Browsing by Author "Merli, Maria-Giovanna"

Immigrants rely on social networks upon arrival to their country of destination to access resources, find a job, and begin the process of incorporation. However, the contours of how and under what circumstances networks support a job search or facilitate assimilation remain unexplored. In this dissertation, I look at the intersection of migration, social networks and employment to shed light on both the limitations and benefits of social networks for immigrant incorporation. In Chapter 1, I study whether return migrants use social networks to find a job when they return to their home country. In doing so, I contribute to the academic debate on whether immigrants lose or maintain their connections to friends and family when they leave. Using Colombia as a case study, I draw on data from two years of Colombian nationally representative household surveys conducted in 2016 and 2017. I use a Difference-in-Differences strategy and exploit a mass deportation event of Colombian migrants from Venezuela in 2015 which prompted a wave of return-migrants. This yields three main findings: (1) Return migrants are more likely to use networks in their search than never migrants; (2) social networks are a last resort in return migrants’ job search, and (3) jobs found through networks for return migrants may be lower quality than jobs found through other means. This paper contributes to the literature on return migrant integration, and speaks to an important question in the literature: Will friends and family still be there for you after you’ve left? In Chapter 2, co-authored with Giovanna Merli and Ted Mouw, we study how immigrants’ personal networks are related to their migration experience and key indicators of assimilation. We draw on novel data that includes network data for over 500 immigrants and use model-based clustering to understand the assimilation of a particular case of first-generation immigrants: Chinese immigrants in a sparsely dispersed in a mixed suburban/urban area (Raleigh-Durham). We identify four Chinese immigrant typologies, Chinese Friendship Networks, Socially Embedded, Undecided Newcomers, and Economically Integrated, which are distinguished simultaneously by their social networks and their demographic characteristics. In turn, we find different clusters show different patterns in assimilation indicators. These findings contribute to a growing literature that calls for more granular study of immigrant groups so we can better understand heterogeneity in their outcomes. In Chapter 3, I study the limits of social networks for the immigrant job search. The idea that migrants draw on their networks to obtain employment upon arrival at their destination is central to the immigrant integration literature. However, despite the wealth of evidence on migrants’ use of networks, little is known about when and why migrants are willing to help newcomers find work. To study this, I deploy an online vignette experiment among Latin American immigrants to the United States. I find that immigrants are more likely to provide job search support to other immigrants from their home country but are less likely to lend support to newcomers that pose a reputational risk. I also find that tie strength is important – respondents in our sample are more likely to help a close friend than a stranger, which can help immigrants overcome the difficulties associated with a competitive labor market.

Over the past three decades, the phenomenon of children's health in China has been marked by a co-existence of overweight and underweight. As the primary institution for a child, family is an opportune place for child malnutrition intervention. By advancing a framework that addresses the contextual factors which shape the heterogeneity of socioeconomic gradients of child overweight/obesity, this dissertation has sought to understand the channels through which access to family resources influences child overweight/obesity in China. Based on these developed understandings, I identified the mechanisms by which having any younger siblings and three generation living together or proximately affect child malnutrition in China. Using data drawn from China Health and Nutrition Survey, this dissertation uncovered remarkable differences in multiple levels of contextual factors that shape a child's risk of overweight/obesity and underweight in China as compared to Western society. China's stage of economic development together with the drastically increasing income inequality has created an ever-increasing socioeconomic gap in child overweight/obesity, especially after 1997. This finding confirmed the position of the Ecological System framework that access to obesogenic environment is much more important than willpower based on knowledge in shaping one's obesity-related risk behavior. Although the fertility level has been lowered by One Child Policy, resource dilution effect still affects girls' nutrition status, especially for those exposed to poverty and food insecurity. Children in the care of grandparents are healthier, probably due to the generally low degree of access to obesogenic foods and a closer intergenerational relationship that facilitates effective communication and promotes healthy lifestyle formation.

In the United States, geographic and racial-ethnic disparities in adverse birth outcomes have increased over the past decade. High and rising rates of low birth weight, preterm delivery, and infant mortality are concentrated in the South and Midwest and among non-Hispanic Black and other birthing persons of color. These divergent trends are rooted in structural and social systems of inequality, such that cumulative experiences of discrimination and disparate access to resources related to policy contexts and one’s social standing systematically place some birthing persons at greater risk of adverse birth outcomes compared to others. Because these outcomes are associated with both birthing persons’ social positioning and offspring’s later-life socioeconomic status and health, they become mechanisms through which inequality is passed across generations. This dissertation explores the structural and social determinants of intergenerational health inequities by examining how the state policy contexts and discrimination that a mother is exposed to contribute to differences in adverse birth outcomes across US states and two distinct but related status characteristics: race and ethnicity and skin tone. Chapters 2 and 3 use birth cohort-linked birth/infant death restricted-use micro-data from the National Center for Health Statistics. Chapter 2 focuses on a single policy context and evaluates how rates of preterm birth and infant mortality responded to two policies restricting access to reproductive health care in Texas between 2005 and 2017. Using demographic standardization and decomposition techniques, I find that age-education-prenatal care standardized rates of infant mortality increased significantly in the years immediately following restrictions to family planning care (2011), but only for births to non-Hispanic (NH) Black mothers. Standardized preterm birth rates increased slightly and temporarily following 2013 restrictions on abortion providers across all racial-ethnic groups. These salient findings underscore the need to consider the infant health and heterogeneous consequences of rapidly evolving reproductive rights across the US. Chapter 3 takes a multidimensional policy approach to consider, first, how state policies and related characteristics co-occur to form distinct, underlying policy contexts and, second, how those contexts are related to low birth weight and infant mortality. Building on the World Health Organization’s structural determinants of health framework and compiling state-level data from several publicly available sources, results from the latent profile analysis suggest three distinct contexts. Contexts defined by high intervention or high constituent engagement (compared to low intervention) are negatively associated with risks of low birth weight and infant mortality. Overall, the protective effects are most pronounced among births to NH white mothers (compared to NH Black or Hispanic). These findings demonstrate how state policies and characteristics combine to shape health and underscore the importance of considering how racialized experiences may reduce the benefits of certain state contexts among minoritized groups. In Chapter 4, I marry weathering and skin tone stratification frameworks to examine how risks of low birth weight differ across maternal age and skin tone, a marker of cumulative discrimination, among NH Black mothers. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescence to Adult Health, I find that, despite similar risks of low birth weight across skin tone at maternal age 16, risks diverge with age such that mothers with the darkest skin tones experience the sharpest increases. These findings underscore the transgenerational consequences of life course exposures to discrimination. Overall, these findings contribute to health equity, maternal and child health, and life course studies by demonstrating how both “protective” and “harmful” policies contribute to racial-ethnic disparities in birth outcomes and by underscoring the importance of considering heterogeneous experiences across the life course and within racial-ethnic groups when addressing birth inequities. Future research should continue to interrogate how the “protective” effects of policies and contexts vary across race and ethnicity to clarify if such policies exacerbate or mitigate inequities, as well as examine how other cumulative and early life course stressors shape birth outcomes.