The economic characteristics of one’s childhood neighborhood have been found to deter mine long-term well-being. Policies enacted dur ing child hood may change neighborhood trajectories and thus impact long-term outcomes for children. We use individual-level data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study to examine the enduring consequences of childhood exposure to local-area New Deal emergency employment work-relief activ ity. Our out comes include ado les cent cog ni tion, edu ca tional attain­ment, mid­life income, health behav­iors, late-life cog­ni­tion, and mor­tal­ity. We find that children (ages 0–3) living in neighborhoods with moderate work-relief activity in 1940 had higher adolescent IQ scores, had higher class rank, and were more likely to obtain at least a bach­e­lor’s degree. We find endur­ing ben­e­fits for mid­life income and late-life cognition for males who grew up in areas with a moderate amount of work relief. We find mixed results for males who grew up in the most dis­ad­van­taged areas with the highest levels of work-relief activity. These children had similar educational outcomes as those in the most advantaged districts with the lowest work-relief activity but had higher adult smok­ing rates. Our find­ings pro­vide some of the first evi­dence of the long-term consequences of New Deal policies on children’s long-term life course outcomes.

Research on the health consequences of criminal legal system contact has increasingly looked beyond imprisonment to understand how more routine forms of surveillance and punishment shape wellbeing. One of these sites is probation, the largest form of supervision in the U.S. Drawing on an interview study with 162 adults on probation in Hennepin County, MN, in 2019, we map how adults on probation understand the consequences of supervision for their health and how these self-reported health changes correlate with individual, social, and structural circumstances. Roughly half of participants described their health as having improved since starting probation, while the remainder were split between no change and worsened health. Examining both closed-ended survey questions and open-ended interview prompts, we find that the “gains” of supervision were correlated with substance use treatment (often mandated), reduced drug and alcohol use, increased housing and food security, and perceptions of support from their probation officer. However, these potentially health-promoting mechanisms were attenuated for many participants by the significant “pains” of supervision, including the threat of revocation, which sometimes impacted mental health. In addition, participants in the most precarious circumstances were often unable to meet the demands of supervision, resulting in further punishment. Moving beyond the “pains” and “gains” framework, we argue that this analysis provides empirical evidence for the importance of moving social services outside of punishing criminal legal system interventions. People with criminal legal contact often come from deeply marginalized socio-economic contexts and are then expected to meet the rigorous demands of supervision with little state aid for redressing structural barriers. Access to essential services, including healthcare, food, and housing, without the threat of further criminal legal sanctions, can better prevent and respond to many of the behaviors that are currently criminalized in the U.S. legal system, including substance use.

Obesity is an increasing public health concern with important mortality consequences. Weight gain or maximum adult BMI, not BMI at one point in time, has been shown to be an important risk factor in cohorts studied recently during an era of rapid increase in population levels of overweight and obesity. However, there is limited evidence on individual weight trajectories from cohorts born before the mid-twentieth century. Archival world war military personnel files from New Zealand are freely available online, and identify service in both wars. A pilot study of 316 soldiers confirmed the files contain sufficient information to examine health trajectories and lifespan. Because this cohort are now entirely deceased, nearly the entire sample can be found in death records to estimate the impact of weight increases on lifespan. Weight change over 20–30 years and its relationship with lifespan is examined using ordinary least squares regression. The study demonstrates that military records are a feasible source for collecting data on adult weight and health trajectories in the first half of the twentieth century. Although this sample is likely to be composed of men fitter than average, there is a clear pattern of increasing weight from early to mid-adulthood. Weight gain from early adulthood to middle-age was found to be more strongly associated with mortality than weight in early adulthood. A one unit increase in BMI over the inter-war period was found to be associated with an 8 month decline in lifespan. These results confirm that weight gain in adulthood has an important impact on mortality in an earlier birth cohort than previously studied, and that data exist to measure any changes more precisely over time.

Childhood malnutrition and its later life effects were important concerns in European and North American social policy in the early twentieth century. However, there have been few studies of the lo...

Children require a large amount of time, effort, and resources to raise. Physical help, financial contributions, medical care, and other types of assistance from kin and social network members allow couples to space births closer together while maintaining or increasing child survival. We examine the impact of kin availability on couples’ reproductive success in the early twentieth-century United States with a panel data set of over 3.1 million couples linked between the 1900 and 1910 U.S. censuses. Our results indicate that kin proximity outside the household was positively associated with fertility, child survival, and net reproduction, and suggest that declining kin availability was an important contributing factor to the fertility transition in the United States. We also find important differences between maternal and paternal kin inside the household—including higher fertility among women residing with their mother-in-law than among those residing with their mother—that support hypotheses related to the contrasting motivations and concerns of parents and parents-in-law.

Introduction: Understanding which non-cigarette tobacco products precede smoking in youth across different racial/ethnic groups can inform policies that consider tobacco-related health disparities. Methods: We used nationally representative, longitudinal data from the Population Assessment of Tobacco and Health Study waves 1-4. The sample was a dynamic cohort of cigarette-naïve youth aged 12-17 years. Mixed-effects models were used to assess non-cigarette product (e-cigarette, cigar product, or other product) use with cigarette use over 1-year intervals. Results: Of the 28 788 observations pooled across waves 1-4, respondents were 48.7% non-Hispanic white, 13.9% non-Hispanic black, and 23.1% Hispanic. Odds of cigarette initiation over 1-year follow-up were higher among youth with prior use of e-cigarettes (odds ratio [OR], 2.76; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.21-3.45), cigars (OR, 2.00; 95% CI, 1.42-2.80), or other products (OR, 1.66; 95% CI, 1.28-2.14) compared to never users. At the population level, 20.6% of cigarette initiation was attributable to e-cigarette use among white youth and 21.6% among Hispanic youth, while only 3.5% of cigarette initiation was attributable to e-cigarette use among black youth. In contrast, 9.1% of cigarette initiation for black youth was attributable to cigar use compared to only 3.9% for both white and Hispanic youth. Conclusions: Prior use of e-cigarettes, cigars, and other non-cigarette products were all associated with subsequent cigarette initiation. However, white and Hispanic youth were more likely to initiate cigarettes through e-cigarette use (vs. cigar or other product use), while black youth were more likely to initiate cigarettes through cigar use (vs. e-cigarette or other product use). Implications: Our findings suggest that previous studies on effects of non-cigarette tobacco products may overlook the critical role of cigar products as a pathway into cigarette smoking among US youth, particularly black youth. While our data support the importance of e-cigarette use as a pathway into smoking, regulatory actions aimed at addressing youth e-cigarette use alone may contribute to disparities in black versus white tobacco use and further exacerbate inequities in tobacco-related disease. Thus, contemporary policy development and discourse about the effects of non-cigarette tobacco products on cigarette initiation should consider cigar and other non-cigarette products as well as e-cigarettes.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: Learning to balance the clinical, educa-tional, and scholarly elements of an academic career is challenging for faculty. To increase research output amongst family medicine faculty with limited to no publications, we developed the Collaborative Scholarship Intensive (CSI) to provide participants with intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected time for writing. METHODS: The CSI was developed by the University of Minnesota Department of Family Medicine and Community Health as a six-session faculty development program that enrolled 23 participants in its first three classes. RESULTS: Findings reveal that faculty participants significantly improved their pre-to postcourse self-ratings of 12 research competencies, and significantly increased their scholarly output. CONCLUSIONS: Our CSI faculty development program successfully engaged clinical faculty in a collaborative research program. Our results suggest that a program focused on intensive instruction in research methodology coupled with structured writing support and protected writing time may be a model for faculty development in other academic departments.

This paper examines the work and work culture of department store salespeople in New Zealand department stores. Following the management advice of American, British, and Australian experts New Zeal...

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes publicly and freely available period migration data at the state and county levels. Among their uses, these data inform estimates of net-migration as part of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Program, which, in turn, are used for producing other annual statistics, survey design, business and community planning, and federal funding allocations. Building on and extending prior research, we devote this Research Brief to documenting from multiple new angles a highly concerning and apparently systemic problem with the IRS migration data since the IRS took over responsibilities for preparing these data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011. As we then discuss, despite the fact that the IRS provides documentation detailing changes that it made to how it prepares these data relative to how the U.S. Census Bureau prepared them, it is not clear why or how these changes would result in the problem detailed in our analysis. Given that this problem appears to be an internal one within the IRS, we conclude by suggesting that the post 2011–2012 IRS migration data not be used until this problem is resolved, and we encourage the IRS to do so quickly, transparently, and collaboratively.

In the wake of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda’s government created the Gacaca courts to hold suspected perpetrators accountable. Although much has been written about these courts, researchers know comparatively less about the 250,000 individuals who served as Gacaca court judges (inyangamugayo). We draw upon 135 interviews to explore how the inyangamugayo entered and adapted to their new public roles as moral arbiters, how these judges understood Gacaca’s missions, and how their social identities evolved over the course of multiple status transitions. Building on Erving Goffman’s sequential approach to moral careers, we trace the process of becoming a judge. In doing so, we highlight the two overarching missions that surfaced during the interviews – justice and reconciliation – and how the judges continued to view themselves as inyangamugayo even after the courts closed.

Does education change people’s lives in a way that delays mortality? Or is education primarily a proxy for unobserved endowments that promote longevity? Most scholars conclude that the former is true, but recent evidence based on Danish twin data calls this conclusion into question. Unfortunately, these potentially field-changing findings—that obtaining additional schooling has no independent effect on survival net of other hard-to-observe characteristics—have not yet been subject to replication outside Scandinavia. In this article, we produce the first U.S.-based estimates of the effects of education on mortality using a representative panel of male twin pairs drawn from linked complete-count census and death records. For comparison purposes, and to shed additional light on the roles that neighborhood, family, and genetic factors play in confounding associations between education and mortality, we also produce parallel estimates of the education-mortality relationship using data on (1) unrelated males who lived in different neighborhoods during childhood, (2) unrelated males who shared the same neighborhood growing up, and (3) non-twin siblings who shared the same family environment but whose genetic endowments vary to a greater degree. We find robust associations between education and mortality across all four samples, although estimates are modestly attenuated among twins and non-twin siblings. These findings—coupled with several robustness checks and sensitivity analyses—support a causal interpretation of the association between education and mortality for cohorts of boys born in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.

Indigenous people have experienced relatively high incarceration rates in British Columbia, as elsewhere in North America, since the 1940s. Archival prison records, however, show that the incidence of Indigenous incarceration was lower than for other people before 1910. This evidence implies the crucial period for increasing incarceration of Indigenous peoples in British Columbias was from 1910 to 1940. The pattern for Indigenous women differed from that of men. Large numbers of Indigenous women were imprisoned in the 1870s and 1880s. The British Columbia Indigenous pattern has important similarities to the New Zealand Māori in the same era. Neither Indigenous experience is easily explained by group threat theory used to understand rising incarceration for African-Americans in this period. Indigenous incarceration in settler states prior to the 1950s needs additional comparative research and theoretical understanding.

This paper presents a new probabilistic method of record linkage, developed using the U.S. full count censuses of 1900 and 1910 but applicable to a range of different sources of historical records. The method was designed to exploit a more comprehensive set of individual and contextual characteristics present in historical census data, aiming to obtain a machine learning algorithm that better distinguishes between multiple potential matches. Our results demonstrate that the method achieves a match rate that is twice as high other currently popular methods in the literature while at the same time also achieving greater accuracy. In addition, the method only performs negligibly worse than other algorithms in resembling the target population.

The U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS) makes publicly and freely available annual place-based and place-to-place migration data at the state and county levels. Among their many uses, the IRS migration data inform estimates of net-migration as part of the U.S. Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program, which, in turn, are used for producing other annual statistics, survey design, business planning, community development programs, and federal funding allocations. In this Research Note, we document what appears to be a systemic problem with the IRS migration data since the IRS took over responsibilities for preparing these data from the U.S. Census Bureau in 2011. We conclude by speculating on possible reasons for this problem and suggesting that the post-2011 IRS migration data not be used until the IRS resolves this issue.

Extended Abstract Total fertility in the United States fell from 7.0 in 1835, one of the highest rates in the world, to 2.1 in 1935, one of the lowest (Coale and Zelnik 1963; Hacker 2003). In some respects, the U.S. fertility transition is an ideal case study for testing theories of fertility decline. The population was characterized by remarkable ethnic, racial, and religious diversity and large group differences in fertility. Geographic differences in fertility were also large, reflecting spatial differentials in industrialization, agriculture, urbanization, school attendance, women's labor force participation, population composition, religion, and occupational structure (Hacker 2016). Unfortunately, our understanding of the U.S. fertility transition has been limited by poor data. A national birth registration system was not established until 1933, after the end of the century-long fertility decline. IPUMS samples of the 1850-1940 censuses have helped address the lack of birth registration data, but low sample densities-most census samples are limited to 1% densities-have limited researchers' ability to analyze contextual factors and small population subgroups. A few researchers (e.g., Wanamaker 2012; Lahey 2014) have continued to rely on aggregate state-and county-level data published shortly after each census. Others have relied on retrospective children ever born data published in the 1900, 1910, and 1940 censuses for ever-married women (e.g. David and Danderson 1987; Jones and Tertlit 2008). Although these data can be used to measure trends in cohort fertility from the early nineteenth century, selection issues distort the timing of the decline and the measurement of independent variables for analysis. This paper leverages the analytical power of new IPUMS complete-count microdata databases of 1850, 1880, and the 1900-1940 decennial censuses (a joint ongoing project between the Minnesota Population Center and Ancestry.com) to reexamine the U.S. fertility transition. The dataset includes nearly 600 million individuals spanning the beginning of the decline in the middle of the nineteenth century to its temporary end with the baby boom in the late. A major advantage of these complete-count datasets is our ability to examine individual-level, couple-level and household-level correlates of fertility at or near the time of childbearing simultaneously with contextual variables outside the household, including a measure of patrilineal kin propinquity and …

Between 1825 and 1960 900,000 Norwegians emigrated. Before 1930 more than 95 per cent went to the United States. The rate of return to Norway was low in comparison to many other nations who sent large numbers to the <small>US</small> after 1880. High quality census enumerations in both countries, that are now available in electronic format, allow the possibility of reconstructing the lives and voyages of some of these migrants. Even with a low rate of return-migration there were more than 50,000 return migrants. Constructing a large sample of return migrants observed in both Norway and the <small>US</small> becomes more feasible with electronic search and matching strategies. This article gives an overview of available and soon forthcoming sources in the North Atlantic Population Project, the possibility of electronic linkages, and the challenges of this research strategy. Using a group of 448 Norwegian migrants matched between the 1900 American and 1910 Norwegian census, an empirical analysis shows that migration and marital transitions were likely to have been closely linked. Machine-linked records hold the promise of being able to trace several thousand Norwegians across the Atlantic and back again.

<p>For the past 80 years, social scientists have been linking historical censuses across time to study economic and geographic mobility. In recent decades, the quantity of historical census record linkage has exploded, owing largely to the advent of new machine-readable data created by genealogical organizations. Investigators are examining economic and geographic mobility across multiple generations and also engaging many new topics. Several analysts are exploring the effects of early-life socioeconomic conditions, environmental exposures, or natural disasters on family, health, and economic outcomes in later life. Other studies exploit natural experiments to gauge the impact of policy interventions such as social welfare programs and educational reforms. The new data sources have led to a proliferation of record linkage methodologies, and some widespread approaches inadvertently introduce errors that can lead to false inferences. A new generation of large-scale shared data infrastructure now in preparation will ameliorate weaknesses of current linkage methods.</p>