Unequal Aging and Neighborhood Effects

• In Event: 30860 - Section on Aging and the Life Course Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 1. Place-Based Studies of Health and Aging

Abstract

This paper exists at the intersection of scholarship on aging, racial and ethnic health disparities, immigrant health, longitudinal neighborhood and housing effects. To assess age-related decline, I use measures of both physical and cognitive functional limitation at all stages of the adult life course, rather than restricting the sample to an older population in an effort to illuminate the process of aging across the adult life span. Functional limitation has been linked to life expectancy and physiological health in previous empirical work and improving rates of functional limitation is seen as a key indicator of improving health in older populations Further, rather than uncoupling race, ethnicity, citizenship, and legal status, I use a structural intersectionality approach, tying these different statuses together. Using participant reports on neighborhood and housing conditions, I measure how the perception of both neighborhood and housing disorder may exist to alter trajectories of aging within and across different racial and ethnic groups. Therefore, this study offers a unique perspective on how neighborhood contexts and housing conditions can shape aging trajectories at the intersection of multiple axes of stratification. Using panel data from the Survey on Income and Program Participation (2014-2018), I answer two broad research questions: First, how do trajectories of functional limitations vary at the intersections of race/ethnicity-citizenship and race/ethnicity-household legal status? Second, how do neighborhood and housing conditions over life course influence these observed aging trajectories across race/ethnicity-citizenship and race/ethnicity- household legal status?

Author

• Richard Patti, University of Pennsylvania