I am broadly interested in medical sociology, and my primary area of research critically examines women’s sexual and reproductive health and healthcare as a site where gender, SES, racial, and geographic inequalities are created and sustained. This research draws on theories of gender as a “socially constructed stratification system” (Risman 2004), medicine as an “institution of social control” (Zola 1972), and reproductive justice (Luna & Luker 2013).
Gender, Health & Inequalities
Dissertation Work
My dissertation leverages a mixed-methods dataset to investigate inequalities in women’s experiences with sexual and reproductive health across the life course. The data focus on 1,635 Indiana women in the Person to Person Health Interview survey, including an omnibus health survey, linked electronic health records, and 42 in-depth interviews. Specifically, I use hybrid multilevel models to examine how women’s engagement with sexual and reproductive healthcare (SRH) differs from their engagement with other types of healthcare. I focus on the role of health insurance and examine racial/ethnic, SES and geographic disparities. Lastly, my in-depth interviews illuminate how women’s structural position shapes their response to SRH problems.
Abortion
In a related line of research, my coauthors and I investigate the cultural forces that inhibit or enable abortion access. People who need abortion services must draw upon social and economic resources to obtain them. In a paper in Science Advances using interviews and the General Social Survey, Sarah Cowan, Tricia Bruce, Brea Perry, Bridget Ritz, Stuart Perrett and I examine the willingness of Americans who deem abortion immoral to help a close friend or family member seeking an abortion. We find that a substantial minority of Americans morally opposed to abortion would engage in “discordant benevolence”: providing help when doing so conflicts with personal values. We find that those who see abortion as morally wrong can nevertheless play a role in the social support process surrounding abortion access.
In a second stream of research on abortion, I focus on the role of physicians in abortion access. In a first-authored paper in Social Science & Medicine – Population Health, my co-authors, Sarah Cowan, Jenny Higgins, Nicholas Schmuhl, Cynthie Wautlet, and I examine physician’s ability to refer patients to abortion care as a barrier to abortion access using a survey of physicians. We find that around half of physicians willing to consult in abortion care are unable to refer patients because of a lack of knowledge. This research exposes how the institutional exclusion of abortion from standard medical training inhibits individual access to care.
Gender Inequalities & Covid-19
In a separate project published in Socius, my co-authors, Jessica Calarco, Emily Meanwell and Amy Knopf, was motivated by the observation that mothers have shouldered a disproportionate share of the childcare duties during the pandemic. Consequently, we ask how mothers account for these unequal parenting responsibilities. Through interviews and surveys (Pandemic Parenting National Survey [PPNS]) with 55 mothers and 14 fathers in different-sex, pre-pandemic dual-earner couples, we found that mothers (and fathers) justified unequal parenting arrangements based on gendered structural and cultural conditions that made mothers’ disproportionate labor seem “practical” and “natural.” These findings help explain why many mothers have not reentered the workforce, why fathers’ involvement at home waned as the pandemic progressed, and why the pandemic led to growing preferences for inegalitarian divisions of domestic and paid labor.
Disability Status, Health & Inequalities
Disability is a critical axis of inequality garnering increased scholarly attention. Through my collaboration on a longitudinal project of college students on the autism spectrum, my co-authors and I highlight the challenges that students with disabilities experience.
Working with data from a unique survey of the experiences of college students with autism and neurotypical students in Indiana, Jane McLeod and I tested whether autism symptomology was independently associated with multiple educational and social outcomes including course failure, academic difficulties, lower friendship quality and social exclusion. We found that autism symptomology was associated with these outcomes independent of an autism diagnosis, and found evidence of intersectional inequalities as symptomology had a greater negative effect among women than men. We also found that autism symptoms were associated with greater negative social outcomes for students without a diagnosis. This paper can be found at the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
In another paper published in Social Science & Medicine – Population Health, my co-authors and I use the longitudinal data from 2020 and 2021 to demonstrate that college students with disabilities were more likely to experience declines in their physical health, mental health, and educational aspirations over the first year of the pandemic compared to students without disabilities because of differential exposure to financial and illness stressors.
Broader Inequalities & Health
In a related project, I examine the question of whether inequities in access to vaccination have successfully been addressed, even as the numeric rate of sociodemographic disparities in adolescent vaccination initiation rates for the HPV, Tdap, and MenACWY vaccines has declined in the US. I synthesize research on the resource barriers that inhibit vaccination alongside research on vaccine hesitancy where parents actively refuse vaccination. To do so, I classify the primary reason why teens are unvaccinated in the National Immunization Survey-Teen 2012-2022 into three categories: resource failure, agentic refusal, and other reasons. I use three non-exclusive subsamples of teens who are unvaccinated against the HPV, MenACWY , and Tdap vaccines to examine the relative importance of resource failure reasons and agentic refusal reasons for non-vaccination across time and teens’ sociodemographic characteristics. Results indicate that resource failure reasons continue to explain a substantial portion of the reasons why teens are unvaccinated and disproportionately affect racially/ethnically and economically marginalized teens. Thus, even as sociodemographic inequalities in rates of vaccination have declined, inequities in access remain consequential. This paper was published in PLoS ONE.