Demographers have recognized the importance of early life events and conditions for producing disparities in later life health for at least two decades, and stratification research in sociology has studied intergenerational transmission of socioeconomic status for three quarters of a century while economists have studied intergenerational financial transfers for decades. The intergenerational transmission of health has received less attention, although it seems apparent that a key mechanism—beyond genetics—for the transmission of health from parents to children is socioeconomic. This area of research benefits from the application of some of the newest interdisciplinary methods in social science, including groundbreaking research led by CPHA Scholars. The Center’s work moves beyond specific cohorts to examine the influence of lineage on the aging process. Studies focus on both the social and biological transmission of health and longevity risks.
Prominent projects at CPHA addressing these concerns include:
- The Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study carried out by Terrie Moffitt and Avshalom Caspi use family medical histories and genetics to identify patients who may have a higher-than-usual chance of developing a medical condition, such as high blood pressure, stroke or cancer.
- The Add Health Parent Study (AHPS) directed by Naomi Duke and Kathleen Mullan Harris (UNC) collects data from the parents of the original Add Health panel and adds this new parent information to the existing panel. Designed to improve the understanding of the role that families play through socioeconomic channels in the health and wellbeing of the older, parent generation and that of their offspring, this dataset uniquely supports analysis of the intergenerational transmission of (dis)advantage.
- Hedwig Lee and colleagues created a national data set linking historical sundown towns to census geographies from 1940-2020. Historical Sundown towns were all-White communities, neighborhoods, and counties often located outside of the South that emerged in the early decades of the 20th century to exclude Black Americans and other racial and ethnic minority groups through the use of a set of formal (e.g., discriminatory laws) and informal (e.g., harassment, threats, or use of violence) means.
- Hedwig Lee and Christopher Wildeman, using Add Health data and a series of latent class and logistic regression models, examined co-occurring patterns of child maltreatment and foster care placement (FCP) as well as resulting life-course consequences of such patterns.
- Hanzhang Xu used data from the 2016 Health and Retirement Study and the 2015 China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study to identify caregiving networks for persons with dementia in the U.S. and China.
- Susan Alberts, received a pilot to investigate the transmission of baboon maternal adversity to her offspring.