Deciding to Wait: Partnership Status, Economic Conditions, and Pregnancy during the Great Recession

The Great Recession was associated with reduced fertility in the United States. Many questions about the dynamics underlying this reduction remain unanswered, however, including whether reduced fertility rates were driven by decreases in intended or unplanned pregnancies. Using restricted data from the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth (N = 4,630), we exploit variation in state economic indicators to assess the impact of economic conditions on the likelihood of an intended pregnancy, an unplanned pregnancy, or no pregnancy for adult women without a college education. We focus on variations by partnership and marital status. Overall, we find that worse economic conditions were predictive of a lower risk of unplanned pregnancy. Women’s odds of intended pregnancy did not, however, respond uniformly to economic conditions but varied by marital status. When economic conditions were poor, married women had lower odds of intended pregnancy, whereas cohabiting women had greater odds of intended pregnancy

Neighborhood Context, Poverty, and Urban Children’s Outdoor Play

Although research consistently demonstrates a link between neighborhood conditions and physical activity for adults and adolescents, less is known about residential context and young children’s physical activity. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=2,210), we explore whether outdoor play and television watching are associated with children’s body mass indexes (BMIs) at age five; and whether subjective and objective neighborhood measures are associated with children’s outdoor play and television watching. Hours of outdoor play and television viewing are associated with BMI. Higher maternal perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy are associated with more hours of outdoor play, fewer hours of television viewing, and more trips to a park or playground. In addition, we find that neighborhood physical disorder is associated with more outdoor play and more television watching. Finally, we find that children living in public housing have one-third more outdoor play time than other children.residential context, physical activity, young children, body mass indexes, Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, television viewing

Acculturation and Self-Rated Health among Latino and Asian Immigrants to the United States

The ways in which immigrant health profiles change with shifts in acculturation is of increasing interest to scholars and policy makers in the United States, but little is known about the mechanisms that may link acculturation and self-rated health, particularly for Asians. Utilizing the National Latino and Asian American Study (NLAAS) and its data on foreign-born Latinos (N = 1,199) and Asians( N = 1,323) (Pennelletal.2004), we investigate and compare the associations between acculturation and self-rated health for immigrants to the United States from six major ethnic subgroups (Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Mexican, Cuban, and Puerto Rican). Using comprehensive measures of acculturation, we demonstrate that across ethnic groups, and despite the widely varying contexts of the sending countries and receiving communities, native-language dominance is associated with worse self-rated health relative to bilingualism, and measures of lower acculturation--coethnic ties and remittances—are associated with better self-rated health; and moreover, these associations are only partially mediated by socioeconomic status, and not mediated by acculturative stress, discrimination, social support, or health behaviors. We speculate that immigrants who maintain a native language while also acquiring English, as has been shown for other immigrant outcomes, attain a bicultural fluency, which also enables good health. Surprisingly, we do not find strong associations between duration of time in the United States or age at migrationﾗ measures frequently used to proxy acculturationﾗwith self-rated health. Our findings illustrate the complexity of measuring acculturation and its influence on health for immigrants

Objective and Subjective Residential Context and Urban Children’s Weight Status and Physical and Sedentary Activities

This paper fills this gap by addressing two research questions: first, we ask, are the activity patterns (outdoor play and television watching) of five-year-old children living in large cities associated with children’s weight status? Second, we ask, is residential context, and neighborhood safety in particular, associated with children’s activity patterns? Consistent with past research, we find that outdoor play is negatively associated with weight status, while television watching is positively associated with weight status. We also find, unexpectedly, that the poorest children are playing outdoors the most and watching the most television. Finally, we find that three measures of residential context: living in public housing, mothers’ perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy, and interviewer-assessed neighborhood physical disorder, are positively associated with children’s physical activity, but that neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage is not. Thus, this paper answers calls both for more research into the determinants of child obesity as well as more work integrating objective and subjective neighborhood characteristics and physical activity (Foster and Giles-Corti 2008)

Together Forever? Relationship Dynamics and Maternal Investments in Children’s Health

Using Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Data (N=4,342), this paper examines why relationship status matters for maternal health behaviors. The paper argues that a mother's decisions on how much to invest in her child are partly driven by her perception of how committed the father is to their relationship. Results show that several relationship dynamics measures, including multiple partner fertility, relationship quality, and for unmarried mothers, whether she believes she will eventually marry the father, all predict prenatal health behaviors above and beyond confounding factors. In addition, these relationship dynamics explain some of the advantage in maternal health behaviors married mothers have over those who are dating or who have broken up with the father of the baby by the time of the birth.

Neighborhoods and Food Insecurity in Households with Young Children: A Disadvantage Paradox?

Abstract In the United States, more than 1 in 5 households with children are unable to access and provide adequate food for a healthy, active lifestyle. We argue that the contribution of local context for food insecurity risk has largely been overlooked in favor of focusing on individual family characteristics, and that this is problematic given that mitigating food insecurity may be a communal process. We examine the relevance of neighborhood contributors to food insecurity among children, utilizing geocoded and nationally-representative data from the ECLS-K: 2010-2011 kindergarten cohort. We find little evidence that neighborhood socioeconomic, food retail, or social services characteristics directly impact food insecurity risk. However, our results reveal that family and neighborhood socioeconomic characteristics combine to impact food insecurity in ways consistent with a disadvantage paradox. As neighborhood concentrated disadvantage increases, higher-SES families’ risk of food insecurity increases, but lower-SES families’ risk decreases. This paradox is not explained by a higher concentration of social service organizations in more disadvantaged neighborhoods, and we theorize that impoverished families with children may share information and resources in disadvantaged communities to avoid food insecurity

Young children in urban areas: Links among neighborhood characteristics, weight status, outdoor play, and television watching

Although research consistently demonstrates a link between residential context and physical activity for adults and adolescents, less is known about young children’s physical activity. Using data from the U.S. Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N=1822, 51% male), we explored whether outdoor play and television watching were associated with children’s body mass indexes (BMIs) at age five using OLS regression models, controlling for a wide array of potential confounders, including maternal BMI. We also tested whether subjective and objective neighborhood measures - socioeconomic status (from U.S. Census tract data), type of dwelling, perceived collective efficacy, and interviewer-assessed physical disorder of the immediate environment outside the home -were associated with children’s activities, using negative binomial regression models. Overall, 19% of the sample were overweight (between the 85th and 95th percentiles), and 16% were obese (≥95th percentile). Hours of outdoor play were negatively associated with BMI, and hours of television were positively associated with BMI. Moreover, a ratio of outdoor play to television time was a significant predictor of BMI. Higher maternal perceptions of neighborhood collective efficacy were associated with more hours of outdoor play, fewer hours of television viewing, and more trips to a park or playground. In addition, we found that neighborhood physical disorder was associated with both more outdoor play and more television watching. Finally, contrary to expectations, we found that children living in public housing had significantly more hours of outdoor play and watched more television, than other children. We hypothesize that poorer children may have more unstructured time, which they fill with television time but also with outdoor play time; and that children in public housing may be likely to have access to play areas on the grounds of their housing facilities