Family Histories and Teen Pregnancy in the United States and Canada.

Objective: This study took a long view of childhood experiences that can contribute to the risk of teen pregnancy in the U.S. and Canada, two countries with different norms and policies surrounding family life and inequality.

I want to move, but cannot: characteristics of involuntary stayers and associations with health among Canadian seniors.

Objectives: The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristics of seniors in the Canadian population who are involuntary stayers and to assess associations with health.

Method: Data come from the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey, with the sample restricted to those 65 and older (N = 2,551).

Results: Nearly 1 in 10 seniors identified as an involuntary stayer.

A life-course approach to studying transitions among Canadian seniors in couple-only households.

This study tracked the occurrence of death, widowhood, institutionalization, and coresidence with others between 1994 and 2002 for a nationally representative sample of 1,580 Canadian respondents who, at initial interview, were aged 55 and older and living in a couple-only household. Although the majority of seniors remained in a couple-only household throughout the duration of the survey, nearly one in four who experienced a first transition underwent one or more subsequent transitions. Age, economic resources, and health were significant predictors of a specific first transition and multiple transitions.

Prevalence of methylphenidate use among Canadian children following parental divorce.

Background: Evidence suggests that children living in single-parent or step-parent households are more likely than children in households with 2 biological parents to be prescribed methylphenidate. I conducted a study of prospective data to investigate parental divorce as a predictor of methylphenidate use.

Methods: I used data for children who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth from 1994 to 2000.

Household income histories and child mental health trajectories.

Although it is widely accepted that low household income is associated with worse child mental health, less is known about whether income histories, often differentiated into stable and dynamic components, also matter. Using longitudinal data from the Child Supplement of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, comprising the repeated measures of children ages 4 to 14 from 1986 to 1998 inclusive, I estimate generalized linear mixed models to evaluate the influence of household income histories on child depression and antisocial behavior over time. Results indicate that, at initial interview, low household income is associated with higher levels of depression and antisocial behavior; subsequent improvements in household income reduce child mental health problems.

Marital transitions and mental health: are there gender differences in the short-term effects of marital status change?

Although there has been evidence to suggest that women exhibit more vulnerability to psychological distress than men when they lose a spouse or remarry, knowledge about the process by which men and women adjust to marital change remains fragmentary. This is due in part to the length of time between observations in longitudinal studies on marital change, with the result that mental health status is typically assessed long after a marital status transition has occurred. The purpose of the current study is to test for gender differences in the short-term mental health effects of a marital status transition using three waves of data collected at two year intervals in a Canadian population health survey (N=11,155).

Age and the gender gap in distress.

Women report more psychological distress than men and recent evidence suggests that this gap increases with age. It has been argued that the widening differential in distress reflects the progressive and cumulative nature of women's disadvantaged work and family roles. Drawing on the cumulative disadvantage hypothesis and social stress theory, we test: (1) whether exposure to chronic stress accounts for an increasingly larger proportion of the gender effect on distress with age; and (2) whether women are increasingly more vulnerable to the effects of chronic stress on distress with age.

Chronic stress and the social patterning of women's health in Canada.

Existing research on the social patterning of women's health draws attention to the significance of social roles and socioeconomic position. Although we know a great deal about health differences according to the occupancy of these positions, we know a lot less about why such patterns exist. This paper addresses this gap by examining the pathways through which social structure is linked to health using data from a 1994 Canadian national probability sample of women, aged 25-64 years.

The influence of work, household structure, and social, personal and material resources on gender differences in health: an analysis of the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey.

Data from the 1994 Canadian National Population Health Survey (NPHS) do not confirm the widespread assumption that women experience considerably more ill health than men. The patterns vary by condition and age and at many ages, the health of women and men is more similar than is often assumed. However, we should not minimize the gender differences that do exist and in this paper we focus on three health problems which are more common among women: distress, migraine and arthritis/rheumatism.