Seminar Series

Colter Mitchell discusses his recent work on the biosocial correlates of social disadvantage and child development. In particular, Mitchell reviews the effects of cumulative disadvantage as well as how the timing of disadvantage exposure influences child development.

Robert Moffitt discusses how he used data from 1996 through 2008 to analyze the effects of 1990s welfare reforms on family structure categories that incorporate the biological status of the male, finding that most policies did not affect family structure, but that some work-related reforms increased single parenthood and decreased marriage to biological fathers. He posits that these effects of work-related welfare policies on family structure stem from their effects on increased labor force participation and earnings of single mothers combined with factors special to biological fathers, including a decline in their employment and wages.

The University of Michigan's Tyler McCormick discusses his recent methodological work on verbal autopsies. He also reviews his ongoing efforts to integrate verbal autopsies in settings with partial coverage vital registration systems using an open source software platform designed to integrate with existing verbal autopsy & vital registration data infrastructures.

The renewed interest by the economic literature in the effect of birth order on children's outcomes has neglected trust as a long-term output of familial environment. Duke University’s Pierligi Conzo discusses how differences in the order of birth predict heterogeneous self-reported trust levels in Britain. Conzo looks at how psychology, economics and sociology help explain the relationship between birth order and trust.

Maria Glymour discusses the challenges of identifying modifiable causes of dementia because of the ambiguity in the outcome definition and the long and insidious onset of disease. She posits that many of the risk factors identified in observational epidemiology are correlates of childhood development, rather than causes of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. She discusses the necessity of finding novel study designs that circumvent the measurement and confounding biases intrinsic to research on dementia.

Sex differences in human mortality and health are widely documented in both low and high income countries. In this talk, Michael Gurven assesses sex differences in adult health and physical condition among small-scale, natural fertility populations of hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists like the Tisane Amerindians, looking at the effects of reproductive intensity on the female health of this population.

Kevin Lewis discusses how Big data is increasingly used to answer longstanding social scientific questions and how "digital footprints" of human interaction often provide unusually nuanced information on an unprecedented scale that often obscures as much as it illuminates. Lewis draws on the example of online dating to illustrate a few basic fallacies in how big data are often framed for social science research, and suggests some alternative (and potentially more constructive) paths moving forward.

Christina Kamis looks at the long-term consquences of parental mental health, specifically how childhood stressors influence adult mental health and well-being. Jessie West discusses the impact of disability on quality of life, examining disability influence over different stages of the life course.

The Hidden Information in Names

Daniel Adkins examines the influence of physical illness on sexual risk-taking behaviors in adolescence and young adulthood, both directly and through moderation of the impact of social disadvantage. He looks at the positive effects for social disadvantage and physical illness on sexual risk behavior—consistent with the development of fast life history behavioral strategies—among adolescents facing greater life adversity.