There is a substantial correlation between household debt and health. Individuals with less healthy lifestyles are more likely to hold debt, yet there is little evidence as to whether this is merely a correlation or if financial hardship actually causes obesity. In this paper, we use data from the National Survey of Adolescent Health to test whether financial hardship affects body weight. We di...

Because of the growing concern that exposures to airborne pollutants have adverse effects on fetal growth and early childhood neurodevelopment, and the knowledge that such exposures are more prevalent in disadvantaged populations, we assessed the joint impact of prenatal exposure to environmental tobacco smoke (ETS) and material hardship on the 2-year cognitive development of inner-city childre...

BACKGROUND Many older adults manage multiple chronic conditions (i.e. multimorbidity); and many of these chronic conditions share common risk factors such as low socioeconomic status (SES) in adulthood and low SES across the lifecourse. To better capture socioeconomic condition in childhood, recent research in lifecourse epidemiology has broadened the notion of SES to include the experience of ...

INTRODUCTION: Student hardship in social work has become the subject of research recent years. Social students face particular challenges because financial, and emotional demands long, unpaid, clinical placements. APPROACH: This article reports on a literature review conducted prior to mixed-methods study commenced 2019. informed development survey graduates set qualitative interviews that will...

Tiny sap-sucking insects that are a scourge to gardeners also have the upside of helping trees survive in seasonally dry forests in Central America. How? Scale insects use carbon they get from Cordia alliodora trees to make sugar-rich ‘‘honeydew’’ for Azteca pittieri ants, which in turn defend the trees against leaf-munching insects. Mutualism is often stronger when resources are scarce, but th...

Reducing the prevalence of household food insecurity has been a long-standing objective of the federal government. Previous research has found many negative consequences of food insecurity for families and households but has not examined its relationship with housing instability. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, difference-in-difference models show th...

OBJECTIVE Mental health disorders are of great social, economic, and policy concern. A higher incidence of major depressive disorder has been reported among those living in or near poverty. Our study examines the extent to which the relationship between income and depression is mediated by measures of material hardship. METHODS We use measures of depression at two points in time from the long...