Debra Umberson, Rachel Donnelly, Minle Xu, Mateo Farina, and Michael A. Garcia, December 2019
This brief reports on a study that uses Health and Retirement Study (HRS) data to explore the impact of the death of a child prior to midlife on later dementia risk for parents, to ask whether biosocial processes might explain increased dementia risk, and to consider how the loss of a child might add to disadvantage in dementia risk for non-Hispanic black parents compared to non-Hispanic white parents.
Debra Umberson, January 2018
Close relationships, or social ties, benefit mental health, physical health, and longevity. Yet, strained and conflicted social ties undermine health and well-being, and the loss of close relationships, particularly through death, can be devastating. In this brief, the author demonstrates that while social ties are a resource for health and well-being, this resource is unequally distributed in the population: black Americans suffer more loss and disruption to social ties than white Americans.
How Losing Family Members Earlier than Expected Adds to Racial Disadvantage for U.S. Blacks
Debra Umberson, January 2017
In this study, the authors hypothesize that deaths of close family members (mother, father, sibling, spouse, child) are more common for Black than for White Americans in childhood, midlife and later life. Using nationally representative data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and the Health and Retirement Study, they estimate the differences by race in the likelihood that Blacks will be exposed to more deaths of close family members than Whites throughout their lives.