Housing insecurity is a pressing public health problem: U.S. rates are the fastest-growing among older adults, one-third of whom spend more than 30% or 50% of their income on housing. Housing insecurity – defined as limited access to and availability of affordable, stable, safe, and adequate housing and neighborhoods – is a risk factor for numerous adverse health outcomes including chronic conditions, disability, and mortality. Although federal housing assistance is associated with improved health outcomes, current programs support only about one-third of income-eligible, cost-burdened adults aged 50+ who need assistance. Moreover, the relationship between housing assistance, housing insecurity, and adults health and disability trajectories remains poorly understood.
One unexplored area is how housing assistance and multiple dimensions of housing insecurity experienced during emerging adulthood, a critical life course period, relate to midlife and older adult health and disability trajectories. While previous research has examined effects of housing assistance and housing insecurity on health, studies often use cross-sectional or convenience samples, focus on a single rather than combined effects of multiple housing insecurity dimensions, and rarely include income-eligible older adults who do and do not receive housing assistance. Examining how previous housing histories relate to health and disability later in life will enhance our understanding of when housing assistance and housing insecurity matter most, and inform future housing interventions.
This study leverages more than 50 years of nationally representative, prospectively-collected longitudinal life course data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to examine how midlife and older adult health and disability trajectories relate to housing assistance and housing insecurity experienced during emerging adulthood, a critical life course period. This project seeks to: (1) develop typologies of housing assistance and housing insecurity life course histories for midlife and older adults; (2) examine how trajectories of health and disability during midlife and older adulthood relate to previous histories of housing assistance and housing insecurity; and (3) assess the extent to which relationships between midlife and older adult health and disability trajectories and housing history typologies vary by neighborhood context.
Complementing this research, a detailed training plan will build on the applicants prior training in environmental psychology and architecture to include (1) aging, gerontology, and life course theory; (2) age-related disability, mobility, and physical function; (3) longitudinal survey data analysis skills, including latent variable modeling; and (4) external grant-writing skills. This integrated training will prepare the applicant for a successful independent research career focused on aging, housing, and neighborhoods.
Findings from this proposal will generate critical insights concerning how and when housing assistance and housing insecurity matter most for midlife and older adults health and disability, inform future housing interventions, and elevate older adults need for housing assistance.
Since its inception in the early 1960s, the Social Environment and Health Program (SEH) has been a leader in the development of theory and research on the major role of psychosocial factors in the etiology and course of both mental and physical health and illness. Founded as a cross-disciplinary program, the program has been home to The Americans’ Changing Lives (ACL) study for over thirty years, which is the oldest ongoing nationally representative longitudinal study of the role of a broad range of social, psychological, and behavioral factors in health and the way health changes with age over the adult life course. Visit the ACL website for more information.
Today, SEH maintains the foundational tenet that health is socially determined by the confluence of factors at the individual, environmental, and societal level over the adult life course. We specialize in integrating knowledge from across multiple disciplines and using innovative & cutting-edge methods to characterize the social and environmental contexts in which people live their lives. Our interdisciplinary faculty includes social, environmental, psychiatric, and infectious disease epidemiologists, as well as gerontologists, climate scientists, and experts in human-centered design. Our work examines interrelated contextual exposures such as the residential neighborhood social and built environment, climate events, housing conditions, and the contexts that shape the distribution of infectious pathogens and their consequences. We do this work with particular attention to issues of health equity. We examine a broad range of health and behavioral outcomes including cognitive function, disability, musculoskeletal health, serious mental illness, sleep, and housing instability. We also interrogate the factors & processes that may link or modify the relation between the environment and these health & behavioral outcomes, including biomarkers of premature aging and housing modifications.
This proposal seeks to characterize the upstream conditions identified by this framework in the persistent, current, and low poverty census tracts in the Karmanos Cancer Institute (KCI) catchment area and throughout Michigan by 1) developing a data resource of variables characterizing the upstream factors (social inequities & social justice; institutional environments; and economic, physical, social, and service living environments) in the framework in the KCI catchment area and across Michigan; 2) characterizing the upstream factors of persistent, current, and low poverty census tracts using those data; and 3) evaluating associations between individual components of the framework and cancer prevention, incidence, mortality, and survivorship outcomes.
This project seeks to document the frequency and duration of diarrheal disease and acute respiratory infection in early childhood, and assess how intergenerational disadvantage and household and community circumstances shape disparities in children’s health, illness, and healthcare utilization. The results of this project will allow child health programs and health systems to better address health disparities in illness and healthcare utilization among young children, and inform our understanding of the consequences of intergenerational disadvantage for children globally.
This project proposes to study determinants of mid-life health in the areas most beset by such place-based health inequalities: rural communities in the South and Appalachia.
The Survey Research Operations (SRO) will provide sample design services, manage the sample purchase, and provide consultation on sample monitoring and interviewer training. The SRO Director of Sampling Operations will design and oversee implementation of the sampling plan and the purchase of an Address Based Sample (ABS), composed of addresses selected from the USPS sequence delivery file.
This project aims to evaluate the impact of local environmental conditions – seasonal pollen – on mental health and death by suicide in the United States and identify contributing factors which would be sensitive to policy intervention.
The number of women and children living in close proximity to armed conflict and/or community-based violence has increased globally and in the United States in recent decades. Violence is known to disrupt health service delivery and individuals ability to utilize certain health services, including antenatal care and facility delivery. These disruptions likely contribute to poor maternal health outcomes, as well as disparities in maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. However, the limitations of existing data make it difficult to identify the underlying mechanisms that shape these relationships, as well as how exposure to violence may differentially affect maternal health outcomes among different sub-populations. The objective of this project is to estimate how the precise location, timing, and intensity of community-based violence affect maternal health outcomes, including whether and how exposure to violence contributes to disparities in maternal health. This project draws on data from a three-year cluster-randomized controlled trial that began prior to the onset of escalated community-based armed conflict in the study area. Combining household panel survey data collected before and after the onset of violence, health facility records, and a dataset of violent conflict events provides a unique opportunity to study the effects of community-based violence on maternal health with two specific aims. In the first aim, we will analyze how differences in the precise location, timing, and intensity of community-based violence affect the timing and quality of antenatal care and whether women deliver at a health facility. In the second aim, we will test whether the relationship between exposure to violence and maternal healthcare utilization outcomes varies by the location of violent events. Under this aim, we will draw on health facility data to test whether exposure to violence near health facilities affects the uptake of maternal healthcare services differentially from other types of healthcare services. For the analyses in both aims, we will examine whether and how the relationship between exposure to violence and maternal healthcare utilization outcomes varies by women’s socio-economic status and education. Addressing maternal health disparities is a key challenge in population health in the United States and globally, and a scientific priority. This research will enhance our understanding of the location-related mechanisms through which exposure to violence shapes maternal healthcare utilization, and disparities in maternal health outcomes; identify promising avenues for future research in this area; and generate rigorous evidence for effective interventions to improve maternal health outcomes and equity among populations affected by violence.
Landscapes of Population Health (“Landscapes”) is an interdisciplinary research collective that includes historians, sociologists, psychologists, epidemiologists, and statisticians who bring their expertise in historical and contemporary racial violence and control, environmental justice, epigenomics, and population health to study the link between structural racism and population health. We bring together critical theories from the humanities and innovative potential biological mechanisms from the bench and medical sciences to better understand the root causes of patterns in population health. Our work includes active data collection, work on existing data sets, and the development and implementation of measures. In addition to our focus on the science itself, we are committed to changing the demography of the scholars who drive our epistemology.
Landscapes Collaborators outside of ISR
We are only beginning to clarify the ways the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in substantial changes to American neighborhoods. There has been an excess of permanent business closures, particularly among small neighborhood businesses most vulnerable to social distancing, such as local barbershops and nail salons. COVID-19 outbreaks in late September 2021 caused 2,000 neighborhood schools to close for an average of six days in 39 states.
A burgeoning body of research has tried to understand the forces driving these trends, focusing on infectious disease transmission at the individual level or economic models at the business level. What is not considered is the context in which these changes are taking place. By context, we mean the neighborhood community environment that holds the opportunities, restrictions, risks, and flexibility for post-pandemic growth. The community environment includes:
- Job opportunities in business sectors robust to social distancing;
- Comprehensive broadband internet access to facilitate telemedicine, online schooling, remote work, and online grocery shopping;
- Parks and walkable streets to facilitate socially distanced physical activity and social interaction to mitigate social isolation brought on by the pandemic; and
- The provision of medical care through the availability of alternate health care providers and pharmacies.
Access to these neighborhood resources is not equally distributed across America, reinforcing risk for vulnerable populations, including older adults, children and adolescents, racial/ethnic minorities, and those in rural areas. However, a lack of national, standardized, longitudinal metrics of the local neighborhood environment has hindered the ability to identify which communities are most vulnerable to the immediate and longer-term consequences of the pandemic for a host of behavioral, psychological, social, and economic outcomes.
To address this limitation in the nation’s data infrastructure, we will augment, curate and disseminate data from our National Neighborhood Data Archive (NaNDA). This dataset includes a wealth of physical, social and economic characteristics of the local neighborhood across the United States (e.g., racial segregation, business density, environmental hazards, broadband internet access, and healthcare availability), in the years both before and since the pandemic. We will participate with the Consortium on Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research on COVID-19 to integrate, share, and analyze spatially referenced neighborhood data that can be readily linked to existing survey data, cohort studies, or electronic health records at various levels of geography. We will work with the COVID-19 Consortium Coordination Center to identify and create key neighborhood metrics that are priorities for research teams in the Consortium, including a set of common data elements (CDEs) on the social, behavioral and economic indicators of the COVID-19 pandemic at the neighborhood level. We will also develop new metrics of longitudinal neighborhood change in the decades preceding the pandemic, which can inform community risk and resilience since the pandemic.
The Child Development Supplement (CDS) is an integral and on-going component of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), a longitudinal survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. families that began in 1968. With data collected on the same families and their descendants for 41 waves over 52 years (as of 2020), PSID is a cornerstone for empirical social science research in the U.S. Through its long-term measures of economic and social wellbeing, and based on its weighted representative sample of U.S. families that now includes two major immigrant refresher samples, the study has advanced research on the dynamics of social, economic, demographic, and health processes and their interrelationships. Five waves of CDS have been conducted: three on the original cohort of children born between 1985 and 1997 (in 1997, 2002/2003, and 2007/2008) and two waves (in 2014 and 2019) on the next generation of PSID children who were born between 1997 and 2019.
This project has two specific aims. The first is to design and field a follow-up wave of CDS in 2021, collecting re-interview data on children aged 2-17 years who participated in CDS-19, through interviews with primary caregivers and older children aged 12-17 years. The second specific aim is to process, document, and distribute the new CDS-21 data, with scale composites, generated variables, and individual-level links to detailed school data from the National Center for Education Statistics. The 2021 wave of CDS will, in conjunction with data from CDS-14 and CDS-19, provide unique and valuable prospective panel data to study the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, lockdown, and recession. The study will provide comprehensive and rich information on a large, nationally representative sample of children that includes an over-sample of African Americans and a new refresher sample of children in immigrant families. These data will be available free of charge through the PSID Online Data Center, which provides customized extracts and codebooks, detailed study documentation, and comprehensive user education and support.