Research
My research seeks to improve public well-being by exploring how social policies, contexts, and adverse experiences contribute to health inequities and how new types of data and methods can expand research to small and hard-to-reach populations. I detail select ongoing and completed projects below.
State & local contexts, adverse experiences, and health
Several of my research projects consider how state and local contexts and adverse experiences shape health outcomes throughout the life course. These papers also consider heterogeneity in the examined relationships across groups and time.
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In two ongoing projects, I interrogate the relationship between sociopolitical contexts and perinatal health. First, a first-authored paper situates the 2008 Obama Presidential campaign and electoral win in the symbolic empowerment framework to consider the potentially salubrious perinatal impacts of the election of the first Black US President. Using a novel measure of fetal death--male twinning rates--and interrupted time series analysis, results suggest a significant but short-lived reduction in susceptibility to fetal death among NH Black male twin cohorts conceived during the 2008 campaign. These findings underscore the symbolic importance of elections and join growing work demonstrating the potential for sociopolitical contexts to mitigate racial-ethnic health inequities. Second, a sole-authored paper evaluates the perinatal health consequences of Texas policies restricting access to reproductive health care. Using demographic composition techniques, I examine the contribution of compositional and real rate changes to changes in observed rates of low birth weight and infant mortality over time and across race-ethnicity. Preliminary results suggest that restrictions on family planning funding may have particularly deleterious effects on standardized Black infant mortality rates, thus exacerbating health inequities.
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A collaborative project (published in SSM-Population Health) integrates data on county characteristics from multiple sources to examine how the relationships between county-level rates of overcrowding and poverty and COVID-19 mortality rates vary across three theoretically-motivated periods of the pandemic. Results suggest that the relationship between overcrowding and mortality is positive and changes non-linearly over time. These findings underscore the need for policymakers to consider the ever-changing dynamics between local contexts and COVID-19 outcomes, as social disparities are likely to change with advancements in knowledge and disease spread.
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Other papers examine how adverse experiences, including exposures to discrimination, shape mental health and birth outcomes. One collaborative paper (published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior) examines how the relationship between parental death and mid-adulthood depressive symptoms varies by the child's life course stage at the time of death and the bereaved parent's gender. A first-authored paper (published in SSM-Mental Health) considers how COVID-19-related experiences of perceived discrimination and racism-related vigilance shape generalized perceptions of stress among Chinese immigrants in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina, and how those relationships vary by strength of ethnic identity. An ongoing sole-authored paper centers sociological theories to examine how the risk of low birth weight differs across maternal age and skin tone—a marker of exposure to discrimination. Preliminary results suggest that, despite similar risks of low birth weight across skin tone at maternal age 16, risks diverge with age, underscoring the importance of considering the heterogeneity of experiences within racial-ethnic groups when addressing health inequities.
New data & methods to forward population health research
I have worked on several research projects that examine social scientists' ability to use new types of data or data collection methods to make population inferences about small and hard-to-reach populations. A collaborative, innovative data collection project (published in Demography) tests the ability to use network sampling with memory for population research, which can forward both social policy and population health research among small and hard-to-reach populations. A first-authored project (published in Social Science and Medicine) estimates the proportion of local children captured in the Duke University Health System's Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and examines the suitability of using EHR data to study local child population health. Findings suggest that EHRs from a large health system can be used to assess local children's health, but that analyses should account for differences in capture rates (i.e., rates of local children included in the EHRs) by census tract characteristics.
Program & policy evaluations
As a researcher at the Urban Institute, I worked on several program evaluations that sought to understand how job training and health-related programs improved individuals' well-being. For example, interim evaluations of the Health Profession Opportunity Grant (HPOG) found that most participants remained in or completed their health care training programs or were employed one and two years into the program. An RCT study of a mentoring program (Promotor Pathway program) at the Latin American Youth Center in DC found that youth in the treatment group (i.e., received mentoring) were more likely to remain in school, were less likely to have a child, had higher rates of housing stability, and were more likely to report having a special adult in their life compared to youth in the control group. An evaluation of the Teen ACTION program in New York City, which sought to reduce risky behaviors among teens, found that teens largely benefited from the program and its encouragement of self-reflection. My work on these projects included training 32 US-wide grantees on data entry procedures and managing and analyzing program data for interim reports (HPOG), conducting qualitative interviews and focus groups and analyzing data for program evaluations (Teen Action), and using program data to conduct quantitative analyses (Promotor Pathway program).
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I also worked on the Mapping America's Futures project, which estimated possible population growth scenarios for commuting zones across the US between 2010 and 2030.