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.
There is now consensus that concurrent partnerships increase transmission of infectious diseases in sparse networks -- like HIV in sexual partnership networks. Empirical research is accumulating that supports the hypothesis that concurrent sexual partnerships are one of the key drivers of the hyper-epidemics of HIV in some populations in Eastern and Southern Africa. The next step is intervention developmnet. This presentation reports on an NIH-funded pilot project of a concurrency reduction intervention.
Most demographic research on intergenerational processes focuses on the associations between the numbers and characteristics of individuals in successive generations, and ignores multigenerational (Non-Markovian) aspects of intergenerational mobility. These aspects include both the net effects of grandparents and early ancestors on individuals and also other types of path-dependent sequences of family characteristics.
The Global Health Initiative (GHI), President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and other global health programs are putting increasing emphasis on evaluation and learning to ensure that investments in global health are effective and achieve desired outcomes. At the same time, there is a growing debate in the evaluation literature on the most appropriate methods to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of health interventions in real world situations.
The prevailing model of migration in transitioning countries conceives of a risk-diversifying household in which members share a coherent set of preferences about the departure of one or more members to work elsewhere. Several decades of ethnographic research have questioned the applicability of this model by revealing the importance of gender hierarchies in family decisions. Some scholars argue that, in many contexts, women have little role in determining the migration behavior of spouses and other family members.
The share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since the early 1980s, but the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in these shifts by considering the effects of recent paternal and maternal incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study.
There are indications that the mean difference in socioeconomic status between homeowners and renters has been increasing in recent decades, and that these trends vary by race and ethnicity. This paper examines the roles of changes in the distribution of household demographic characteristics, the effects of those characteristics on the probability of being a homeowner, and local housing market characteristics in producing this apparent growth in inequality.