Spring 2010

This talk will present the theoretical foundations, study design, and research findings of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, or Add Health. Add Health is a national representative study of more than 20,000 adolescents in 1995 who have been followed over time through their transition to early adulthood. The most recent wave of data collection in 2008 expanded collection of biological data to study social, behavioral, and biological linkages in health and developmental trajectories in young adulthood.

Mortality is being postponed at older ages. This finding, documented in 1994 and bolstered since, is a fundamental discovery about the biology of human ageing, a discovery with profound implications for individuals, society and the economy. Remarkably, the rate of deterioration with age seems to be constant across individuals and over time: it appears that death is being delayed because people are reaching older ages in better health.

Many studies have found a positive relationship between cognitive ability, as measured in childhood or youth, and subsequent survival, and several explanations of this have been offered, ranging from the idea that low ability is an indicator of adverse systemic events in infancy or childhood to the idea that high cognitive functioning is required continuously to maintain health and reduce threats to survival.

(joint work with Jennifer Beam Dowd)We proceed to analyze relationships between individuals' health status in 2006 on the one hand, and the run-up in housing values in their communities over the previous decade or more.

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary schools (from 2003 to 2005).

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that attributes fertility and its local variation in China as functions of government's birth planning policy. The study compares fertility in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of the most developed provinces in China, to examine the relationship between socioeconomic development and low fertility in a global context.

The first project develops and implements an innovative method of measuring quality of care in a developing country context by using Simulated Standardized Patients. The second project is a recently funded impact evaluation of state-run voucher programs for obstetric care in India.

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.