Seminar Series

Self-harm is a critical health risk in adolescence, a life course stage when peers are important for healthy development. Theory suggests adolescents self-harm to quell mental distress and to meet explicitly social objectives, both functions that can be shaped by peer networks. To date, however, no study has systematically examined how self-harm relates to social integration.

The social and symbolic boundaries that define rural America are highly ambiguous. Paradoxically, the majority of rural Americans today live in metropolitan areas—at the periphery of big cities and suburbs. Since 1990, 746 or nearly 25 percent of all U.S. counties were redefined by OMB as metropolitan, shifting nearly 70 million residents from nonmetropolitan to metropolitan America.

Whether older adults reside in their long-term communities or move to other locations, the characteristics of the places where they experience the aging process likely have profound consequences for their abilities to adapt to changes such as bereavement, retirement, and ill health, as well as to maintain independence. The Chicago Health and Activity Space in Real Time (CHART) study will provide one example of the use of new technology to address fundamental questions in social capital accumulation, urban sociology and in life course studies of older adult health. CHART employs innovative smartphone-based methods for the identification of older adults’ activity spaces (i.e., locations of routine activities in daily life).

Nearly twenty-five years ago, Susan Watkins asked, “How do women appear on the pages of Demography?...what does Demography indicate about the way we as a scientific community, as authors, reviewers, and readers, understand women?” Her questions were about women, but also about gender, and they led her to conclude, among other things, that “a more general implication is that we should be more attentive to the fit between gender as it is constructed in the pages of Demography and gender as it is constructed in the societies we study.”

India is home to one-sixth of all people, one-fifth of all births, and one-fourth of all neonatal deaths. Why is death so likely at the beginning of life in India — even more so than in many poorer countries? This talk explores the evidence for one important reason: poor maternal nutrition.

Titles: Disparities in cardiovascular disease and the Great Recession: Did disparities in heart disease narrow or widen since the Great Recession? and Consequences of ignoring seemingly ignorable competing risks: Some interesting differences between hazard model and multistate life table results.

Duke University operates a secure computer lab that provides approved research projects access to use the non-public (raw) data collected by the Federal government, including Census, Bureau of Labor Statistics, National Center for Health Statistics, and many other agencies.

World population ageing patterns are changing, with older people (i.e. 65 years old and over) now being the fastest growing segment. As populations around the globe are rapidly ageing, their health and well-being have become a growing public health concern. Muscle and fat mass are strongly related with ageing process, are changing progressively with advance age and are related with a variety of chronic disease.

Much of the work connecting childhood adversities and adult health has operationalized adversity as the total number of adversities experienced by an individual. This strategy masks how adversities cluster together, whether certain adversities are more problematic for adult health, and variations within the experience of similar adversities. To better understand the relationship between childhood adversity and adult health, research is increasingly moving toward the use of latent class analysis (LCA) with distal outcomes. LCA is an attractive approach as it can identify unique subpopulations with similar adversity profiles without a priori distinctions made by the researcher and can incorporate more nuanced measurements of adversity. However, there are several available approaches to LCA with distal outcomes, and results may be inconsistent across these approaches. In this talk, I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) to evaluate the results from five different approaches to LCA with distal outcomes, including one that is not currently automated in statistical software. I show that different substantive conclusions can be drawn based on the approach chosen by the researcher. This study underscores the need for simulation studies assessing the performance of these approaches against relevant characteristics of social science data.

Chronic inflammation is implicated in many diseases of aging, and it is a potentially important mechanism linking environments and health over the life course. But this understanding is based almost exclusively on research in affluent industrialized populations, which are epidemiologically and ecologically unique in comparison with most populations globally, and historically. A comparative, life course approach challenges key assumptions of the chronic inflammation paradigm, and points toward promising directions for future research.