Older Adults Without Close Kin in the United States

Objectives: We document the size and characteristics of the population of older adults without close kin in the contemporary United States. Methods: Using the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the prevalence of lacking different types and combinations of living kin, examine how kinless-ness is changing across birth cohorts, and provide estimates of kinless-ness for sociodemographic and health groups. Results: In 1998–2010, 6.6% of U.S. adults aged 55 and above lacked a living spouse and biological children and 1% lacked a partner/spouse, any children, biological siblings, and biological parents. Kinless-ness, defined both ways, is becoming more common among adults in their 50s and 60s for more recent birth cohorts. Lacking close kin is more prevalent among women than men, native born than immigrants, never-married, those living alone, college-educated women, those with low levels of wealth, and those in poor health. Discussion: Kinless-ness should be of interest to policy makers because it is more common among those with social, economic and health risks; those who live alone, with low levels of wealth, and disability. Aging research should address the implications of kinless-ness for public health, social isolation, and the demand for institutional care

Projections of White and Black Older Adults without Living Kin in the United States, 2015-2060

Close kin provide many important functions as adults age, affecting health, financial well-being, and happiness. Those without kin report higher rates of loneliness and experience elevated risks of chronic illness and nursing facility placement. Historical racial differences and recent shifts in core demographic rates suggest that white and black older adults in the United States may have unequal availability of close kin and that this gap in availability will widen in the coming decades. Whereas prior work explores the changing composition and size of the childless population or those without spouses, here we consider the kinless population of older adults with no living close family members and how this burden is changing for different race and sex groups. Using demographic microsimulation and the United States Census Bureau’s recent national projections of core demographic rates by race, we examine two definitions of kinlessness: those without a partner or living children, and those without a partner, children, siblings, or parents. Our results suggest dramatic growth in the size of the kinless population as well as increasing racial disparities in percentages kinless. These conclusions are driven by declines in marriage and are robust to different assumptions about the future trajectory of divorce rates or growth in nonmarital partnerships. Our findings draw attention to the potential expansion of older adult loneliness, which is increasingly considered a threat to population health, and the unequal burden kinlessness may place on black Americans

THREE ESSAYS ON INTERDISCIPLINARITY AND KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

There is a broad contemporary interest in innovation, how ideas interconnect (or fail to), and how they relate to organizational structures and research funding. Those interested in enhancing innovation have initiated policies, formal and informal, to quicken its pace, ranging from dramatic increases in federal funding to calls and moves to reshape longstanding organizational features of research universities and professional associations. In this dissertation, I examine some of these policies and their outcomes using tools from text analysis and network science. I first look at whether the doubling of the National Institute of Health’s budget between 1998 and 2003 enabled a scientific revolution. I then explore the prevalence of interdisciplinarity in dissertation committees and whether dissertations with interdisciplinary committee members tend to examine more novel topics. After this, I explore the prevalence and nature of interdisciplinary research collaborations among contemporary core demographers. I conclude by reflecting on how these chapters shed light on the production, organization, and advancement of knowledge.Doctor of Philosoph

Demography and Social Network Differentiation

Nearly all societies in the world have completed or begun a demographic transition, but their experiences have varied in terms of timing, tempo and extent of mortality and fertility decline. I focus on understanding what implications such variation has for social interaction. Though prior literature has explored demographic contributions to opportunities for interaction between individuals of different ages, it has focused on social ties between very close kin (such as children and parents), particularly in the context of multi-generational co-residence. This paper extends this focus by considering broader kinship links in communities, which are important components of community integration. To do this, I use a simulation approach that combines the traditions of demographic micro-simulation and social network generation with techniques of agent-based modeling. Results are presented concerning how variations in demographic history manifest as differences in modern social networks. These are validated against a set of specific cases from Thailand

Sampling migrants from their social networks: The demography and social organization of Chinese migrants in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania

The streams of Chinese migration to Africa are growing in tandem with rising Chinese investments and trade flows in and to the African continent. In spite of the high profile of this phenomenon in the media, there are few rich and broad descriptions of Chinese communities in Africa. Reasons for this include the rarity of official statistics on foreign-born populations in African censuses, the absence of predefined sampling frames required to draw representative samples with conventional survey methods and difficulties to reach certain segments of this population. Here, we use a novel network-based approach, Network Sampling with Memory, which overcomes the challenges of sampling ‘hidden’ populations in the absence of a sampling frame, to recruit a sample of recent Chinese immigrants in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and collect information on the demographic characteristics, migration histories and social ties of members of this sample. These data reveal a heterogeneous Chinese community composed of “state-led” migrants who come to Africa to work on projects undertaken by large Chinese state-owned enterprises and “independent” migrants who come on their own accord to engage in various types of business ventures. They offer a rich description of the demographic profile and social organization of this community, highlight key differences between the two categories of migrants and map the structure of the social ties linking them. We highlight needs for future research on inter-group differences in individual motivations for migration, economic activities, migration outcomes, expectations about future residence in Africa, social integration and relations with local communities

Social Networks and Transnational Social Fields: A Review of Quantitative and Mixed-Methods Approaches

Ashton Verdery acknowledges assistance provided by the Population Research Institute, which is supported by an infrastructure grant by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24-HD041025), and the Institute for CyberScience at Penn State University.Scholars of transnationalism have argued that migrants create transnational social fields or spaces that connect their place of origin to destination areas. Despite the centrality that social networks have in the definition of these concepts, quantitative and mixed-methods social network research is rare in research on transnationalism. This situation, however, has changed over the last decade, and the transnational social networks of migrants have been studied with multiple methodologies. So far, this literature has not been systematically evaluated. With the aim of taking stock of this research, we classify the literature into four types of approaches (individual, household, dyad/small set, and community) and review their distinct contributions regarding the functioning of immigrants' transnational networks, as well as the relative strengths and limitations of each approach. On the basis of our analysis, we discuss pathways for future investigation

Community Lost? Changes and Stratification in Perceived Neighborhood Social Cohesion among Families with Children

CC BY-NC 4.0Neighborhood social cohesion is strongly associated with health and well-being, especially among families with children. However, there is a widespread perception in the media, policy circles, and prominent research traditions that neighborhood social cohesion has decreased in recent decades for the United States as a whole and among certain subpopulations. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence for such trends is thin. In this study, we use data on families with children from two studies, the Survey of Income and Program Participation and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, to explore trends in neighborhood social cohesion and how individual- and neighborhood-level characteristics pattern disparities in the experience of neighborhood social cohesion. Counter to popular perceptions, our results show increases in neighborhood social cohesion over recent decades, at least for families with children. However, our results reveal persistent disparities in the experience of neighborhood social cohesion by individual and neighborhood characteristics.OA publication support through Carolina Consortium agreement with Sag

Network Sampling with Memory: A Proposal for More Efficient Sampling from Social Networks

Techniques for sampling from networks have grown into an important area of research across several fields. For sociologists, the possibility of sampling from a network is appealing for two reasons: (1) A network sample can yield substantively interesting data about network structures and social interactions, and (2) it is useful in situations where study populations are difficult or impossible to survey with traditional sampling approaches because of the lack of a sampling frame. Despite its appeal, methodological concerns about the precision and accuracy of network-based sampling methods remain. In particular, recent research has shown that sampling from a network using a random walk based approach such as Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) can result in high design effects (DE)—the ratio of the sampling variance to the sampling variance of simple random sampling (SRS). A high design effect means that more cases must be collected to achieve the same level of precision as SRS. In this paper we propose an alternative strategy, Network Sampling with Memory (NSM), which collects network data from respondents in order to reduce design effects and, correspondingly, the number of interviews needed to achieve a given level of statistical power. NSM combines a “List” mode, where all individuals on the revealed network list are sampled with the same cumulative probability, with a “Search” mode, which gives priority to bridge nodes connecting the current sample to unexplored parts of the network. We test the relative efficiency of NSM compared to RDS and SRS on 162 school and university networks from Add Health and Facebook that range in size from 110 to 16,278 nodes. The results show that the average design effect for NSM on these 162 networks is 1.16, which is very close to the efficiency of a simple random sample (DE=1), and 98.5% lower than the average DE we observed for RDS

Americas Forgotten Orphans: An Urgent Call for the White House and Congress to Address Childhood Bereavement

Today, more than 2.2 million children under the age of eighteen in the United States have experienced the death of a co-resident parent. As a result of their loss, many of these children face significant physical, social, and economic hardships for the rest of their lives.In this first-of-its-kind report, we examine the current and historical trends in childhood bereavement and discover it is an epidemic hiding in plain sight impacting every state, race, and ethnicity in the nation.Beyond discovering this crisis, we provide a road map for federal lawmakers, philanthropists, and other public leaders to create equal, healthy, and prosperous futures for all our nation's orphans

Understanding Opioid Users’ Views on Fentanyl could help Reduce Overdoses

The opioid overdose crisis is a national public health emergency, made much worse in recent years by the widespread emergence of fentanyl – a highly potent synthetic opioid. This research brief summarizes the findings from their research conducted in southwestern Pennsylvania in 2017 and 2018. Results show that the majority of interviewees who use opioids are fearful of and want to avoid fentanyl and would utilize harm reduction strategies such as fentanyl test strips if they were made more widely available