Lisa Neidert

On the Validity of Using Census Geocode Characteristics to Proxy Individual Socioeconomic Characteristics

Investigators of social differentials in health outcomes commonly augment incomplete micro data by appending socioeconomic characteristics of residential areas (such as median income in a zip code) to proxy for individual characteristics. However, little empirical attention has been paid to how well this aggregate information serves as a proxy for the individual characteristics of interest. We build on recent work addressing the biases inherent in proxies and consider two health-related examples within a statistical framework that illuminate the nature and sources of biases. Data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and the National Maternal and Infant Health Survey are linked to census data. We assess the validity of using the aggregate census information as a proxy for individual information when estimating main effects, and when controlling for potential confounding between socioeconomic and sociodemographic factors in measures of general health status and infant mortality. We find a general, but not universal, tendency for aggregate proxies to exaggerate the effects of micro-level variables and to do more poorly than micro-level variables at controlling for confounding. The magnitude and direction of these biases, however, vary across samples. Our statistical framework and empirical findings suggest the difficulties in and limits to interpreting proxies derived from aggregate census data as if they were micro-level variables. The statistical framework we outline for our study of health outcomes should be generally applicable to other situations where researchers have merged aggregate data with micro data samples.

Age patterns of smoking in US Black and White women of childbearing age

OBJECTIVES The purpose of the study was to describe age patterns of smoking among Black and White women of reproductive age, with cohort membership controlled for. METHOD Data from the 1987 National Health Interview Survey Cancer Supplement, weighted to be nationally representative, were used to calculate the fractions of women who were ever smokers, quitters, and current smokers by age and race. Summary distributions of age patterns of smoking behaviors by race were estimated; proportional hazard models were used to avoid confounding of age and cohort. RESULTS White women begin smoking at younger ages than do Blacks but are more likely to quit and to do so at young ages. Rates of current smoking converge between Blacks and Whites by age 25, and may cross over by 30. Education-standardized results show larger Black-White differentials in ever smoking and smaller differences in quitting. CONCLUSIONS Our findings confirm that womens age patterns of smoking vary by race. Age x race interactions should be considered in smoking research and anti-tobacco interventions. For Black women, delayed initiation and failure to quit call for increased emphasis on interventions tailored to adults. These findings have possible implications for understanding Black-White differences in low birthweight, child health, and womens health.

Converting Education into Earnings: The Patterns among Hispanic Origin Men

We evaluate the functional form of the relationship between education and earnings for Hispanic and non-Hispanic white men to determine whether the payoffs to education vary with level of schooling, and whether credential effects can be discerned. Results indicate that for all groups the usual linear specification, while offering the advantage of parsimony, fits the data less well than more complex models. The levels model best predicts the earnings of Puerto Rican and other Spanish origin workers, while the credential model is best suited for Mexican, Central/South American, and non-Hispanic white men. Credential effects accrue to all groups, except the other Spanish, but Central/South Americans only receive added income bonuses for the completion of a college degree, whereas Mexican, Puerto Rican, and non-Hispanic white men also receive a bonus for a high school diploma.

A note on the measurement of hypertension in HHANES.

Using data from the HHANES, we found the rates of elevated blood pressure readings on clinical examination to be extremely low for a sample of Mexican American and Puerto Rican women. The prevalence rates were one-fourth to one-fifth the rates found for a comparable sample of White women from NHANESII. These findings are discrepant with the little that is known about hypertension prevalence among Hispanics and with estimates of hypertension prevalence for Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans drawn from NHANESII. While our HHANES samples women had much lower rates of clinical high blood pressure than Whites, they reported hypertension histories in excess of Whites. Rates of medicine usage among Hispanics were insufficiently large for effective treatment to explain the disparity. The prevalence estimates increased, but the relative discrepancies remained when we altered our sample specifications and clinical high blood pressure measure. A possible explanation for these discrepancies is that few physicians performed the majority of blood pressure readings in our HHANES sample. This may have been statistically inefficient. The discrepancies noted suggest that HHANES may not be a reliable source of information on hypertension among Hispanic women.

The Social Geography of Unmarried Cohabitation in the USA, 2007–2011

US studies of marriage and cohabitation have mainly highlighted the social and racial differentials as they were observed in cross-sections, and have as a result essentially focused on the “pattern of disadvantage”. The evolution of such social differentials over time and space reveals that this pattern of disadvantage has clearly persisted, but that it is far from covering the whole story. Historically, there has been a major contribution to the rise of cohabitation by white college students, and later on young white adults with higher education continued to start unions via cohabitation to ever increasing degrees. Only, they seem to move into marriage to a greater extent later on in life than other population segments. Also, the religious affiliation matters greatly: Mormons and evangelical Christians have resisted the current trends. Furthermore this effect is not only operating at the individual but at the contextual level as well. Conversely, even after controls for competing socio-economic explanations, residence in areas (either counties or PUMA-areas) with a Democratic voting pattern is related to higher cohabitation probabilities. And, finally, different legal contexts at the level of States also significantly contributed to the emergence of strong spatial contrasts. Hence, there is a concurrence of several factors shaping the present differentiations, and the rise of secular and liberal attitudes, i.e. the “ethics revolution”, is equally a part of the explanation.