Browsing by Author "Gorman, Bridget K"

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    Exploring Gender Differences in the Early Life Origins of Three Health Behaviors
    (2018-03-05) Fahey, Lynn M; Gorman, Bridget K
    Lynn M. Fahey Health behaviors are an important contributing aspect of physical health and well-being, yet the structural conditions that may shape health behaviors differ across socio-demographic groups, including between men and women and across SES groups. Prior work on the gender gap in health behaviors has several limitations, including a focus on gender disparities in adult circumstances only; failure to account fully for gender gaps in participation in a variety of behaviors, including smoking, drinking, and weight status; a focus on outcomes in mid or late life, with less attention given to how participation in health behaviors emerges and unfolds across earlier stages of the adult life course; and a reliance on retrospective, self-reported measures of early youth that are somewhat limited in scope. This dissertation responds to these limitations by using a life-course epidemiological framework and employs longitudinal data from across the early life course to explore how gender conditions the relationship between early life circumstances and health behaviors– specifically alcohol use, tobacco use, and weight status using a nationally representative longitudinal dataset: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). Generally, results show that the features of early life which are predictive of health behaviors differ based on the particular outcome examined, and that gender does interact with early life circumstances to produce health behaviors. For example, in terms of smoking behavior, the results support that women who had access to cigarettes or had peer smokers during youth are at a lower risk of being a current smoker than their male counterparts with similar youth exposures. Additionally, with respect to drinking behavior, the results of this study suggest that gender moderates the relationship between youth circumstances and heavy episodic drinking only at the earlier time points in young adulthood. The results for weight status transitions in this study do not suggest that gender operates as a moderator in the relationship between youth circumstances and adulthood weight status transitions. Taken together, this body of work extends and provides links between the prior literature on early life circumstances, gender differences in health across the life course, and gender differences in health behaviors.
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    Intersectional Immunity? Examining How Race/Ethnicity and Sexual Orientation Combine to Shape Influenza Vaccination among US Adults.
    (2022-02-23) Wilkins, Kiana kristine; Gorman, Bridget K
    Influenza vaccination is a critical preventive healthcare behavior designed to prevent spread of the seasonal flu. In this paper, I contribute to existing scholarship by applying an intersectional perspective to examine how influenza vaccination, a crucial preventive health behavior, differs across the specific intersections of racial/ethnic and sexual identity. My analysis begins with logistic regression model among the pooled sample (all 18 racial/ethnic and sexual orientation groups), and following I run models stratified first by sexual orientation, and then by racial/ethnic identity, to further examine patterns of flu vaccination across the intersections of sexual and racial/ethnic identity. Drawing on aggregated state-level data from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) from 2011-2018, findings from pooled models three key findings emerge. First, findings both confirm previous understandings of influenza vaccination (e.g., lower vaccination among black adults, relative to whites, but found only among heterosexuals; gays/lesbians reporting higher vaccination relative to heterosexuals for certain groups; bisexuals having lower vaccination status in select racial ethnic groups), second, my findings also challenge these previous vaccination patterns (e.g. Asian bisexuals vaccinating more than both heterosexuals and gays/lesbians, and certain racial/ethnic gays/lesbians having a disadvantage in influenza vaccination), and third, results pinpoint most vulnerable intersectional groups in need of influenza vaccination outreach.