"Probabilistic Cause-of-Death Assignment using Verbal Autopsies"

ABSTRACT

In areas without complete-coverage civil registration and vital statistics systems there is uncertainty about even the most basic demographic indicators.  In such areas the majority of deaths occur outside hospitals and are not recorded.  Worldwide, fewer than one-third of deaths are assigned a cause, with the least information available from the most impoverished nations.  In populations like this, verbal autopsy (VA) is a commonly used tool to assess cause of death and estimate cause-specific mortality rates and the distribution of deaths by cause.  VA uses an interview with caregivers of the decedent to elicit data describing the signs and symptoms leading up to the death.  This talk describes a new statistical method to classify cause of death using information acquired through VA.  Unlike current approaches, our method shares uncertainty between cause of death assignments for specific individuals and the distribution of deaths by cause across the population.  We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method using side-by-side comparisons with both observed and simulated data.

“Exposure to the United States and Healthy Eating Among U.S. Immigrants:
A Life Course Perspective on Immigrant Health”

ABSTRACT

The negative acculturation perspective predicts that immigrants’ health advantages erode with increasing exposure to the U.S. due to the adoption of the unhealthy default American lifestyle. Focusing on diet, we argue that this perspective underestimates immigrants’ abilities to maintain healthy eating patterns, especially among adult immigrant arrivals, and fails to account for how migration during childhood can disrupt important developmental processes. We advance an alternative “life course perspective on immigrant health” and present evidence for it by examining the associations of age at arrival and duration of residence with healthy eating among adult immigrants. Our results suggest that earlier age at arrival is negatively associated with healthy eating and that duration of residence has a weak but positive association with healthy eating, especially among those who arrived as adults. The results call into question notions that emphasize a steady erosion of healthy eating with time and acculturation. Instead, they support the life course perspective and point to the importance of early childhood exposures for understanding how living in the U.S. influences healthy eating among immigrants.

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"Characterizing Cohort Loss Before Birth"

ABSTRACT

Answers to many central questions in the social sciences depend upon the assumption that cohort loss before birth is ignorable. Evidence from inferential population studies and small-scale cohort studies increasingly suggests otherwise. Up to 70% of human pregnancies terminate before birth; these losses appear to be non-random. In this research we consider the implications of prenatal cohort loss for a few key demographic questions, including the effects of early-life exposures on later-life health and the effects of child traits on parent outcomes. In so doing, we extend a long history of demographic research on cohort selection to the prenatal period. We conclude with a discussion of new, big data approaches to learn more about how prenatal exposures shape population traits.

"Minority Stress and the Health of Sexual and Gender Minorities: Challenges and Innovations in Population Studies"

ABSTRACT

In several highly cited papers, Dr. Meyer has developed a model of minority stress that describes the role of prejudice and stigma in promoting social stressors that bring about adverse health outcomes for LGBT people. The model has guided his and other investigators’ population research on LGBT health disparities by identifying the mechanisms by which social stressors impact health and describing the harm to LGBT people from prejudice and stigma. In this talk, Dr. Meyer will describe minority stress research findings and current challenges to the study of LGBT health. He will describe two new NIH-funded research projects that take advantage of methodological innovations. In these projects, Dr. Meyer and co-investigators assess the role of historical context and the social environment in understanding how social changes impact the study of minority stress to help understand health and well-being of LGBT people.

"Utilizing Smartphones to Study Disadvantaged and Hard-to-Reach Groups: The Newark Smartphone Reentry Project"

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I discuss the use of smartphones to collect real-time information on the experiences of men recently released from prison and on parole in Newark, New Jersey. Mobile technologies, specifically smartphones, offer social scientists a potentially powerful approach to examine the social world. They enable researchers to collect information that was previously unobservable or difficult to measure, expanding the realm of empirical investigation. For research that concerns resource-poor and hard-to-reach groups, such as men recently released from prison, smartphones may be particularly advantageous by lessening sample selection and attrition and by improving measurement quality of irregular and unstable experiences. The first part of this talk describes the project and the smartphone application. I then present findings from one working paper, which uses GPS estimates to assess neighborhood-level daytime exposure by men on parole and the association between exposure and crime rates.

"The Other One Percent: Indians in America "

ABSTRACT

People of Indian origin—whether they are Indian-born or American-born—make up about 1% of the U.S. population. While there are several anecdotal accounts of Indians in America as well as scholarly studies on specific sub-groups, The Other One Percent is the first data-driven comprehensive account of the community. The book focuses on three major issues: Selection—the processes by which people from a low-income country have become the highest-income and most-educated group in the U.S; Assimilation—the multiple pathways and challenges of integration while maintaining some aspects of their distinctive identities; and Entrepreneurship—from motels to medicine and finance to technology. Drawing from different academic disciplines, the book examines the entire community, from its successful to its marginal members. The Other One Percent is a follow-up to Kapur’s prior book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration From India on India, for which he earned a 2012 ENMISA Distinguished Book Award of the International Studies Association.

"Diffusion in Social Networks: New Theory and Experiments "

ABSTRACT

The strength of weak ties is that they tend to be long – they connect socially distant locations. Research on “small worlds” shows that these long ties can dramatically reduce the “degrees of separation” of a social network, thereby allowing ideas and behaviors to rapidly diffuse. However, I show that the opposite can also be true. Increasing the frequency of long ties in a clustered social network can also inhibit the diffusion of collective behavior across a population. For health related behaviors that require strong social reinforcement, such as dieting, exercising, smoking cessation, or even condom use, successful diffusion may depend primarily on the width of bridges between otherwise distant locations, not just their length. I present formal and computational results that demonstrate these findings, and then present an experimental test of the effects of social network topology on the diffusion of health behavior.

"New Thoughts on Old Age "

ABSTRACT

I will discuss late-age career transitions and retirement incentive plans, the annuity puzzle, and financial issues that are faced by the aging population. My discussion aims to stimulate new thoughts and argument about aging and retirement.

"Research Funding and the Foreign Born "

ABSTRACT

There has been a resurgence of interest in the link between immigration and economic activity. The evidence suggests that US education plays an important role in both attracting and retaining high-quality foreign-born students. This is particularly true in the case of doctorates trained in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), a workforce that is disproportionately foreign born and likely to contribute to long-term economic growth. Because of this, much effort is given toward attracting talented students and retaining them in the US workforce after they complete their studies. However, little is known about how that attraction and retention works. In this paper we use new data to examine the role of an important policy lever-research funding—in keeping both domestic and foreign-born workers in the US labor market.

"The Problem of Causal Mutualisms, The Promise of Polygenic Scores, and The Pervasive Divergence of Life Outcomes"

ABSTRACT
Casual mutualisms are sets of properties that have substantial reciprocal influence on one another. This may sound abstruse, but various big constructs in behavioral science, including "heritability," "SES", "health", and "achievement," exhibit clear signs of instantiating massive mutualisms and yet many implications of their doing so remain largely unpursued. The talk will describe the problem and several routes into it by reference to a series of phenomena that might otherwise appear unrelated, on intellectual achievement, educational attainment, and health disparities. Together these examples are used to argue for a more strongly integrative and developmental social science, as well as the potential value of predictive scores based on genomic information for helping reckon with mutualisms.

"Harnessing Social Networks and Social Systems for Obesity Prevention"

ABSTRACT

Our health and social networks are closely intertwined. In this talk, I describe how the complex web of family, friend, and peer relationships in which we are embedded—i.e., our social networks– influence eating, physical activity, and obesity, and how the dynamics of our evolving behaviors and social networks shape population obesity rates. I will outline intervention and policy strategies that have the potential to activate, harness, or alter social networks and broader social-ecological systems, so that these social contexts play a more supportive role in the prevention and treatment of obesity.

"Legal Origins and Female HIV "

ABSTRACT

More than half of all people living with HIV are women and 80% of all HIV positive women in the world live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper demonstrates that the legal origins of these formally colonized countries significantly determines current day female HIV rates. In particular, female HIV rates are significantly higher in common law Sub-Saharan African countries compared to Civil law ones. This paper explains this relationship by focusing on differences in female property rights under the two codes of law. In Sub-Saharan Africa, common law is associated with weaker female marital property laws. As a result, women in these common law countries have lower bargaining power within the household and are less able to negotiate safer sex and are thus more vulnerable to HIV, compared to their civil law counterparts. Exploiting the fact that some ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa cross country borders with different legal systems, we are able to include ethnicity fixed effects into a regression discontinuity approach. This allows us to control for a large set of cultural, geographical, and environmental factors that could be confounding the estimates. The results of this paper are consistent with gender inequality (the ‘feminization of AIDS’) explaining much of its prevalence in Sub-Saharan Africa.

"To Work for Yourself, for Others, or Not at All? How Disability Benefits Affect The Employment Decisions of Older Veterans "

ABSTRACT
The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs Disability Compensation (DC) program provides disability benefits to nearly one in five military veterans in the US and its annual expenditures exceed $60 billion. We examine how the receipt of DC benefits affects the employment decisions of older veterans. We make use of variation in program eligibility resulting from a 2001 policy change that increased access to the program for Vietnam veterans who served with “boots on the ground” in the Vietnam theater but not for other veterans of that same era. We find that the policy-induced increase in program enrollment decreased labor force participation and induced a substantially larger switch from wage employment to self-employment. This latter finding suggests that an exogenous increase in income spurred many older veterans to start their own businesses. Additionally, we estimate that one in four veterans who entered the DC program due to this policy change left the labor force, estimates in the same range as those from recent studies of the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program.