Recent Scientific Accomplishments

Wong’s research agenda deals with the economic demography of Hispanic and immigrant populations in the U.S. and in Latin America, especially Mexico. Her research focuses on two main areas: 1) migration and old-age consequences, and 2) health and aging. In these broad topics, Wong applies a cross-national perspective to study health and aging processes of the population. In a 2005 paper in Population and Development Review with Ken Hill, she uses data from Mexico and U.S. censuses to estimate the net flow of migrants from Mexico to the U.S., yielding an estimate of 400,000 net migrants per year. In the area of health and aging, she and colleagues are using this cross-national perspective to study the determinants of health among older adults in Latin America. In a 2006 special volume of the journal Health and Aging edited by Wong and colleagues Alberto Palloni and Martha Peláez, and a special volume of the Panamerican Journal of Public Health, several papers use data from different countries to conclude that regardless of context and the stage of demographic and epidemiologic transitions, the perceived quality of memory dominates the self-report of global health by older adults in Latin America. Also using a cross national perspective, in a 2006 paper in Research on Aging, Wong and former student Juan JoséDíaz find that health insurance plays a key role in the propensity to use health care among Mexicans in both Mexico and the U.S. However, the effect varies by type of health care service, concluding that health insurance plays a major role for the type of service for which there are no low-cost alternatives in the country, such as doctor visits in the U.S. In a 2007 paper in International Migration Review, Wong and co-authors find that, after controlling for migration selectivity, older adults in Mexico who are former U.S. migrants have large wealth advantage over Mexicans who never left for the U.S. The paper concludes however, that the mechanisms of this wealth advantage may not be straightforward. The accumulated wealth advantage may not necessarily originate from the old adults own trips to the U.S.; part of the economic gain may be due to skills they acquired in the U.S. which provided them with higher earnings upon returning to Mexico, or by their children’s subsequent U.S. migration which allowed the older adults to accumulate wealth through remittances. In a forthcoming book , Wong and colleagues (Estelle James and Alejandra Cox-Edwards) examine the consequences of social security reforms with a gender perspective in three countries of Latin America, and draw lessons for policy makers in other countries seeking to revamp their social security systems.

Funded Research

Wong was co-Principal investigator on an R01 grant from NIA (1999-2004) that funded the Mexican Health and Aging Study (MHAS). The study seeks to examine aging in Mexico with a wide socioeconomic perspective included the collection of two waves of a national survey among older adults in Mexico in 2001 and 2003, and used protocol and instruments that are highly comparable to the U.S. Health and Retirement Study. The study has an emphasis on past migration from Mexico to the U.S. to understand the selection process of initial and return migrants, and how these selections result in patterns of health observed in old age among U.S. populations. Wong is currently principal investigator (PI) of an R01 parallel with Alberto Palloni, that examines the health and aging patterns of older populations in Latin America with an emphasis on migration selection (2005-2009). She also has an active R03 funded by NIA/NIH (with Deborah DeGraff) that seeks to construct a secondary database on the past context of Mexicans in the MHAS cohorts (2006-2008) and explore the use of indicators that capture this historical context in models of old-age well being. Wong also has a funded R01 from NICHD (with Anne Pebley and Noreen Goldman) to study social differentials in health among Latinos. The focus is on Latinos in Los Angeles in comparison to populations in their origin communities in Mexico.

Future Plans

Over the next few years, Wong plans to develop a new research agenda on the old age consequences of lifestyle risk factors such as tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity and lack of physical exercise. The focus is on describing these patterns with a cross-national perspective between Mexico and the U.S. and assessing the impact of these lifestyles on disability, functionality, old-age productive activity, and catastrophic health care expenditures. Wong and colleagues from the Universities of Michigan, Johns Hopkins, and Emory submitted an R01 proposal to NIA in October 2006 to request funding for this work.