While socioeconomic gradients in health are well established, the biological mechanisms underlying these associations are not well understood. This talk will provide an overview of recent work investigating how latent infections may link social factors, stress, and disease.
Respondent-Driven Sampling is an innovative sampling technique that has recently gained considerable popularity as a method for studying "hidden" and "hard-to-reach" populations. Furthermore, the RDS methodology comes with strategies that, it is claimed, make it possible to compute estimates of population-level characteristics and for constructing confidence intervals for such estimates. Yet despite the widespread use of RDS, there remain serious questions about the statistical validity of the methodology.
The pace of aging in human societies has been of considerable interest to scientists and social scientists, and although some captive animal models for aging have been developed, no comprehensive studies of aging in wild animals have ever been conducted. Here we use data for both sexes from a 37-year longitudinal study of a wild baboon population to document patterns aging and place them within a life history context for this species, a primate relative of humans that evolved in the same savannah habitat as humans did.
We studied the relationship between early life socioeconomic status, household structure and adult all cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland among cohorts born in 1936-1950. We found significant associations between early life social and family conditions on all cause mortality as well as mortality from cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and alcohol related diseases, accidents and violence, with protective effects of higher childhood SES varying between 10% and 30%.
DuPRI Seminar Kick-Off. Reception to announce upcoming seminars which will allow the Duke community to hear cutting edge research from renowned scholars and will serve as a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges.
This paper tests an insider-outsider model of harassment and involuntary unemployment.We exploit random assignment of appellate judges to three-judge panels and the fact that ajudge's gender and party of appointment predict outcomes in sexual harassment litigation todemonstrate a causal relationship between appellate decisions creating precedent in sexualharassment law and subsequent labor market outcomes.
A growing body of research highlights that in-utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This paper examines the effect of one such condition "prenatal maternal stress" on birthweight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life.
This paper uses newly-released data from 2008 American Community Survey (ACS), along with the similar microdata from the 1980 decennial census, to examine recent changes in interracial marriage. The 1980-2008 period brought rapid increases in interracial marriage between whites and African Americans, slower increases in observed marriages between whites and Hispanics, and an end to the long-term rise in marriages between whites and both Asian Americans and American Indians. Marriages between natives and the foreign-born, however, increased dramatically over 2000-2008, especially among U.S.
We have demonstrated a close match between self-reported race and bio-ancestry estimated from survey responses and 162 genetic ancestral informative markers drawn from 2,065 racially and ethnically diverse U.S. college students. Allowing each individual to belong to one and only one ancestral population, 99.3%, 94.7%, and 97.7% of self-reported whites, blacks, and East Asians, respectively, were classified into the white, black, and East Asian categories.
This paper reports on an extension of group-based trajectory modeling to address non-random subject attrition or truncation due to death that varies across trajectory groups. The effects of the model extension are explored in both simulated and real data. The analyses of simulated data establish that estimates of trajectory group size as measured by group membership probabilities can be badly biased by differential attrition rates across groups if the groups are initially not well separated.