Emily Smith-Greenaway (USC)
Emily Smith-Greenaway is Dean’s Professor of Sociology and Professor of Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. Her research seeks to infuse social-psychological perspectives into demography to advance how we quantify and theorize key population processes and how we study them in cause and consequence. Much of her work focuses on studying the levels, patterning, and consequences of bereavement. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and has appeared in demography, sociology, and general science journals including Annual Review of Sociology, Demography, Population and Development Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Social Forces.
Despair of deaths? Exploring the childhood cost of early adult mortality
The United States has experienced worsening mortality trends in recent years, principally due to the rise in midlife mortality. Middle-aged adults are often the parents of dependent-aged children, raising questions about the consequences that these early adulthood deaths portend for the next generation. In this talk, I present findings from a series of papers studying the levels and consequences of parental death using Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study data—a study featuring an urban sample of racial and ethnic minorities disproportionately born to unmarried parents. By exploring the linkages between parental death and outcomes across various life domains, the results offer a comprehensive assessment of the potential for parental death to be a cause, not only a consequence, of despair.
