This National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship will extend current knowledge about the role of residential segregation in racial/ethnic health disparities, significantly enhance the Fellow's training as a research scientist in population health and demography, and contribute to the future vitality of scientific enterprise. The Fellow will perform her research at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Dr. Frank Furstenberg in the Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center. Dr Furstenberg is a renowned expert in the areas of family demography, development across the life course, teen pregnancy, and urban neighborhoods. He has published extensively on the black family and family dynamics in top peer-reviewed journals and is the author of influential books on poor urban families. Additionally, the Fellow will work with Drs. Samuel Preston, Irma Elo and Jason Schnittker?a group of leading demographers and medical sociologists, also at the University of Pennsylvania, who specialize in black mortality, racial/ethnic and socioeconomic health disparities. The research combines quantitative, qualitative and spatial approaches to investigate the relationships among residential segregation, community violence and premature black mortality. Specifically the study will examine the mediating effects of racial discrimination, family-level social capital, and family processes in contributing to disparities in black-white, violence-related mortality rates. The Fellow will spend the first postdoctoral year acquiring methodological and substantive training in social demography and population health through auditing courses in the Department of Sociology and possibly the Medical School. The Fellow will also use the first year to explore some of the quantitative aspects of the project. For example, she will use publicly available data sets from the National Center for Health Statistics (e.g., National Health Interview Survey) to obtain small area estimations of morbidity and mortality rates for sub-Saharan African and West Indian immigrants. Other data sets (e.g., the Philadelphia Neighborhood Information System data, census summary tape files, etc.) will also be used to explore some of the mechanisms underlying the residential segregation-community violence-premature mortality nexus. Last but not least, the Fellow will apply agent-based computational demography and GIS techniques to simulate how racial residential segregation affects features of the physical and social neighborhood environment (e.g., disorder and crime), and in turn, increasing individual agents? risks for morbidity and ultimately, mortality. In the second year of the postdoctoral fellowship, the Fellow will field a pilot study (most likely in either New York City of Boston) to explore how African American and black immigrant families residing in segregated neighborhoods negotiate their environments with respect to health and safety. Information about mechanisms from the quantitative analyses in year one will be used as a starting point for understanding how family social processes and social capital influences individual and aggregate risks for morbidity and mortality. The pilot study will be instrumental in setting up the research design and interview guides for a larger proposed three cities (Boston, New York and D.C.) ethnographic study on residential segregation and morbidity/mortality among black immigrants and African Americans.
