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The majority of research on African American adolescents raised in single-mother homes has focused on externalizing problems, with less attention to other facets of socio-emotional functioning. Using a compensatory resilience approach, the current study examined risk and protective factors at the family (maternal warmth, monitoring, psychological control) and youth (ethnic identity and religiosity) levels as predictors of depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and self-esteem among African American adolescents from single-mother homes ( n  = 193). Lower levels of psychological control, higher levels of monitoring, and higher levels of youth ethnic identity were associated with at least one of the outcomes, depressive symptoms, hopelessness, and self-esteem. In addition, self-esteem, but not hopelessness, mediated the associations between the family- and youth-level factors and youth depressive symptoms. The importance of targeting maternal psychological control and youth ethnic identity, as well as self-esteem, in intervention programs for African American youth from single-mother families is discussed.

Findings of an association between skin color and educational attainment have been fairly consistent among Americans born before the civil rights era, but little is known regarding the persistence of this relationship in later born cohorts. The authors ask whether the association between skin color and educational attainment has changed between black American baby boomers and millennials. The authors observe a large and statistically significant decline in the association between skin color and educational attainment between baby boomer and millennial black women, whereas the decline in this association between the two cohorts of black men is smaller and nonsignificant. Compared with baby boomers, a greater percentage of the association between skin color and educational attainment among black millennials appears to reflect educational disparities in previous generations. These results emphasize the need to conceptualize colorism as an intersectional problem and suggest caution when generalizing evidence of colorism in earlier cohorts to young adults today.

A growing body of sociological research has shown that racial identification is not only fluid, but crucially depends on other individual- and societal-level factors. When such factors are also associated with socioeconomic outcomes such as earnings, estimates of the disadvantage experienced by individuals because of how they identify racially obtained from standard regression models may be biased. We illustrate this potential bias using data from a large-scale survey conducted by the Mexican census bureau. This survey is the first by the government agency since the country’s independence to include a question on black identification. We find evidence of a substantial bias in estimates of racial disadvantage. Results from our initial models treating racial self-identification as an exogenous predictor indicate that black men have higher earnings than non-black men. However, when we use an instrumental variables model that treats racial self-identification as endogenous, that is, as a function of the same unobserved characteristics as individuals’ earnings, we find a significant negative effect of black identification on earnings. While previous studies have acknowledged the endogeneity of race, ours is the first to explicitly model racial self-identification as an endogenous predictor to obtain an unbiased estimate of its effect on individuals’ socioeconomic conditions.

Research indicates that individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and class origins differ in their unemployment rates. We know less, however, about whether these differences result from the differing groups’ unequal hazards of entering or exiting unemployment and even less about how economic fluctuations moderate the ethnoracial and class-origin gaps in the long-term risks of transitioning into and out of unemployment. Using Rounds 1–17 of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 and event history models, we show that non-Hispanic blacks become more similar to non-Hispanic whites in their paces of entering unemployment as their local unemployment rate rises, perhaps because jobs largely closed to the former are eliminated in a greater proportion during recessions. Nonetheless, blacks’ relatively slow pace of transitioning from unemployment to having a job decelerates further with economic downturns. By contrast, Hispanics’ paces of entering and exiting unemployment relative to non-Hispanic whites hardly change with local unemployment rates, despite unemployed Hispanics’ slower rate of transitioning to having a job. With respect to class origin, we find that the advantages in both unemployment entry and recovery of young men with relatively educated parents diminish with economic deterioration. Based on these results, we suggest that facing economic pressure, employers’ preference for workers of a higher class origin is more malleable than their preference for whites over blacks, making unemployed blacks especially disadvantaged in uncertain economic times. DOI :  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rssm.2019.100422

Race differences in school attendance across the Jim Crow South and its implications for Black-White disparities in cognitive impairment risk among older adults

In the US, African Americans have a higher prevalence of hypertension than Whites. Previous studies show that social support contributes to the racial differences in hypertension but are limited in accounting for the social and environmental effects of racial residential segregation. We examined whether the association between race and hypertension varies by the level of social support among African Americans and Whites living in similar social and environmental conditions, specifically an urban, low-income, racially integrated community. Using data from the Exploring Health Disparities in Integrated Communities-Southwest Baltimore (EHDIC-SWB) sample, we hypothesized that social support moderates the relationship between race and hypertension and the racial difference in hypertension is smaller as the level of social support increases. Hypertension was defined as having systolic blood pressure greater than 140 mmHg and/or diastolic blood pressure greater than 90 mmHg, or the participant reports of taking antihypertensive medication(s). The study only included participants that self-reported as “Black/African American” or “White.” Social support was measured as functional social support and marital status. After adjusting for demographics and health-related characteristics, we found no interaction between social support and race (DUFSS score, prevalence ratio 1.00; 95% confidence interval 0.99, 1.01; marital status, prevalence ratio 1.02; 95% confidence interval 0.86, 1.21); thus the hypothesis was not supported. A plausible explanation is that the buffering factor of social support cannot overcome the social and environmental conditions which the participants live in. Further, these findings emphasize social and environmental conditions of participants in EHDIC-SWB may equally impact race and hypertension.

Nationwide program focused on race and police issues

Assumptions that single mothers are “time poor” compared with married mothers are ubiquitous. We tested theorized associations derived from the time poverty thesis and the gender perspective using the 2003–2012 American Time Use Surveys (ATUS). We found marital status differentiated housework, leisure, and sleep time, but did not influence the amount of time that mothers provided childcare. Net of the number of employment hours, married mothers did more housework and slept less than never-married and divorced mothers, counter to expectations of the time poverty thesis. Never-married and cohabiting mothers reported more total and more sedentary leisure time than married mothers. We assessed the influence of demographic differences among mothers to account for variation in their time use by marital status. Compositional differences explained more than two-thirds of the variance in sedentary leisure time between married and never-married mothers, but only one-third of the variance between married and cohabiting mothers. The larger unexplained gap in leisure quality between cohabiting and married mothers is consistent with the gender perspective.

Join Nature Rx@UMD for a special talk on Nature, Race and Relational Trauma by Beth Collier,

Background Perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and poor sleep occur across all races/ethnicities in the U.S., though both are most common among racial/ethnic minorities. Few studies have investigated associations between perceived racial/ethnic discrimination and various sleep dimensions in a multiethnic population. Methods We analyzed cross-sectional associations among 40,038 eligible Sister Study participants (enrollment: 2003-2009) who reported ever/never experiencing specific types of everyday (e.g., treated unfairly at a store or restaurant) or major (e.g., unfairly stopped, threatened, or searched by police) discrimination attributed to their race/ethnicity during a follow-up survey in 2008-2012. Participants also reported short sleep duration (<7 hours), sleep debt (≥2-hour difference between longest and shortest sleep duration), frequent napping (≥3 times/week), and insomnia. Poisson regression with robust variance estimation, adjusted for sociodemographic and health characteristics, estimated prevalence ratios (PRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for the association between each type of racial/ethnic discrimination and each sleep dimension, overall and by race/ethnicity. Results Mean age was 55 ± 8.9 years, 89% were NH-white, 8% NH-black, and 3% Hispanic/Latina. NH-black participants were the most likely to report everyday (76% vs. 4% [NH-whites] and 36% [Hispanics/Latinas]) and major racial/ethnic discrimination (52% vs. 2% [NH-whites] and 18% [Hispanics/Latinas]). Participants who experienced both types versus neither were more likely to report short sleep duration (PR=1.17 [95% CI: 1.09-1.25]) and insomnia symptoms (PR=1.10 [1.01-1.20]) but not other poor sleep dimensions. Conclusions Racial/ethnic minority women were most likely to experience racial/ethnic discrimination, which was associated with certain poor sleep dimensions among women of all races/ethnicities.