CCPR Seminar

Measuring Reproductive Autonomy: Are the questions different for Adolescents and Young Adults?

Ushma Upadhyay, PhD, MPH will discuss her previous work developing the Reproductive Autonomy Scale, which has been mainly used among adults. Her current work focuses on understanding reproductive empowerment among young people, and the development of a new psychometric measure of Sexual Health and Reproductive Empowerment for Young Adults (The SHREYA Scale).

Co-sponsored with The Bixby Center 

Neural mechanisms lie behind the emergence of dyadic affective reciprocity and transitive closure in human groups

This talk considers a set of findings from socializing cognitive social neuroscience that captures neural and social network data at multiple time points for a group of students who volunteered to organize workers in very difficult social situations on the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer, in the Summer of Respect project. We identify a neural mechanism for the emergence of affective reciprocity, the building block of social solidarity. We show that we can predict from neural signatures who group members will like five months in the future. We extend this work to a discussion of transitivity, or balance. Time permitting, we discuss how a neural signature of self-enhancement (narcissism) predicts becoming peripheral in small groups, supporting the idea that there is "no I in team".

Co-sponsored by the Sociology Department

The Reversal of the Gender Gap in Education and Family Dynamics in Europe

Although men tended to receive more education than women in the past, the gender gap in education has reversed in recent decades in most Western and many non-Western countries. In this talk, I will discuss the main results of a major research project that aimed to investigate the implications of the reversal of the gender gap in advanced education for family life across European countries. I highlight the results about union formation and assortative mating, discuss our findings about union stability as well as about husbands’ and wives’ relative earnings. Finally, I present some first results from research about implications for fertility behavior. To conclude, I will reflect on implications for conventional theories used in family sociology and demography.

Individual and Neighborhood Vulnerability over the Latin American Immigrant Health Experience

The state of Latino health seemingly defies the way in which the historical disadvantages faced by people of color in the United States get under the skin, and how place matters in reflecting or further reproducing these disparities. Hispanics –especially foreign-born individuals with lower socioeconomic statuses– have more favorable health than other race/ethnic groups –notably, U.S.-born non-Hispanic whites– in a limited but very important set of health outcomes such as cardiovascular function, some cancers and mortality across much of the life course.

In this talk, I discuss the mechanisms/phenomena driving the Hispanic immigrant health advantage, which is likely tied to processes of self-selection as well as to protection and resilience likely operating particularly well in heavily-concentrated Latino neighborhoods and enclaves. Throughout, I present my empirical research aimed at disentangling self-selection processes from the protection that immigrants might draw from fellow neighborhood and/or community members. I further discuss these findings in the context of how immigrants adapt in the longer term: these advantages and resilience eventually erode as immigrants spend more time in the United States –as well as across immigrant generations– through a series of processes by which immigrant and Latino vulnerability become somatized.

I conclude by speculating on the likely future of Latino and immigrant health, discussing how the resilience and vulnerability of Latino immigrants might evolve given recent major shifts U.S. immigration and social policies and practices, and due to important changes in the dynamics of migration between Mesoamerica and the United States.