Inequality in Process: ​​Education, Health and Income's Participation as a Mechanism among Blacks and Whites

copy at: https://bit.ly/2Ob7azc

Though prior work has provided substantial evidence to suggest that Blacks and Whites differ in how much their general health improves from educational attainment, empirical attempts that explain how these populations arrive at disparate educational effects are quite sparse. In this study, to flesh out our understanding of how educational gradients manifest among racial subpopulations in the U.S, I examine how a key mediator of the education-health relationship---i.e., income---differs, among Blacks and Whites, in how it participates as a mechanism of a college degree's effect on general health status. I use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (n = 8,823) and sequential g-estimation in this investigation. I find that income varies markedly across groups in how it participates as a mechanism of a college degree's health status effect and that this differential behavior helps clarify Black-White disparities in educational gradients.

The Consequences of Contact with the Criminal Justice System For Health in Emerging Adulthood 
 
with: Hedwig Lee, Lauren C. Porter, Margret T. Hicken, and Jerald R. Herting.

Given that the United States currently has the highest prevalence of incarceration in the world, social scientist have begun to examine the lasting health consequences of contact with the criminal justice system in this context. In this paper, we add to the discourse around the incarceration's health effects in the US by estimating the change in health brought about about incarceration in early adulthood. 

Beholding Inequality: Race, Gender, Physical Attractiveness, and Socioeconomic Status in the United States

with:  Ellis P. Monk, and Hedwig Lee

​​Bringing theoretical insights from intersectionality and social cognition to bear on how the body relates to social inequality, this study uses nationally-representative data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to examine how race, gender, and physical attractiveness intersect to affect earnings in the US. We build upon existing research on "beauty" premia by (instead of solely using race/ethnicity and gender as "controls") directly examining whether “beauty” is more or less consequential for earnings among certain race/gender group combinations. In so doing, the present study is situated to make compelling contributions to ethnoracial, gender, bodily inequalities, while providing needed empirical bases for ongoing theoretical elaborations of theories of intersectionality. Preliminary results suggest that the association among physical attractiveness and income does indeed vary by race/ethnicity and gender, with African-American women experiencing the strongest earning penalties for not being assessed as attractive.

Estimating the risk of police-involved death by race and place

with: Frank R. Edwards and Hedwig Lee [Forthcoming]

Violent interactions with the police are, especially for people of color, a persistent feature of American social life. In this paper, we add to the collective project of explicating racial-disparities in police-involved mortality (i.e., deaths, of civilians, resulting from interactions with law-enforcement)  by examining how place factors into this social phenomenon.  To provide estimates of how geography and race interact to produce variable risks of police-involved deaths, we utilize non-traditional, crowd-sourced data (i.e., Fatal Encounters)--which explicitly address several shortcomings of federal efforts to document deaths involving police—as well as a methodological approach that allows for predictive precision on relatively sparse events (i.e., Bayesian, multilevel models, with weakly informative priors).Our results suggest that race and place may interact in important ways to generate risks of mortality due to police-involved deaths. 



​​Taking Stock: Measurement of Interpersonal Racism in Population Health Studies

​with: Courtney S. Thomas, Darrell L. Hudson, Hedwig Lee, and ​Margret T. Hicken
Interpersonal discrimination has been studied widely in relation to health as it is hypothesized to be an important mechanism by which racial inequities in health are maintained. However, the exact role of interpersonal discrimination here is not clear:  differences in levels of reports of discrimination vary by dataset and are often not different between Whites and persons of color, and the relation between discrimination and health is often shown to consistent across racial groups. It is likely that this lack of clarity in the role of interpersonal discrimination in racial health inequities, including that racial variation exists in what latent construct(s) manifest discrimination maps onto. To establish a comprehensive foundation for the study of discrimination and health (both going forward and for the interpretation of previous studies), we examine who tends to report different types of discrimination and how the items in the discrimination measures hang with items of other major and potentially related psychosocial factors.

Interracial Couples and the Association Among Marriage and Health

with: Ryan Gabriel

In this paper, we utilize almost a quarter-century of data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine the heterogeneity in the association among marriage and health across interracial and monoracial couples in the U.S. We hypothesize that variation in the health returns to marriage aligns with broader patterns of racial stratification. In particular, due to variation in exposure to discrimination-produced stress, individuals paired in more racially stigmatized marriages experience fewer health benefits from marriage than do equivalent individuals who are coupled in less racially stigmatized unions. We compare, specifically, the association between marriage and self-rated health for women and men involved in interracial marriages to the strength of said association for individuals in monoracial marriages. Preliminary results reveal that individuals married to Black partners experience weaker health returns to marriage than any other group (with individuals partnered in Black-White marriages benefiting the least).


Is Race in the Eye of the Beholder?: Using Interviewer-Recorded Race to Assess the Relationship Between Self-Identified Race, Observed Race, and Health

​
​with: Savannah Larimore, Hedwig Lee, Jane Rafferty, Margaret T. Hicken, and Taylor W. Hargrove
In the United States, race is a consistent predictor of health status. However, race as a concept has no meaningful biological validity. Instead, race is a sociopolitical construct used to classify human variation and justify the exploitation of groups defined as inferior based on external appraisals of arbitrary physical characteristics. At the macro-level, the results of these external racial appraisals expose individuals to various risk factors that affect health outcomes. While racial self-identification is commonly used in social surveys and analyses, recent scholarship has called for more attention to external appraisals of race in health research. Focusing on various health outcomes, our analysis introduces the concept of "interviewer-recorded" race to detemine if external evaluations of race matter above and beyond self-identified racial classifications. We find support for the use of this construct in health research, showing that external appraisals of race produce differing health profiles within self-identified racial groups.