Labor migration is a massive global reality, and its effects on the well-being of nonmigrating household members vary considerably. However, much existing research is limited to cross-sectional or short-term assessments of these effects. This study uses unique longitudinal panel data collected over 12 years in rural Mozambique to examine long-term connections of women's exposure to husband's labor migration with women's material security, their perception of their households' relative economic standing in the community, their overall life satisfaction, and their expectations of future improvements in household conditions. To capture the cumulative quality of such exposure, we use two approaches: one based on migrant remittances ("objective") and the other based on woman's own assessment of migration's impact on the household ("subjective"). The multivariable analyses detect a significant positive association between "objective" migration quality and household assets, regardless of women's current marital status and other characteristics. However, net of household assets, "objective" quality shows a positive association with life satisfaction, but not with perceived relative standing of the household or future expectations. In comparison, "subjective" quality is positively associated with all the outcomes even after controlling for other characteristics. These findings illustrate the gendered complexities of long-term migration impact on nonmigrants' well-being.

Math achievement in U.S. high schools is a consistent predictor of educational attainment. While emphasis on raising math achievement continues, school-level interventions often come at the expense of other subjects. Arts courses are particularly at risk of being cut, especially in schools serving lower socioeconomic status youth. Evidence suggests, however, that arts coursework is beneficial to many educational outcomes. We use data on 20,590 adolescents from the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 to answer two research questions: (1) Does student accumulation of fine arts courses across different topic areas relate positively to math test scores in high school? (2) Does school SES differentiate this potential association? Results indicate that youth attending higher-SES schools take more art courses and taking music courses is related to higher math test scores. However, this benefit only seems to only apply to more socially advantaged student bodies. Results reveal a site of additional educational advantage for already privileged youth.

HIV stigma negatively affects the social experiences of people living with HIV (PLWH) and remains a challenge to HIV prevention, treatment, and care. Research has overwhelmingly focused on individual cognitive measures of HIV stigma (e.g., internalized, anticipated, and experienced). However, little research explores the interactions and societal structures through which HIV stigma is produced. Data from qualitative interviews with 30 black gay and bisexual men living with HIV in the U.S. Deep South revealed an interconnected and interdependent set of processes that produce and reproduce HIV stigma. These included social interactions (silence, euphemism, and gossip), witnessed acts of marginalization, word-of-mouth transmission of HIV misinformation, and laws and policies carried out within the education and criminal justice systems. Efforts to reduce stigma that focus on individual beliefs and attitudes are critical to improving the well-being of PLWH. However, reducing HIV stigma requires intervening on the social interactions and structures through which HIV stigma is produced and reproduced.

Adverse life course events associated with unemployment can negatively affect individuals' future labor market prospects. Unauthorized status, and subsequent unauthorized employment, may operate similarly, marring immigrants' labor market prospects even after they change legal status. However, it is unclear how and why any durable disadvantage associated with prior unauthorized status operates differently by gender. This is an important shortcoming given that legal status and gender overlap to influence both migration and stratification. Using longitudinal data from a nationally-representative sample of lawful permanent residents, we find durable disadvantage associated with prior exposure to unauthorized status, especially among women. Men with prior exposure to unauthorized status experience persistent occupational disadvantage over time relative to men who were never unauthorized. However, women with exposure to unauthorized status experience widening occupational disadvantage over time relative to women who were never unauthorized. Human capital and legal processes help to explain this pattern.

Along with intensified competition for college admissions, U.S. teens increasingly spend more time on educational activities. Homework can be a particularly important component of educational time for economically disadvantaged and racial/ethnic minority students who have limited access to private sources of learning beyond the classroom. This study uses data from the American Time Use Survey and the Programme for International Student Assessment to compare homework time by race/ethnicity and examine the factors that explain these differences. We extend existing literature to consider explanations beyond demographic and family background. Our ordinary least squares (OLS) results show that family background accounts for the difference in homework time between Hispanic and White students and partially explains the difference between Black and White students, with students' academic characteristics or school fixed effects explaining the remaining gap. While these factors partially account for Asian students' greater time spent on homework than their White peers, a substantial gap remains.

Recently, several mainstream media organizations have moved away from using "illegal immigrant" in their immigration coverage. While this shift in immigration coverage is positive, seemingly positive language may still be exclusionary, particularly if the content of stories remains the same. We investigate whether newspaper articles that describe immigrants as "illegal" are more negative in content than articles that present immigrants as "undocumented" by analyzing 1,616 newspaper articles and letters to the editor in between 2000 and 2016, a critical period of immigration legislative activity in Arizona. We find that inundated readers with negative news coverage and that this coverage is baked into the content of stories and transcends the use of either term, "illegal" or "undocumented." We then draw on letters to the editor and original interview data to consider how social forces outside of the media may influence coverage.

Both adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and peer influences consistently predict early tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug use. However, less research considers how peer and community influences contribute to or modify the association between ACEs and early substance use. This study addresses these gaps in the literature by analyzing multilevel, longitudinal data from the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN; = 1,912). Unstructured socializing and peer substance use largely explained the association between ACEs and drinking, smoking cigarettes, and illicit drug use in the past month. A history of ACEs magnified the association between peer substance use and the number of cigarettes smoked. Collective efficacy also shaped the associations between peer influences, ACEs, and substance use, but in different ways depending on the substance use outcome analyzed.

The present study explores whether adolescent religiosity, health-related behaviors, and marital stability mediate the association between parental religiosity and health. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult (Add) Health, I model potential direct and indirect effects between three measures of parental religiosity (i.e., parental institutional religiosity, parental personal religiosity, and parental religious affiliation); three sets of mediators indicating adolescent religiosity, health-related behaviors, and marital stability; and self-rated health during late adolescence/early adulthood. Overall, I found that parental institutional religiosity has a direct effect on the self-rated health of children during late adolescence/early adulthood, and that it influences self-rated health by reducing adolescent and parental smoking. I also found evidence for deleterious effects of parental institutional religiosity on health as well. Future research should explore variation in the influence of parental religiosity on self-rated health between various sociodemographic groups and between different stages of the life course.

Protection is now the modal motivation for gun ownership, and men continue to outnumber women among gun owners. While research has linked economic precarity (e.g., insecurity and anxiety) to gun ownership and attitudes, separating economic well-being from constructions of masculinity is challenging. In response to blocked economic opportunities, some gun owners prioritize armed protection, symbolically replacing the masculine role of "provider" with one associated with "protection." Thus, understanding both persistently high rates of gun ownership in the United States (in spite of generally declining crime) alongside the gender gap in gun ownership requires deeper investigations into the meaning of guns in the United States and the role of guns in conceptualizations of American masculinity. We use recently collected crowdsourced survey data to test this provider-to-protector shift, exploring how economic precarity may operate as a cultural-level masculinity threat for some, and may intersect with marital/family status to shape gun attitudes and behaviors for both gun owners and nonowners. Results show that investments in stereotypical masculine ideals, rather than economic precarity, are linked to support for discourses associated with protective gun ownership and empowerment.

Despite the benefits of social participation for individuals and communities, little is known about how social participation varies over the life course. Drawing upon data collected between 1957 and 2011 by the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (22,023 observations from a cohort of 6,627), this study provides four valuable results. One, I find evidence of five distinct social participation trajectories; the majority of which demonstrate social disengagement as individuals age. Two, these decreases were primarily attributable to declines in meeting friends and group exercise. Three, the activities most likely to predict being a part of more-desirable trajectories were cultural event attendance, voluntary group membership, and joining charity groups. Lastly, I find that seven different types of high school activities were each associated with greater social activity counts, decades later. In total, these results highlight systematic differences in social participation trajectories; and suggest that age-graded participation changes are highly dependent on the underlying social activities.

Mixed evidence on the relationship between school closure and COVID-19 prevalence could reflect focus on large-scale levels of geography, limited ability to address endogeneity, and demographic variation. Using county-level Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) COVID-19 data through June 15, 2020, two matching strategies address potential heterogeneity: nearest geographic neighbor and propensity scores. Within nearest neighboring pairs in different states with different school closure timing, each additional day from a county's first case until state-ordered school closure is related to 1.5 to 2.4 percent higher cumulative COVID-19 deaths per capita (1,227-1,972 deaths for a county with median population and deaths/capita). Results are consistent using propensity score matching, COVID-19 data from two alternative sources, and additional sensitivity analyses. School closure is more strongly related to COVID-19 deaths in counties with a high concentration of Black or poor residents, suggesting schools play an unequal role in transmission and earlier school closure is related to fewer lives lost in disadvantaged counties.

Previous research has linked racial/ethnic residential segregation to a number of poor health conditions, including infectious disease. Here, we examine how racial/ethnic residential segregation is related to the novel coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2. We examine infection rates by zip code level segregation in four major cities across the U.S.: New York City, Chicago, Houston, and San Diego. We also include a number of area-level Census variables in order to analyze how other factors may help account for the infection rate. We find that both Black and Latino residential clustering are significantly and positively related to a higher SARS-CoV-2 infection rate across all four cities, and that this effect is strong even when accounting for a number of other social conditions and factors that are salient to the transmission of infectious disease. As a result, we argue that neighborhood-level racial/ethnic patterning may serve as an important structural mechanism for disparities in SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic requires people to engage in new health behaviors that are public, monitored, and often contested. Parents are typically considered responsible for controlling their children's behavior and instilling norms. We investigated how parents and teens managed teenagers' social distancing behaviors. Analyzing 100 longitudinal (2015-2020), dyadic qualitative interviews with teenagers and their parents in 20 families from two middle-class communities in which social distancing was normative, we found that preexisting health lifestyles were used to link social distancing behaviors to specific identities, norms, and understandings of health. The pandemic presented challenges resulting from contradictory threats to health, differing preferences, and conflicting social judgments. Parents responded to challenges by adhering to community norms and enforcing teens' social distancing behaviors. They drew on preexisting, individualized health lifestyles as cultural tools to justify social distancing messages, emphasizing group distinctions, morality, and worth in ways that perpetuated inequalities.

This paper investigates how the complexity of and everyday interactions within the criminal legal system sow confusion about the causes and consequences of low-level misdemeanor, or fine only, legal entanglements. Drawing on data from 62 interviews with people assessed legal debt and 240 hours of ethnographic observation in courtrooms, we describe inconsistencies between the design of the criminal legal system and the organization of defendants' lives that undermine the ability of defendants to satisfactorily or summarily resolve their legal cases. We also consider how interpersonal interactions within courts undermine the power of defendants to challenge legal authority, court norms, and established criminal legal processes. These findings illustrate a mismatch between expectations about and experiences with misdemeanor charges that place undue burden on disadvantaged defendants and highlight the scale and impact of fine only misdemeanors as a central inequality generating feature of the contemporary criminal legal system.

One of the fastest growing groups on college campuses is students with disabilities, but their rates of bachelor's degree completion remain low. We build on research about barriers to degree completion among historically underrepresented groups on college campuses to examine the extent to which academic preparation before college and processes during college contribute to gaps in bachelor's degree completion among four-year college students with a mental or physical disability. Using the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, we find that students with a mental disability are significantly less likely to complete a bachelor's degree than students without disabilities and students with a physical disability, net of students' family and academic background. Decomposition of the estimated indirect effect of mental disability on degree completion reveals first-year academic performance as the largest contributor. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications for understanding the barriers faced by college students with a mental disability.

We examine how labor together with social participation protects against cognitive impairment and depression, with a focus on gender differences. Data are drawn from four waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging (2006-2012). Both paid work and unpaid work are considered labor participation. Social participation includes the frequency of participation in formal social institutions, religious groups, grandparenting, and interactions with family and friends. Using growth curve models, we find that social and labor participation are independently associated with outcomes and effects vary by gender. Religious group activity was beneficial only for women, whereas inability to work was detrimental for men only. Informal social gatherings and labor participation, paid or unpaid, were beneficial for both genders. Findings on gender differences highlight how social identities can shape social roles and confine activity space, and productive engagement, affecting outcomes for mental health in later life.

The economic crisis of the Great Recession in the late 2000s had implications for the intergenerational transmission of inequality within families. Studying patterns of college enrollment across the Great Recession among U.S. youth from diverse family contexts provides insight into how economic volatility can either compound or undercut the advantages that some parents can give their children. Although college enrollment among 18- to 21-year-olds did not decline during or after the Great Recession, analyses of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979-Young Adult cohort revealed that this general trend subsumed variability by family history, local economic conditions, and age. Histories of family stability and sufficiency were associated with higher odds of college enrollment over time and across age, but this advantage was largest during the Recession in high-unemployment communities. These results illuminate how life course consequences of early family life can fluctuate with volatility and opportunity in the broader economy.

Why are some youth more likely to think of themselves as a science kind of person than others? In this paper, we use a cognitive social-theoretical framework to assess disparities in science identity among middle school-age youth in the United States. We investigate how discovery orientation is associated with science interest, perceived ability, importance, and reflected appraisal, and how they are related to whether youth see themselves, and perceive that others see them, as a science kind of person. We surveyed 441 students in an ethnically diverse, low-income middle school. Gender and race/ethnicity are associated with science identity but not with discovery orientation. Structural equation model results show that the positive association between discovery orientation and science identity is mediated by science interest, importance, and reflected appraisal. These findings advance understanding of how science attitudes and recognition may contribute to the underrepresentation of girls and/or minorities in science.

Recent research suggests increasing heterogeneity in the transition from adolescence to early adulthood. This study considers how this heterogeneity may influence delinquency between these two developmental periods. We focus on the role of family transitions, educational attainment, and employment in predicting risk of nonviolent delinquency and substance use, as well as disparities in transitions across socioeconomic status subgroups. Data are from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health). We find that family and neighborhood advantage are negatively associated with transitions into marriage, cohabitation, and parenthood, yet positively associated with educational attainment. In addition, adolescent family and neighborhood advantage are associated with a continuation of delinquent behavior and substance use during early adulthood. In multivariate analyses, accounting for family transitions in early adulthood largely attenuates the relationship between neighborhood advantage in adolescence and delinquency in early adulthood. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for developmental criminology.

This study evaluates the utility of Hagan's power-control theory for explaining substance use behaviors for a sample of American Indian adolescent males and females. Consistent with the theory, we found that patriarchal family form and the affective bond between father and daughter were significant predictors of female substance use behaviors. Compared to results from an analysis of non-Hispanic whites, these results reveal the importance of testing generalist explanations of deviant behavior across racial and ethnic groups. Our findings encourage a more in depth consideration of the gendered nature of work, it's association with socialization and control in American Indian families, and it's impact on gender differences in substance use and delinquent behaviors.