Christina Cross wins prestigious award for paper that parses out racial/ethnic differences when looking at family structure & children’s education

Head shot of Christina Cross

A paper by Harvard Pop Center post-doctoral fellow Christina Cross, PhD, was selected by the National Council on Family Relations (NCFR) as the winner of the 2020 Reuben Hill Award. Cross’s paper, which is being recognized for making a “substantial and significant contribution to family research and theory (with a requirement of theory development),” was selected by a committee that reviewed over 30 leading scholarly journals in the family field.…

How stressors are perceived may contribute to differences in mental health between Black and white older adults

Head shot of Leah Abrams

Despite higher levels of exposure to common chronic stressors across five life domains (health, financial, residential, relationship, and caregiving), Black study participants were found to suffer less from symptoms of anxiety and depression than white study participants. Our new Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work, Leah Abrams, PhD, is an author on a paper that that explores how stress appraisal (the extent to which stress exposures are perceived to be…

Assessing the scale for assessing depression in rural South Africa

Two South African women wearing colorful clothes

Researchers from the Harvard Pop Center in Cambridge, MA and the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa who are affiliated with the HAALSI study have published a paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders that finds that the reliability of the commonly used scale to assess depression (Center for Epidemiologic Depression Scale (CES-D)) differed by gender. Authors of the study include: Leslie B. Adams, Meagan Farrell, Sumaya Mall,…

Geotagged tweets used to better assess urban mobility, neighborhood isolation in 50 U.S. cities

Findings of a research study show that even though residents of black and Hispanic neighborhoods traveled outside of their home neighborhoods, they were far less exposed to nonpoor or white middle-class neighborhoods than residents of primarily white neighborhoods, suggesting that segregation persists in some of the country’s largest cities. Two authors of the study—Mario L. Small, PhD, and Robert J. Sampson, PhD—are affiliated with the Harvard Pop Center.  

When it comes to hiring, racial discrimination against African-Americans in U.S. holding steady

Despite improvements in racial bias and inequities in certain respects over the last 25 years in the United States, a new meta-analysis indicates that there has been no change in the level of hiring discrimination against African-Americans, while there has been some improvement within the Latino population. Harvard Pop Center faculty member Devah Pager, PhD, is author on a paper published in PNAS. Read more in Northwestern Now.

Impact of long-term unfair treatment on cardiovascular health in women found to vary by race

Rebecca C. Thurston, PhD, an alumna of the Harvard RWJF Health & Society Scholars program, is an author on a study published in Health Psychology that has found that Caucasian women who were exposed to cumulative (over a 10-year period) unfair treatment had worse cardiovascular health. The same exposures were not found to impact the CV health of women of the other races in the study.

Do racial disparities in cognitive outcomes in US adults vary by state of primary school attendance?

Harvard Pop Center Principal Analyst Sze Yan (Sam) Liu is lead author on a paper in Journal of the International Neuropsychological Society that explores whether variability in cognitive outcomes in adults is attributable to state of school attendance, especially during formative years of primary school. Pop Center faculty member Maria Glymour, PhD, is also an author on the paper.