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Abstract: On April 20, 2010, the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon (BP-DH) oil rig exploded, resulting in the largest marine oil spill in history. In this paper we utilize one-of-a-kind household survey data—the Louisiana Community Oil Spill Survey—to examine the impacts of the BP-DH disaster on the mental and physical health of spill affected residents in coastal Louisiana, with a special focus on the influence of community attachment and natural resource employment. We find that levels of both negative mental and physical health were significantly more pronounced at baseline compared to later time points. We show that greater community attachment is linked to lower levels of negative health impacts in the wake of the oil spill and that the disaster had a uniquely negative impact on households involved in the fishing industry. Further, we find evidence that the relationship between community attachment and mental health is more pronounced at later points in time, and that the negative health impacts on fishers have worsened over time. Implications for research and policy are discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Parental incarceration is now prevalent in community samples (e.g., with 11% of children reporting paternal imprisonment and 3% reporting maternal imprisonment in a national sample), pointing to a potentially important childhood trauma that should be included in work on contemporary childhood stressors in this era of mass incarceration. This paper investigates the influences of maternal and paternal imprisonment on changes in young adult mental health using a nationally representative sample. We assess four perspectives-gendered loss, same-sex role model, intergenerational stress, and maternal salience – on the joint influences of maternal and paternal incarceration within the broader stress process paradigm. The results generalize support for a gendered loss perspective developed in work on parental death and an early small study of parental incarceration. This pattern reveals maternal incarceration increases depressive symptoms while paternal incarceration increases substance role problems. Chronicity of parental imprisonment and its timing are also influential. Analyses further specify a vulnerability of male and minority young adults to high levels of mental health problems following maternal and paternal incarceration in adolescence. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: A large body of literature documents that children of depressed mothers have impaired cognitive, behavioral, and health outcomes throughout the life course, though much less is known about the mechanisms linking maternal depression to children’s outcomes. In this paper, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate and explain the consequences of maternal depression for 5-year-old children’s internalizing and externalizing problem behaviors. Ordinary least squared (OLS) regression models and propensity score models show that children exposed to both chronic and intermittent maternal depression have more problem behaviors than their counterparts with never depressed mothers. Results also show that economic resources and maternal parenting behaviors mediate much of the association between maternal depression and children’s problem behaviors, but that relationships with romantic partners and social support do little to explain this association. This research extends past literature by illuminating some mechanisms through which maternal depression matters for children; by utilizing longitudinal measures of depression; by employing rigorous statistical techniques to lend confidence to the findings; and by using a large, diverse, and non-clinical sample of children most susceptible to maternal depression. Given that early childhood problem behaviors lay a crucial foundation for short- and long-term life trajectories, the social consequences of maternal depression may be far-reaching. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Worker displacement has become a common feature of employment in the “flexible economy.” While studies of income losses and the duration of unemployment after displacement abound, and popular accounts argue that workers often lose status, less empirical attention has been paid to the quality or prestige of employment displaced workers are able to secure after a downsizing event. This paper helps to fill this gap in the literature by focusing on changes in occupational prestige among a nationally representative sample of displaced workers who became reemployed from the January 2004 Displaced Workers and Employee Tenure Supplement of the Current Population Survey. Our findings show that displaced workers with higher levels of education, net of other factors, fared significantly better than others in job quality upon reemployment, highlighting the importance of education in retaining status and privilege in the new economy. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In response to recent empirical research suggesting that how a person perceives his or her neighborhood translates into a number of psychological outcomes, this study seeks to assess the relative roles of (perceptions of) neighborhood disorder and objective levels of neighborhood poverty in influencing individuals’ self-reported self-esteem. Utilizing a series of structural equation models and data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality, this paper lends support to the presence of perceived neighborhood disorder as a mediating factor in the relationship between neighborhood poverty and self-esteem. Although disorder does not significantly and entirely replace the relationship between poverty rate and individual self-esteem, resident perceptions of neighborhood physical disorder are shown to be significantly related to self-esteem and are stronger in magnitude than the effect of poverty rate. Moreover, the models demonstrate that two of the pathways through which this effect operates are via civic engagement and compromised physical health. Although resident perceptions of neighborhood disorder do not unequivocally erase the effect of neighborhood poverty levels in explaining variance in self-esteem, the models do provide evidence of the crucial, non-trivial role of neighborhood disorder in shaping self-esteem. This research supports prior theory that has suggested that blighted and decaying urban neighborhoods are read as disinvestments both by residents and by city governments, and therefore, these images are internalized and incorporated into residents’ psychological makeup. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]