Faith-based pregnancy centers strive to offer "alternatives to abortion" that supporters claim aid women and critics assert manipulate pregnant people, stigmatize abortion, and potentially delay clients from obtaining medical care. However, scholars know little about the exchanges within appointments and how clients make sense of these experiences. Drawing on ethnographic observations of client appointments

Research has consistently linked discrimination and poorer health; however, fewer studies have focused on immigration-related discrimination and mental health outcomes. Drawing on quantitative surveys (N = 1,131) and qualitative interviews (N = 63) with Latino undergraduate students who are undocumented or U.S. citizens with undocumented parents, we examine the association between perceived immigration-related

This study explores whether undergoing medically assisted reproduction (MAR) is associated with experiencing loneliness and whether this association varies by gender and having a live birth. Using ...

This article examines the relationship between cognitive processing and mastery. While scholars have called for the integration of sociological and cognitive analyses of mastery, sociological resea...

This study draws on role theory and the life course perspective to examine how sleep health (duration, quality, and latency) is shaped by social role accumulation (number of roles), role repertoire...

Induction of labor (IOL) rates in the United States have nearly tripled since 1990. We examine official U.S. birth records to document increases in states’ IOL rates among pregnancies to Black, Lat...

Narratives rooted in ableism portray disabled children as burdens on their families. Prior research highlights health disparities between mothers of disabled children and mothers of nondisabled chi...

This article examines whether and how the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and depression is modified by welfare state spending using the 2006, 2012, and 2014 survey rounds of the Eu...

Time spent working or caring for children may reduce the time available for undertaking time-intensive health behaviors. We test competing perspectives about how work hours and the number of childr...

Sociological research suggests that violent environments contribute to excess weight, a pressing health issue worldwide. However, this research has neglected extreme forms of violence, such as arme...

Studying disparities in psychological well-being across diverse groups of women can illuminate the racialized health risks of gendered family life. Integrating life course and demand–reward perspec...

Using cross-national data containing information on the status rank of network alters, this study investigates the potential negative effects of “upward status heterophily,” ties to and perceived i...

Social change produces alterations in society that necessitate changes in sociological theories. Two significant changes affecting health lifestyle theory are the behaviors associated with the COVI...

Patient autonomy, or the right to make decisions about medical care, is usually examined either within clinical encounters with medical providers or outside of clinics via social movements to trans...

Parents with better-educated children are healthier and live longer, but whether there is a causal effect of children’s education on their parents’ health and longevity is unclear. First, we demons...

The COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a massive turn to remote work, followed by subsequent shifts for many into hybrid or fully returning to the office. To understand the patterned dynamics of subjec...

Poor physical health places adults at greater risk for suicide ideation. However, the linkage between health and suicidal thoughts may emerge and become established during early adulthood, concomit...

Life course theories suggest that fathers’ lifetime criminal legal system contact could contribute to poor parent–child outcomes via deterioration in couple relationship quality and fathers’ behavi...

Although most clinicians have come to perceive invasive life-sustaining treatments as overly aggressive at the end of life, some of the public and greater proportions of some socially disadvantaged...

The United States is experiencing a demographic transition toward older motherhood. Biomedicine classifies pregnancies among all women of advanced maternal age (AMA) as high-risk; paradoxically, wo...

Extant research has established that low-wage workers of color are at higher risk for occupational exposures. While the medical sociology literature regarding contested illness provides insights in...

The stress process perspective suggests that romantic relationship transitions can be stressors that impair mental health. Research on romantic relationships and mental health has ignored one commo...

Relying on in-depth interviews and ethnographic data in Los Angeles, California, this study examines the health experiences of unaccompanied, undocumented Latin American-origin immigrant youth as t...

Increasing evidence points to the salience of early life experiences in shaping health inequalities, but scant research has considered the role of institutional resources as buffers in this relatio...

A clear pattern has emerged in allopathic medical schools across the United States: Most medical students have stopped going to class. While this trend among students is well known in medical educa...

Estimates of unmet need for mental health services in the adult population are too high because many recover without treatment. Untreated recovery suggests that individuals accurately perceive prof...

Although the bereavement literature is voluminous, we know very little about how exposure to multiple family member deaths across the life course shapes health trajectories as people age and whethe...

Social isolation has robust adverse effects on health, well-being, dementia risk, and longevity. Although most studies suggest similar effects of isolation on the health of men and women, there has...

Studies of the relationship between income inequality and life expectancy often speculate about the role of policy, but direct empirical research is limited. Drawing on the neo-materialist perspect...

This study investigates mental health inequalities by family type and gender during the COVID-19 pandemic in Germany. Using data from the German Family Panel, we compared three dimensions of mental...

The study of social networks is increasingly central to health research for medical sociologists and scholars in other fields. Here, we review the innovations in theory, substance, data collection, and methodology that have propelled the study of social networks and health from a niche subfield to the center of larger sociological and scientific debates. In particular, we contextualize the broader

We present evidence from choice experiments on hypothetical triage decisions in a pandemic. Respondents have to decide who out of two patients gets ventilation. Patients are described in terms of attributes such as short-term survival chance, long-term life expectancy, and their current ventilation status. Attributes are derived from the ethical discourse among experts regarding triage guidelines during

The sexual identities of young women today are less binary and more fluid than ever before. Several theoretical perspectives imply that this fluidity could be accompanied by distress. To examine this, we analyzed four waves of data from Australian women born 1989 to 1995 (n = 11,527). We found no evidence of a universal association between sexual identity change and psychological distress. Instead

Postmortem diagnostic overshadowing—defined as inaccurately reporting a disability as the underlying cause of death—occurs for over half of adults with cerebral palsy. This practice obscures cause of death trends, reducing the effectiveness of efforts to reduce premature mortality among this marginalized health population. Using data from the National Vital Statistics System 2005 to 2017 U.S. Multiple

Pioneering scholarship links retrospective childhood conditions to mature adult health. We distinctively provide critical evidence with prospective state-of-the-art measures of parent income observed multiple times during childhood in the 1970s to 1990s. Using the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we analyze six health outcomes (self-rated health, heart attack, stroke, life-threatening chronic conditions

We investigate time inequity as an explanatory mechanism for gendered physical activity disparity. Our mixed-effect generalized linear model with two-stage residual inclusion framework uses longitudinal data, capturing differing exchanges and trade-offs in time resources. The first stage estimates within-household exchanges of paid and family work hours. Estimates show that men’s employment increases

Medical sociology gives limited attention to age—a surprising observation given the aging of the population and the fact that age is among the strongest determinants of health. We examine this issue through an analysis of articles published in Journal of Health and Social Behavior (JHSB) and Sociology of Health & Illness (SHI) between 2000 and 2019. One in 10 articles focused on age or aging, with

One of the most promising directions for reducing mental illness stigma lies in Allport’s contact theory, which suggests that intergroup interactions reduce stigma. Here, we argue that stigmatizing attitudes are driven by the nature, magnitude, and valence of community-based ties to people with mental illness (PMI), not simply their presence. Using the 2018 General Social Survey (N = 1,113), we compare

Our study bridges literatures on the health effects of job loss and life course employment trajectories to evaluate the selection into employment pathways and their associations with health in the short and medium terms. We apply sequence analysis to monthly employment calendars from a population-based sample of working-age women and men observed from 2009 to 2013 (N = 737). We identify six distinct

Previous research has indicated that racial-ethnic minority communities lack a wide variety of health-related organizations. We examine how this relates to the early COVID-19 vaccine rollout. In a series of spatial error and linear growth models, we analyze how racial-ethnic residential segregation is associated with the distribution of vaccine sites and vaccine doses across ZIP codes in the five largest

Research suggests that economic declines contribute to mortality risks from suicide and drug poisoning, but how the economy impacts individuals’ risks of these deaths has been challenging to specify. Building on recent theoretical advances, we investigate how adolescent occupational expectations and preparation contribute to suicide and drug poisoning deaths in a shifting economy. We use High School

Prior research documents associations between personal network characteristics and health, but establishing causation has been a long-standing research priority. To evaluate approaches to causal inference in egocentric network data, this article uses three waves from the University of California Berkeley Social Networks Study (N = 1,159) to investigate connections between nine network variables and

Affective polarization—the tendency for individuals to exhibit animosity toward those on the opposite side of the partisan divide—has increased in the United States in recent years. This article presents evidence that this trend may have consequences for Americans’ health. Structural equation model analyses of nationally representative survey data from Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (n

The idea that socioeconomic differences are a “fundamental cause” of health and well-being is the basis for large volumes of research. However, one of the challenges in this area is that of linking socioeconomic positions to etiological mechanisms in theoretically informative ways. The situation is doubly challenging because the expression and meaning of socioeconomic positions and the mechanisms they

Pandemic frontline occupations consist of disproportionately low socioeconomic status and racial minority workers. Documenting occupational health disparities is therefore crucial for understanding COVID-19-related health inequalities in the United States. This study uses Current Population Survey microdata to estimate occupational differences in sickness-related absences (SAs) from work in March through

Suicide is steadily rising. Many blamed worsening economic conditions for this trend. Sociological theory established clear pathways between joblessness and suicide focused on status threat, shame, and consequent disruption of social relationships. However, recent empirical research provides little support for a link between unemployment and suicide. I attempt to reconcile this contradiction by focusing

This study analyzes the longitudinal association between precarious employment and physical and mental health in a dualized labor market by disaggregating between-employee and within-employee effects and considering mobility in precariousness of employment. Analyses were based on the German Socio-Economic Panel from 2002 to 2018 considering all employees ages 18 to 67 years (n = 38,551). Precariousness

Policy mechanisms shaping population health take numerous forms, from behavioral prohibitions to mandates for action to surveillance. Rising drug overdoses undermined the state’s ability to promote population-level health. Using the case of prescription drug monitoring programs (PDMPs), we contend that PDMP implementation highlights state biopower operating via mechanisms of surveillance, whereby prescribers

Although empirical work has shown that personal and spousal education are both related to health, the nature of these associations has been harder to establish. People select into marriages on the basis of observed and hard-to-observe characteristics, complicating the job of the researcher who wishes to make causal inferences. In this article, we implement a within-sibling-pair design that exploits

Quantitative studies of racial health disparities often use static measures of self-reported race and conventional regression estimators, which critics argue is inconsistent with social-constructivist theories of race, racialization, and racism. We demonstrate an alternative counterfactual approach to explain how multiple racialized systems dynamically shape health over time, examining racial inequities

Although physical pain lies at the intersection of biology and social conditions, a sociology of pain is still in its infancy. We seek to show how physical and psychological pain are jointly parts of a common expression of despair, particularly in relation to mortality. Using the 2002–2014 National Health Interview Survey Linked Mortality Files (N = 228,098), we explore sociodemographic differences

Traditional theories of grief suggest that individuals experience short-term increases in depressive symptoms following the death of a parent. However, growing evidence indicates that effects of parental bereavement may persist. Situating the short- and long-term effects of parental death within the life course perspective, we assess the combined influence of time since loss and life course stage at

Link and Phelan’s pioneering 1995 theory of fundamental causes urged health scholars to consider the macro-level contexts that “put people at risk of risks.” Allied research on the political economy of health has since aptly demonstrated how institutions contextualize risk factors for health. Yet scant research has fully capitalized on either fundamental cause or political economy of health’s allusion

The editor wishes to acknowledge the following people who reviewed one or more manuscripts for the Journal of Health and Social Behavior during the period October 2, 2020, to October 1, 2021. Peer review of manuscripts is an often underappreciated contribution yet is essential to the discipline and quality of scholarship published in this journal. We value the importance of peer review and express

Mass incarceration is a public health challenge, particularly among marginalized groups. Not only do prisons and jails serve as vectors for the transmission of infectious diseases, but the carceral experience also heightens risk for stress-related illnesses and premature mortality. Several important challenges confront this research. First, few studies account for selection effects resulting from preexisting

Depressive symptoms are disproportionately high among women and less educated individuals. One mechanism proposed to explain this is the differential vulnerability hypothesis—that these groups experience particularly strong increases in symptoms in response to stressful life events. We identify limitations to prior work and present evidence from a new approach to life stress research using the UK Household

Combining theories of health lifestyles—interrelated health behaviors arising from group-based identities—with those of network and behavior change, we investigated network characteristics of health lifestyles and the role of influence and selection processes underlying these characteristics. We examined these questions in two high schools using longitudinal, complete friendship network data from the

Simons, Ronald L., Man-Kit Lei, Eric Klopach, Mark Berg, Yue Zhang, and Steven S. R. Beach. 2021. “(Re)Setting Epigenetic Clocks: An Important Avenue Whereby Social Conditions Become Biologically Embedded across the Life Course.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 62(3):436–53. doi:10.1177/00221465211009309.

Although prior research documents adverse health consequences of precarious work, we know less about how chronic exposure to precarious work in midlife shapes health trajectories among aging adults. The present study uses longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study to consider how histories of precarious work in later midlife (ages 50–65) shape trajectories of health and mortality risk after

This article reveals how law and legal interests transform medicine. Drawing on qualitative interviews with medical professionals, this study shows how providers mobilize law and engage in investigatory work as they deliver care. Using the case of drug testing pregnant patients, I examine three mechanisms by which medico-legal hybridity occurs in clinical settings. The first mechanism, clinicalization