School Policy Punitiveness and Midlife Cardiometabolic Risk: Gender, Race, and Health in the Zero Tolerance Era

• In Event: Aging and the Life Course Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 3: Life Course Experiences and Exposures and Long-Term Health Trajectories

Abstract

In the United States, youth racialized as Black (hereafter “Black”) are sorted into disproportionately punitive schools, and punished at disproportionate rates than their peers racialized as White (hereafter “White”, and Black-White disparities in school punishment are much larger for girls than for boys. Research demonstrates that exclusionary school discipline is detrimental to subsequent social and health outcomes. A separate line of literature implicates secondary school socioeconomic and racial context in subsequent health outcomes. Still, little is known about the association between the punitiveness of public school policies themselves and subsequent stress-related physiological dysregulation at the intersection of racialized social status and gender. Using nationally-representative contextual and biomarker data from Waves I and VI the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health, N = 2,768) and an intersectional, life course framework, this study investigates the following questions: (1) is exposure to school policy punitiveness during adolescence associated with subsequent midlife (ages 39-51) cardiometabolic risk? and (2) how does this association vary by race/ethnicity and gender for Black and White men and women? Preliminary results from negative binomial regressions suggest that exposure to higher levels of school policy punitiveness is associated with elevated cardiometabolic risk during midlife for Black women [Count Ratio = 1.10, 95% CI = [0.992, 1.221]) but not for Black men, White women, or White men. I discuss next steps for this study and possible implications of preliminary findings.

Author

• Sylvie Tuder, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill