Kristine Witkowski

Salivary cortisol and posttraumatic stress disorder in a low-income community sample of women

BACKGROUND Studies of male combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder have demonstrated a profile of low cortisol. Studies with women with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have focused on childhood sexual abuse and holocaust survivors, both of whom experienced trauma during development, which could be different than adult trauma exposure. METHODS Using an epidemiologic sample of low-income women from an urban area in Michigan, we conducted structured psychiatric interviews and saliva cortisol collection on a subsample of women with exposure to trauma but never PTSD (n = 72), recent PTSD (n = 29), and past PTSD (n = 70). Saliva cortisol was collected at awakening, 30 minutes later, at bedtime, and during a clinic visit. RESULTS Recent trauma exposure but not past trauma exposure led to an increase in saliva cortisol. Neither recent PTSD nor past PTSD resulted in any saliva cortisol changes compared with the trauma exposed, never PTSD group. Recent major depression (past 12 months) demonstrated a weak effect (p =.08) on bedtime saliva cortisol. CONCLUSIONS While recent trauma exposure can increase saliva cortisol, neither recent nor past PTSD affected saliva cortisol in our community sample of women. Our data do not support saliva cortisol changes associated with PTSD.

The influence of income, education, and work status on women’s well being

This article, based on data from the Commonwealth Fund 1998 Survey of Womens Health, examines the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and womens health. Women living in poverty are less likely than their higher-income counterparts to have health insurance and use preventive services, and more likely to have access problems, suffer from chronic illnesses, and report low overall health scores. Women with low educational attainment are also less likely to have health insurance and to use preventive services, and more likely to report poorer health status than women with a college education. We conclude with implications for public policy.

The Effects of Gender Segregation, Labor Force Participation, and Family Roles on the Earnings of Young Adult Workers

This analysis takes a life-course approach to the study of gender inequality in earnings among young adults. The authors construct hypotheses that assess the effects of family role accumulation, earnings atrophy and occupational choice, occupational segregation, and statistical discrimination. The authors find considerable support for the hypothesis that the effects of current labor force attachment, work experience, and occupational segregation are conditioned by family roles. The negative effects of womens representation within occupations are confined to married parents, although the results for women are consistent with social closure explanations, whereas the results for men are more consistent with status composition explanations of the effects of gender segregation. This analysis also reveals interesting differences in the effects of current and prior labor force attachment that are conditioned by gender and life-course group. The results point to the need for more research that studies the relationship between labor force activity, occupational segregation, and family roles.

Organic-solvent water pollution and low birth weight in Michigan.

This pilot study explored the association between a measure of water pollution caused by benzene or chlorinated solvents and the incidence of low birth weights for white residents of Michigan counties. A positive relationship between water pollution by these contaminants and the per cent of low-weight births (less than 2,500 grams, or about 5.5 pounds) resulted despite controls for the incidence of teenaged childbearing, infrequent prenatal care, and mean household income from wages or salaries. Water pollution showed an association with the incidence of low birth weight that was as strong as that between low birth weight and low prenatal care. While correlation cannot prove causation, the finding suggests that impure water may impair fetal growth in Michigan.

Finding Frontiers in the U.S. Great Plains from the End of the Civil War to the Eve of the Great Depression

This chapter uses a new approach to studying patterns of spatial settlement to understand the forces that shaped the movement of the European-origin population into the semi-arid and arid natural region referred to as the Great Plains of the United States, between 1880 and 1940. Defining settlement as the process by which each of the roughly 500 counties in the region reached a population density threshold of four persons per square mile, the results evaluate hypotheses that suggest that the most important forces at work were a combination of structural attributes of the national process (population moving from east to west), climate (precipitation, temperature), other resources inside the region (irrigation, transportation, energy, employment in industry) and developments outside the region, such as the need to supply food to gold and silver miners working in the mountainous region to the west. The approach taken in the chapter includes a new strategy for working with changing county boundaries and a statistical method employing Cox proportional hazards models for repeated events. The results reveal a process of settlement diffusion in the Great Plains and demonstrate that variations in that diffusion process favoured areas well-suited to cropping, mining and manufacturing.

Land Use and Family Formation in the Settlement of the US Great Plains

In agricultural settings, environment shapes patterns of settlement and land use. Using the Great Plains of the United States during the period of its initial Euro-American settlement (1880–1940) as an analytic lens, this article explores whether the same environmental factors that determine settlement timing and land use—those that indicate suitability for crop-based agriculture—also shape initial family formation, resulting in fewer and smaller families in areas that are more conducive to livestock raising than to cropping. The connection between family size and agricultural land availability is now well known, but the role of the environment has not previously been explicitly tested. Descriptive analysis offers initial support for a distinctive pattern of family formation in the western Great Plains, where precipitation is too low to support intensive cropping. However, multivariate analysis using county-level data at 10-year intervals offers only partial support to the hypothesis that environmental characteristics produce these differences. Rather, this analysis has found that the region was also subject to the same long-term social and demographic changes sweeping the rest of the country during this period.