Contextual Long Arms: Adolescent Family and Neighborhood Disadvantages and Racial-Ethnic Disparities in Biological Age Acceleration

• 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

Theory emphasizes that racial–ethnic disparities in health and mortality arise from unequal access to socioeconomic resources and the environments that shape risk exposure early in life. Prior research, however, often treats early disadvantage as a household trait. We develop and test the contextual long arms hypothesis to better understand how disadvantaged adolescent family and social contexts jointly shape racial ethnic health disparities. Using prospective data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (N= 4,597), we study how unequal exposure and unequal vulnerability to adolescent family and neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage are associated with midlife accelerated biological aging. Multivariable models show that both family and neighborhood disadvantages during adolescence are independently linked to faster biological aging in the late 30s, with substantively comparable magnitudes. Racial-ethnic comparisons reveal greater biological age acceleration among Black adults than White adults, alongside lower acceleration among Hispanic and Asian adults. Decomposition analyses indicate that the Black–White gap is driven largely by unequal exposure to adolescent socioeconomic disadvantage, especially in the neighborhood, while socioeconomic advantage yields larger protection in age acceleration for Whites than for Blacks. Hispanic adults show slower aging than Whites despite higher adolescent disadvantage that may stem from different neighborhood resources and stress processes across groups. Asian adults also show slower aging, but this gap is not explained by adolescent disadvantage and is estimated with limited precision. Findings highlight adolescent families and neighborhoods as interdependent social contexts that become biologically embodied and contribute to the early emergence of racial-ethnic inequalities in morbidity and mortality.

Authors

• Yiang Li, University of Chicago

• Yang Claire Yang, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

• Linda J. Waite, University of Chicago

• Allison E Aiello

• Kathleen Mullan Harris, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill