Events

During this talk, Tiffany Green will discuss ongoing research investigating the links between structural racism and the ability to achieve intended births. This research studies the prenatal and early pregnancy period with a novel preconception cohort of users who track menstrual cycles and pregnancies using mobile device applications. In turn, these georeferenced data are linked to area-level information on markers of structural racism in housing: residential segregation and mortgage denial. We demonstrate that achieving intended births takes significantly longer for Black people than for white people and that structural racism appears to lengthen the path to parenthood for Black adults in the U.S.

The Milken Institute Global Conference convenes the best minds in the world to tackle its most urgent challenges and to help realize its most exciting opportunities. It is a unique experience in which individuals with the capital, power, and influence to change the world connect with those whose expertise and creativity are reinventing health, finance, technology, philanthropy, industry, and media. The 24th annual Global Conference will center on the theme, “Charting a New Course.” In recent months, the impact of social crisis, economic dislocation, and global pandemic has called us to reflect on how we live, what we believe, and what matters most

Considerable research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to whites. Yet, we know little about the role of other dimensions of race (e.g., skin tone) and early life contexts (e.g., childhood racial contexts) in shaping trajectories of depressive symptoms across adolescence and adulthood. This study asks: 1) to what extent do self-identified race and skin tone shape disparities in depressive symptoms between Black and white adults across ages 12-42? 2) Do the relationships between race/skin tone and depressive symptoms depend on school racial context, as measured by the racial composition of middle and high schools? This study uses five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and employs growth curve models to address these questions. Overall, results suggest that trajectories of depressive symptoms across ages 12-42 vary by race and skin tone among Black adults. Further, racial and skin tone disparities in depressive symptom trajectories are contingent on school racial context, highlighting competing advantages and disadvantages of navigating majority spaces in early life for Black adults of different skin tones. Findings and implications will be discussed in more detail.

DUPRI will be hosting a virtual workshop, “Working with Big Data, SQL, and Cloud Computing using R”, on September 22. This 2-hour training provides an introduction to working with remote structured databases, performing SQL queries, and accessing and using cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Compute Engine. The training will focus specifically on the R programming language. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

This talk explores racial disparities in mortality during U.S. pandemics, using the 1918 and COVID-19 pandemics to develop general frameworks for understanding inequality in pandemic experiences—and what they reveal about inequality during ordinary, non-pandemic times. The first part of the talk considers racial disparities during the most devastating respiratory pandemic of the 20thcentury, the 1918 flu; shows that those disparities were surprisingly small; and develops new hypotheses, grounded in social immunology, to account for this anomaly. The second part of the talk pivots from 1918 to 2020-21. During the 1918 pandemic, U.S. white mortality was still lower than U.S. Black mortality had been nearly every year. Today, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the same pattern holds: white mortality during the COVID pandemic has likely still been lower than Black mortality has ever been. Using pandemic mortality as a measuring stick for racial disparities offers a new perspective on the measures we do —and do not —embrace in order to combat racial inequality. I use demographic mortality models to make a new, demographically based case for reparations for racism.

The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that factors such as age and pre-existing conditions intersect with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics—such as race-ethnicity, gender, and income—to influence both the onset and severity of the disease, as well as its trajectory. Not only has the pandemic laid bare stark differences in health and mortality for different groups of people, but also dramatic inequalities in outcomes such as education, work, family dynamics, and mental health. In this briefing, population scientists will share research findings on the disparate impacts of COVID and what additional research and data are needed to understand and address its far-reaching effects.

DUPRI will be hosting a virtual workshop, Text Analysis using R, on April 14. This 4-hour training (one morning and one afternoon session) provides an introduction to text analysis using R. It will cover data import and formatting, cleaning and prepping documents, data visualization, exploratory analysis, basic network analysis, and topic modeling. Some prior experience using R is recommended.

Restricting their ability to establish connections with majority groups  or to access novel information. In this talk, I show how this phenomenon  is manifested in a variety of online and face-to-face social networks  and what societal consequences it has on the visibility and ranking of  minorities. I propose a network model with tunable homophily and group  sizes and demonstrate how the ranking of nodes is affected by homophilic  behavior. I will discuss the implications of this research on algorithms  and perception biases.

Hedwig (Hedy) received her PhD in Sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2009. After receiving her PhD, she was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health & Society Scholar at the University of Michigan from 2009 to 2011. She holds a courtesy joint appointment at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at WUSTL and is a Faculty Affiliate in the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is also an Associate Director of the Center for Race, Ethnicity & Equity. She currently serves on the research advisory board for the Vera Institute of Justice and the board for the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science. RESEARCH INTERESTS INCLUDE: Health Disparities | Race and Ethnicity | Gender | Family | Policing and Social Control