Browsing by Author "Denney, Justin T."

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Community social environments and cigarette smoking
    (Elsevier, 2022) Denney, Justin T.; Sharp, Gregory; Kimbro, Rachel Tolbert
    Cigarette smoking remains a primary contributor to health disparities in the United States, and significant evidence suggests that smoking behavior is socially influenced. Though residential neighborhoods are important for health disparities, recent evidence suggests that people spend the majority of their waking time away from the residential neighborhood. We advance research on neighborhoods and smoking by using individual, neighborhood, and activity space data for adults in the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (L.A.FANS). Moving beyond socioeconomic indicators of neighborhoods, we investigate the ways in which residential neighborhood social cohesion, neighborly exchange, and perceived danger impact smoking behavior after accounting for confounding factors in both the residential neighborhood and other activity spaces in which adults spend their days. We find that perceptions of danger in the residential neighborhood is robustly associated with the likelihood of smoking cigarettes. Further, measures of community social organization interact with perceived danger to influence smoking behavior. Adults with high levels of perceived danger are twice as likely to smoke if residing in communities with lower levels of social organization in the form of helpful, trusting, and supportive relationships. Understanding how the social organization of communities contributes to smoking disparities is important for curbing smoking's impact on population health.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Democracy and self-rated health across 67 countries: A multilevel analysis
    (Elsevier, 2015) Krueger, Patrick M.; Dovel, Kathryn; Denney, Justin T.
    Existing research has found a positive association between countries' level of democratic governance and the health of their populations, although that research is limited by the use of data from small numbers of high-income countries or aggregate data that do not assess individual-level health outcomes. We extend prior research by using multilevel World Health Survey (2002-2004) data on 313,554 individuals in 67 countries, and find that the positive association between democratic governance and self-rated health persists after adjusting for both individual- and country-level confounders. However, the mechanisms linking democracy and self-rated health remain unclear. Individual-level measures of socioeconomic status, and country-level measures of economic inequality and investments in public health and education, do not significantly mediate the association between democratic governance and self-rated health. The persistent association between democratic governance and health suggests that the political organization of societies may be an important upstream determinant of population health.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Families, Resources, and Adult Health: Where Do Sexual Minorities Fit?
    (Sage, 2013) Denney, Justin T.; Gorman, Bridget K.; Barrera, Cristina B.
    Extensive research documents the relevance of families and socioeconomic resources to health. This paper extends that research to sexual minorities, using twelve years of the National Health Interview Survey (N = 460,459) to examine self-evaluations of health among male and female adults living in same sex and opposite sex relationships. Adjusting for SES eliminates differences between same and opposite sex cohabiters so that they have similarly higher odds of poor health relative to married persons. Results by gender reveal that the cohabitation disadvantage for health is more pronounced for opposite sex cohabiting women than for men but little difference exists between same sex cohabiting men and women. Finally, the presence of children in the home is more protective for women's than men's health, but those protections are specific to married women. In all, the results elucidate the importance of relationship type, gender, and the presence of children when evaluating health.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Families, Resources, and Suicide: Combined Effects on Mortality
    (Wiley, 2014) Denney, Justin T.
    Important resources from family support systems, employment, and educational attainment inhibit the risk of death. Independently, these factors are particularly salient for suicide, but it is less clear how they combine to affect mortality. Using National Health Interview Survey data from 1986 to 2004 (N = 935,802), prospectively linked to mortality through 2006 (including 1,238 suicides), reveals a process of compensation in the way work status and family combine to affect adult suicide: those not working experience more suicide defense from more protective family support systems than do working adults. But a process of reinforcement occurs in the combination of education and family: more education associates with more protection from the family than does less education. The findings demonstrate how families and resources combine to affect mortality in unique ways.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Individual, Family, and Neighborhood Characteristics and Children's Food Insecurity
    (CHILDREN AT RISK Institute, 2012) Kimbro, Rachel T.; Denney, Justin T.; Panchang, Sarita
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Investigating the United States’ Racial Structure through the Evaluation of Residential Distribution
    (2013-04-22) Howell, Junia; Emerson, Michael O.; Lopez Turley, Ruth N.; Denney, Justin T.
    Diversification of the United States population over the past 45 years has sparked a debate about the contemporary racial structure. Some theorize Latino and Asian immigrants will eventually integrate into the White community, like the European immigrants before them. Others suggest their classification as “people of color” means they will integrate into the Black community. Still others theorize the United States is moving towards a three-tiered racial hierarchy. Racial residential segregation has been demonstrated to be an influential factor in reproducing racial classifications. Yet the use of residential distribution data to test hypotheses of racial structure has been limited because, I argue, segregation indexes are based on particular racial structures, none of which effectively capture multiple tiered hierarchies. Thus, this paper investigates the contemporary racial structure manifested through residential distribution by comparing computer simulations of hypothesized distributions to the observed distributions of Asians, Blacks, Latinos, and Whites in all census tracts in the United States in 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010. Finding that residential segregation contributes to the mounting support for Bonilla-Silva’s theory of a three-tiered racial hierarchy, this paper argues that future research on residential segregation needs to utilize an index that effectively measures segregation in multigroup populations. Through an evaluation of the most widely utilized indexes and conceptions of segregation, this paper introduces the Summary Index of Multigroup Segregation (SIMS), which builds off the Segregation Index to give an overall measure of segregation similar to Theil’s Information Index but that can be compared across populations with different group compositions. The SIMS calculates the proportion of the total population that would need to move for the area to be completely integrated. If commonly adopted, the SIMS can enable researchers to compile studies to further investigate the factors contributing to multigroup segregation and the implications of multigroup segregation.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Suicide in the City: Do Characteristics of Place Really Influence Risk?
    (Wiley, 2015) Denney, Justin T.; Wadsworth, Tim; Rogers, Richard G.; Pampel, Fred C.
    Objective: This article investigates the role of social context on individual suicide mortality with attention paid to the possibility that contextual effects are simply the sum of individual characteristics associated with suicide. Methods: We use restricted data from the 1986–2006 National Health Interview Survey-Linked Mortality Files, which include nearly 1 million records and 1,300 suicides, to examine the role of familial and socioeconomic context on adult suicide. Results: Results show that adults living in cities with more socioeconomic disadvantage and fewer families living together have higher odds of suicidal death than adults living in less disadvantaged cities and cities with more families living together, respectively, after controlling for individual-level socioeconomic status, marital status, and family size. Conclusion: The findings support classic sociological arguments that the risk of suicide is indeed influenced by the social milieu and cannot simply be explained by the aggregation of individual characteristics.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The Social Side of Accidental Death
    (Elsevier, 2013) Denney, Justin T.; He, Monica
    Mortality from unintentional injuries, or accidents, represents major and understudied causes of death in the United States. Epidemiological studies show social factors, such as socioeconomic and marital status, relate with accidental death. But social theories posit a central role for social statuses on mortality risk, stipulating greater relevance for causes of death that have been medically determined to be more preventable than others. These bodies of work are merged to examine deaths from unintentional injuries using 20 years of nationally representative survey data, linked to prospective mortality. Results indicate that socially disadvantaged persons were significantly more likely to die from the most preventable and equally likely to die from the least preventable accidental deaths over the follow-up, compared to their more advantaged counterparts. This study extends our knowledge of the social contributors to a leading cause of death that may have substantial implications on overall disparities in length of life.