial institutions (AFIs) such as check cashers and payday lenders. Based on more than 6 million queries, we compute the difference in the time required to walk, drive, or take public transit to the nearest bank vs. the nearest AFI from the middle of every block in each of 19 of the nation’s largest cities. Results suggest that race is strikingly more important than class: even after numerous economic, demographic, and structural conditions are accounted for, the AFI is more often closer than the bank in well-off minority neighborhoods than in poor white ones. I discuss implications.
Date
4/08/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
Online dating sites have become a prominent method for Chinese young people to find romantic partners, edging out traditional means for pursuing marriage. Using data from the popular online dating site Huatian, which targets highly educated white-collar workers in urban China, I investigate whether online dating preferences still draw on traditional Chinese dating values such as homogamy and hypergamy; I also investigate gender differences in assortative mate preferences by educational attainment and income. The findings suggest that the marriage tradition of homogamy is still salient in the educational and income assortative mating of the young generation. However, educational hypergamy and hypogamy are also prevalent among people holding bachelor or higher education degrees regardless of gender. In fact, when it comes to income, people, especially male love-seekers, are more likely to be hypergamous rather than resemble one another. In addition, I find little evidence of diminishing status hypergamy in age and height.
Date
4/01/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
Demography has a lot of great tools for peering into the future.  We knew that declining fertility was going to make societies older.  Throw in declines in mortality, especially at older ages, and the aging and aged societies that so many of us live in were always in the cards.  But does the fact that aged societies are not unexpected make them any less revolutionary?  I have wondered for some time whether the gradualism and continuity in the demographic process that has gotten us to this point has blinded us to the oddity of where we are.  Whereas most talks feature a speaker trying to convince an audience that he or she knows something that they do not, here the speaker would like to know what everyone else knows about the future of aging and aged societies that he does not.  This being 2021, Covid-19 will be mentioned.
Date
3/25/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link
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.
Date
3/18/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
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.
Date
3/11/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
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.
Date
3/04/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
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.
Date
2/25/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
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.
Date
2/18/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
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. 
Date
2/11/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link. 
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
Date
2/04/2021
Time
3:30pm - 5:00pm
Venue
Zoom Seminar. Please contact laura.satterfield@duke.edu to obtain Seminar Link.