The uneven impact of Medicaid expansion on rural and urban Black, Latino/a, and White mortality.

Purpose: To determine the differential impact of Medicaid expansion on all-cause mortality between Black, Latino/a, and White populations in rural and urban areas, and assess how expansion impacted mortality disparities between these groups.

Methods: We employ a county-level time-varying heterogenous treatment effects difference-in-difference analysis of Medicaid expansion on all-cause age-adjusted mortality for those 64 years of age or younger from 2009 to 2019. For all counties within the 50 US States and the District of Columbia, we use restricted-access vital statistics data to estimate Average Treatment Effect on the Treated (ATET) for all combinations of racial and ethnic group (Black, Latino/a, White), rurality (rural, urban), and sex.

Informal modes of social support among residents of the rural American West during the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, federal spending to government safety net programs in the U.S. increased dramatically.

Social and political correlates of adult and dependent-child COVID-19 vaccination behavior in rural America.

Objective: This paper describes the individual-level correlates of self and dependent-child COVID-19 vaccination behavior among adults in rural America.

Methods: We draw on the data from a large-scale survey of rural Americans conducted in 2022, after most Americans had the opportunity to receive the vaccination easily and freely. The survey yielded an analytic sample of 841 adults and 530 adults with dependent children.

The 2020 US Census Differential Privacy Method Introduces Disproportionate Discrepancies for Rural and Non-White Populations.

The recently finalized changes to the disclosure avoidance policies of the U.S. Census Bureau for the 2020 census, grounded in differential privacy, have faced increasing criticism from demographers and other social scientists.

Cost of Living Variation, Nonmetropolitan America, and Implications for the Supplemental Poverty Measure.

Poverty scholarship in the United States is increasingly reliant upon the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) as opposed to the Official Poverty Measure of the United States for research and policy analysis. However, the SPM still faces several critiques from scholars focused on poverty in nonmetropolitan areas. Key among these critiques is the geographic adjustment for cost of living employed in the SPM, which is based solely upon median rental costs and pools together all nonmetropolitan counties within each state.

Elevated serious psychological distress, economic disruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic in the nonmetropolitan American West.

In this study we examined the psychological distress, self-rated health, COVID-19 exposure, and economic disruption of a sample of the nonmetropolitan western U.S. population and labor force one year after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Poverty Balancing Equation: Expressing Poverty of Place as a Population Process.

The accurate measurement of poverty is essential for the development of effective poverty policy. Unfortunately, approaches that use poverty rates to assess the causes and consequences of poverty do not fully capture the components of change in the poverty population because changes in the conventional poverty rate can occur owing to processes of natural increase, migration, or transitions in and out of poverty. This article presents an accounting framework for changes in poverty within and between places.

The widespread and unjust drinking water and clean water crisis in the United States.

Many households in the United States face issues of incomplete plumbing and poor water quality. Prior scholarship on this issue has focused on one dimension of water hardship at a time, leaving the full picture incomplete. Here we complete this picture by documenting the full scope of water hardship in the United States and find evidence of a regionally-clustered, socially unequal nationwide household water crisis.

Rural-urban differences in the labor-force impacts of COVID-19 in the United States.

COVID-19 has had dramatic impacts on economic outcomes across the United States, yet most research on the pandemic's labor-market impacts has had a national or urban focus. We overcome this limitation using data from the U.S.

Impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on rural America.

Despite considerable social scientific attention to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on urbanized areas, very little research has examined its impact on rural populations. Yet rural communities-which make up tens of millions of people from diverse backgrounds in the United States-are among the nation's most vulnerable populations and may be less resilient to the effects of such a large-scale exogenous shock. We address this critical knowledge gap with data from a new survey designed to assess the impacts of the pandemic on health-related and economic dimensions of rural well-being in the North American West.

County Reclassifications and Rural-Urban Mortality Disparities in the United States (1970-2018).

To demonstrate how inferences about rural-urban disparities in age-adjusted mortality are affected by the reclassification of rural and urban counties in the United States from 1970 to 2018. We compared estimates of rural-urban mortality disparities over time, produced through a time-varying classification of rural and urban counties, with counterfactual estimates of rural-urban disparities, assuming no changes in rural-urban classification since 1970. We evaluated mortality rates by decade of reclassification to assess selectivity in reclassification.

Decomposing Differences in Poor Self-rated Health between Those in Agriculture and Natural Resource Occupations and the Rest of the Labor Force.

: Occupations in agriculture and natural resources persistently have some of the highest rates of injury and illness. Additionally, these fields are dominated by segments of the population known to demonstrate poorer health, such as those with less education, lower family income, and more irregular labor force participation. Thus, it is unclear if health disparities between those in these sectors and the rest of the labor force are unique to these occupations, or a reflection of their demographic composition.

The relationship between parks and recreation per capita spending and mortality from 1980 to 2010: A fixed effects model.

Evidence concerning the link between park access, use, programming and health has continued to grow. However, government funding for parks and recreation is highly susceptible to the ebbs and flows of the national economy. Given this, the purpose of this study was to test the relationship between county area spending on parks and recreation operations and all-cause mortality in the United States from the years 1980-2010.

The relationship between self-rated health and local government spending on parks and recreation in the United States from 1997 to 2012.

The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between local government spending on parks and recreation and self-rated health in the United States. Using four publicly available datasets from the U.S.

Injustice in Mobile Leisure: A Conceptual Exploration of Pokémon Go.

In augmented reality, video games and the physical world converge as individuals participate in digital leisure overlaid on physical spaces. In Pokémon Go, game play in the physical world is impacted by constraints that limit access and play of marginalized groups. Global popularity of Pokémon Go created an opportunity to explore experiences of marginalized groups participating in augmented reality game play.