Browsing by Subject "life course"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Buying Single, But Not Alone: Homeownership and a Successful Single Gendered Adulthood
    (2022-05) Moore, Sarah Catherine
    With couples making up the majority of homebuyers, singles navigate homebuying and homeownership in unequal, gendered ways that both draw on and challenge entangled cultural narratives of how marriage and homeownership fit into successful adulthood. In these ways, we can see homeownership as a site where social actors engage in gendered institutions. They use various gendered schemas to orient their choices as single homebuyers and homeowners. Singles constantly negotiate how their singleness fits into a coupled understanding of homeownership. They both draw on cultural understandings of coupled homeownership to orient their choices as singles to match them, but they also carve out another version of successful adulthood that decouples homeownership from marriage and parenthood.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Children of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: Disrupted Education, Send-Down Experiences, and Subsequent Health
    (2015-06) Fan, Wen
    The relationships between early-life adversity, educational attainment, and subsequent health have been the focus of much sociological research. Questions remain, however, regarding whether and under what conditions one can recover from initial disadvantages, why education is persistently associated with health, and to what extent selection and turning points account for the long-arm of early-life adversities. This dissertation sheds light on these questions by examining children of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (CR), who came of age during the turbulent CR decade (1966-76), when colleges were closed, the state intervened to sever the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage, and approximately 17 million urban youth were sent to rural areas to do manual labor. First, I use the 2003 Chinese General Social Survey to show that members of the CR cohort compensate for their initial educational loss by returning to school at later ages at a rate much higher than adjacent cohorts. Parental education matters more for members of the CR cohort in facilitating school reentry, reflecting the early-life discrimination of high-status families during the Cultural Revolution. Next, using the Cultural Revolution as a natural experiment and the unique Chinese institutional arrangements as a single-party state society, I construct two tests to assess three theoretical perspectives dominant in the education-health literature: spurious correlation, human capital, and fundamental cause theory. Drawing on three cross-sectional data sets collected in 1994, 2002, and 2010, both tests provide strong support for fundamental cause theory, showing that access to resources is the key underlying the educational gradient in health, while suggesting the specific form could differ across societies. Lastly, based on life history data collected in 1994, I investigate midlife consequences of the rustication ("sent down"�) experience. Propensity score analysis indicate a selection process due to the shifting rustication policy, accounting for the poorer subsequent health of those who were sent to rural areas and stayed there for a long time from the trailing-edge CR cohort. Taken together, this dissertation highlights the roles of the state, institutional arrangements, and historical timing in the shaping of educational attainment, as well as the relationships between early-life adversity, education, and health.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Social Pattern and Causes of Dementia Prevalence Decline in the United States
    (2022-07) Lee, Mark
    Age-adjusted dementia prevalence has significantly declined in the United States over the last 25 years, despite little advancement in the biomedical treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease or improvement in proximal dementia risk factors. In this dissertation, I analyze data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) to improve current understanding of the descriptive trends and causal mechanisms underlying dementia prevalence decline. In my first study, I rebut the argument that dementia decline in the HRS is an artefact of unmeasured panel conditioning. I show that practice effects do not bias the estimated secular trend in dementia prevalence after accounting for selective panel attrition. In my second study, I argue that cohort trends in early life risk factors offer a more plausible explanation of the observed dementia improvement than period trends, which have been emphasized in previous research. In my third study, I empirically test the contribution of early life risk factors to cohort trends in dementia prevalence. I find that age- and sex-adjusted dementia prevalence declined 2.3 percentage points per 10-year increase in birth year for cohorts born 1892-1952. The majority (72%) of this trend was explained by increases in educational attainment for more recent cohorts. Proximal risk factors had little influence net of education and other early life factors. The trend in dementia decline was steeper for Black than White Americans, and the causal mechanisms also differed by race. In my fourth study, I document cohort trends in midlife cognitive aging. I find that, compared with those born 1942-1947, those born 1954-1959 entered midlife with lower cognitive function, but exhibited greater maintenance of cognition over time. This suggests that dementia prevalence may continue to improve as this latter-born cohort ages. Overall, this research reinforces the importance of social improvement (especially educational expansion) across the 20th century for cognitive health improvements in the 21st century. This work indicates that interventions to reduce or delay dementia and ameliorate racial disparities should be expanded to include social determinants of health across the life course.