Selena Ortiz, Penn State University

About the Presentation

The current housing crisis in the U.S. requires the consideration and promotion of policies that improve the circumstances of severe housing cost burdens. Building public awareness of the health impacts associated with housing affordability may be a key prerequisite for policy change. Findings from two recent studies that investigate this hypothesis will be presented. The first study uses quantitative and qualitative data from a national survey to investigate public views about housing affordability as a key driver of health. We find that while there is considerable agreement that housing affordability promotes health when using forced-choice measures, connections between the two are not readily volunteered. The second study builds on these findings and tests whether agreement that affordable housing is important to health translate into actual policy support. More specifically, I will discuss how fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used to test whether five theoretical conditions, including belief that housing affordability is a critical social determinant of health, lead to higher levels of agreement with strategies and policies that increase the development of affordable housing and wages among economic elites. Finally, future investigations examining the extent to which contextual factors influence public recommendations to address housing affordability will be presented.

About the Speaker

Selena E. Ortiz, PhD, MPH, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Policy and Administration at The Pennsylvania State University, examines the determinants of population health and public policy formation, including problem recognition, the formulation of policy proposals, and politics. Specifically, she uses mixed methods approaches to examine how cognitive frames and values influence policy agenda setting, public deliberation, public opinion,health disparities, and health care decision-making. Her topics of interest include the social determinants of health and chronic disease. Dr. Ortiz is a faculty affiliate of the Center for Health Care and Policy Research (CHCPR), the Population Research Institute (PRI), and the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State. She is a research fellow at the FrameWorks Institute in Washington, D.C., and is an active member of AcademyHealth, (IAPHS), and  (APHA). Currently, Dr. Ortiz chairs the advisory committee to the Nation’s Health (the official publication of the APHA) and serves as the chair of APHA’s Ethics Section.