Among children under age nine, there is wide variation in rates of deep poverty across the states, ranging from 4 percent to 17 percent. Large racial disparities exist nationally and within most states. In the U.S., 5 percent of young white children and 3 percent of Asian American children live in deep poverty, while these percentages are more than double for other racial/ethnic groups of young children: 18 percent of Black children, 15 percent of American Indian and Native Alaskan children, and 11 percent of Hispanic/Latino children under age 9 are in families with incomes below 50 percent of the federal poverty line. For all but a few of the indicators we compared across income groups, children in deep poverty were the most likely to experience early conditions and circumstances that make them vulnerable to future health, development, and learning problems. These indicators include low birth weight, a physical condition or health problem that limits activities, an intellectual disability or developmental delay, participation in early intervention or special education, and less positive behavior. (As mentioned earlier, participation in early intervention and special education may also reduce risks posed by conditions that make children eligible for these programs.) The parents of young children in deep poverty were the most likely to have a mental health condition, to be a single parent, to lack a high school diploma, and to be unemployed. These parents were also the least likely to report that they can count on people in their neighborhood for help when they need it. For some indicators, families in income groups other than deep poverty showed the greatest disadvantage. Young children in poverty were the most likely to be obese. Low-income children were the most likely to lack health insurance, and they also had the highest prevalence of elevated blood lead levels, although percentages did not differ significantly across income groups. Among parents, those in poverty were the most likely to lack health insurance. Although the results suggest less optimal outcomes and family circumstances for poor and low-income children, the recommendations that follow focus on families with young children in deep poverty since indicators for this group suggest exceptional risks to children’s development and life opportunities. These recommendations incorporate income support policies targeting families in deep poverty into a two-generation approach that include investments in direct support for parents’ health and mental health, child birth outcomes, and children’s development. A body of theory and research suggests that policies aimed at promoting work and higher family income alongside the provision of other supports for parent well-being and children’s development can offer benefits for children that are larger than policies that focus solely on adult workforce development or children’s development.26 In addition, the recommendations call for policies that directly promote the integration of these supports so that they provide maximum opportunities for families to thrive.

Sociologists have long struggled to explain the minority mental health paradox: that racial-ethnic minorities often report better mental health than non-Hispanic whites despite social environments that seem less conducive to well-being. Using data from the 2008–2013 Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS), this study provides a partial explanation for the paradox rooted in a very different disparity. Evidence from MEPS indicates that non-Hispanic whites consume more pharmaceuticals than racial-ethnic minorities for a wide variety of medical conditions. Moreover, non-Hispanic whites consume more pharmaceuticals that although effective in treating their focal indication, include depression or suicide as a side effect. In models that adjust for the use of such medications, the minority advantage in significant distress is reduced, in some instances to statistical nonsignificance. Although a significant black and Hispanic advantage in a continuous measure of distress remains, the magnitude of the difference is reduced considerably. The relationship between the use of medications with suicide as a side effect and significant distress is especially large, exceeding, for instance, the relationship between poverty and significant distress. For some minority groups, the less frequent use of such medications is driven by better health (as in the case of Asians), whereas for others, it reflects a treatment disparity (as in the case of blacks), although the consequences for the mental health paradox are the same. The implications of the results are discussed, especially with respect to the neglect of psychological side effects in the treatment of physical disease as well as the problem of multiple morbidities.

13.0% of middle-aged adults (age 35- 64) live alone in rural (non-metropolitan) counties vs. 12.3% in urban counties. Of the 50 counties with the highest percentage of middle-aged adults living alone, 37 are rural. Health care providers in these counties identified several characteristics related to high rates of middle-aged adults living alone, including socio-demographic characteristics (e.g., income, marital status, age distribution), lack of social support, personal choice, housing issues, and health status. Practical challenges for middle-aged adults living alone in rural counties included limited resources, transportation, accessing health care, loneliness, substance use, and difficulty with self-care. While many individuals live alone by choice and thrive in doing so, some people experience unique barriers to health and well-being when living alone. These barriers play out uniquely in rural areas and require tailored interventions to support these individuals.

After a long period of convergence, around 1980, inter-place gaps in economic well-being in the United States began to increase. This rising inequality offers a rich terrain to explore causality in regional economics and development theory. This paper presents new, long-run evidence on interregional inequality that highlights the need to situate the current moment in a context of episodic alternations between convergence and divergence. In light of this evidence, the paper revisits the theoretical literature, finding gaps in existing supply- and demand-side models. A demand-led perspective can be strengthened by integrating a primary role for disruptive technological change. We posit a theory of alternating waves, where major technology shocks initially concentrate, and eventually deconcentrate, demand for skilled workers performing complementary tasks. Labor supply responds to these centripetal and centrifugal forces. These reversals yield the observed patterns of rising and falling interregional inequality. We trace out the implications of this theory in both academic and policy terms.

Objective: Despite the long-term decline, heart disease has remained the leading cause of death in the United States (US) over the past eight decades, accounting for 23% of all deaths in 2017. Although psychological distress has been associated with cardiovascular disease mortality, the relationship between different psychological distress levels and heart disease mortality in the US has not been analyzed in detail. Using a national longitudinal dataset, we examined the association between levels of psychological distress and US heart disease mortality. Methods: We analyzed the Kessler 6-item psychological distress scale as a risk factor for heart disease mortality using the pooled 1997-2014 data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) linked to National Death Index (NDI) (N=513,081). Cox proportional hazards regression was used to model survival time as a function of psychological distress and sociodemographic and behavioral covariates. Results: In Cox models with 18 years of mortality follow-up, the heart disease mortality risk was 121% higher (hazard ratio [HR]=2.21; 95% CI=1.99,2.45) in adults with serious psychological distress (SPD) (p<0.001), controlling for age, and 96% higher (HR=1.96; 95% CI=1.77,2.18) in adults with SPD (p<0.001), controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, education, marital status, poverty status, housing tenure, and geographic region when compared with adults without psychological distress. The relative risk of heart disease mortality associated with SPD decreased but remained significant (HR=1.14, 95% CI=1.02,1.28) after controlling for additional covariates of smoking, alcohol consumption, self-assessed health, activity limitation, and body mass index. There was a dose-response relationship, with relative risks of heart disease mortality increasing consistently at higher levels of psychological distress. Moreover, the association varied significantly by gender and race/ethnicity. The relative risk of heart disease mortality for those who experienced SPD was 2.42 for non-Hispanic Whites and 1.76 for non-Hispanic Blacks, compared with their counterparts who did not experience psychological distress. Conclusions and Global Health Implications: US adults with serious psychological distress had statistically significantly higher heart disease mortality risks than those without psychological distress. These findings underscore the significance of addressing psychological well-being in the population as a strategy for reducing heart disease mortality.

The share of children living with grandparents has increased in recent years. Previous studies have examined how time with grandparents is associated with child well-being, but we know little about how grandparents fare in their time with grandchildren. We used diary data from the American Time Use Study (ATUS) to examine the association between grandparents’ time in activities with grandchildren and multiple measures of their subjective well-being in those activities. We used a subsample of co-residential grandparents from the American Time Use Study (N = 868 individuals; 2474 activities), paying close attention to potential differences between three-generational families (those with parents, grandparents and grandchildren living together) and grandfamilies (which do not include the parent generation). We examined subjective well-being (happiness, meaning, sadness, tiredness and stress) in relation to family type (three-generational or grandfamily) and grandchild presence during the activity, as well as other characteristics of the activity (e.g., type of activity, duration, etc.) and of the grandparent (i.e., demographic variables). This is the first study to address grandparent SWB as affective response to activities in relation to presence of grandchildren during those activities. Results of multilevel models show that grandparents living with their grandchildren experienced more happiness and more meaningfulness when they engaged in activities with their grandchildren compared to spending time alone or with other people. This relationship was partially moderated by family type, such that grandfamily grandparents experienced less happiness in time with grandchildren than alone, relative to grandparents in three-generational families.

Education is a key dimension of well-being and a crucial indicator of development1–4. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) prioritize progress in education, with a new focus on inequality5–7. Here we model the within-country distribution of years of schooling, and use this model to explore educational inequality since 1970 and to forecast progress towards the education-related 2030 SDG targets. We show that although the world is largely on track to achieve near-universal primary education by 2030, substantial challenges remain in the completion rates for secondary and tertiary education. Globally, the gender gap in schooling had nearly closed by 2018 but gender disparities remained acute in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and North Africa and the Middle East. It is predicted that, by 2030, females will have achieved significantly higher educational attainment than males in 18 countries. Inequality in education reached a peak globally in 2017 and is projected to decrease steadily up to 2030. The distributions and inequality metrics presented here represent a framework that can be used to track the progress of each country towards the SDG targets and the level of inequality over time. Reducing educational inequality is one way to promote a fairer distribution of human capital and the development of more equitable human societies.

Jim Crow segregated African Americans and whites by law and practice. The causes and implications of the associated de jure and de facto residential segregation have received substantial attention from scholars, but there has been little empirical research on racial discrimination in public accommodations during this time period. We digitize the Negro Motorist Green Books, important historical travel guides aimed at helping African Americans navigate segregation in the pre-Civil Rights Act United States. We create a novel panel dataset that contains precise geocoded locations of over 4,000 unique businesses that provided non-discriminatory service to African American patrons between 1938 and 1966. Our analysis reveals several new facts about discrimination in public accommodations that contribute to the broader literature on racial segregation. First, the largest number of Green Book establishments were found in the Northeast, while the lowest number were found in the West. The Midwest had the highest number of Green Book establishments per black resident and the South had the lowest. Second, we combine our Green Book estimates with newly digitized county-level estimates of hotels to generate the share of non-discriminatory formal accommodations. Again, the Northeast had the highest share of non-discriminatory accommodations, with the South following closely behind. Third, for Green Book establishments located in cities for which the Home Owner’s Loan Corporation (HOLC) drew residential security maps, the vast majority (nearly 70 percent) are located in the lowest-grade, redlined neighborhoods. Finally, Green Book presence tends to correlate positively with measures of material well-being and economic activity.

The capacity to exercise choice for women and girls is an important development objective, but evidence on how health policies and programs affect decision-making is lacking in low-resource settings. This study aims to assess three different health interventions that may improve women’s and girls’ decision-making power in key life choices in sub-Saharan Africa. The first intervention consists of legal reforms that reduce restrictions on abortion, which may allow adolescent girls and young women to stay in school longer by delaying marriage and childbearing. I use a difference-in-differences approach to analyze the impact of expanding the legal grounds for abortion on marriage, birth, and schooling rates among adolescent girls and young women in 18 countries. The second intervention addresses financial barriers that might limit women’s ability to choose their preferred contraceptive methods. I use a propensity score approach combined with machine learning techniques to evaluate how free access to a broad contraceptive method mix affects women’s contraceptive choice in eight countries with high unmet needs for family planning. The third intervention distributes HIV self-tests through women with multiple sexual partners in Kenya. I use an instrumental variable approach to assess whether disclosing HIV-negative status affects women’s decision-making in intimate partner and transactional sex relationships. Each of these three analyses is presented as a different chapter with an overview that summarizes the results. Taken together, this study leverages rigorous econometric methods, fills important evidence gaps in the literature on gender and health, and informs policies to improve women’s and girls’ well-being in low-resource settings.

Since the early 1990s, the social safety net for families with children in the United States has undergone an epochal transformation. Aid to poor working families has become more generous. In contrast, assistance to the deeply poor has become less generous, and what remains more often takes the form of in-kind aid. A historical view finds that this dramatic change parallels others. For centuries, the nature and form of poor relief has been driven in part by shifting cultural notions of which social groups are "deserving" and "undeserving." This line was firmly redrawn in the 1990s. Did the re-institutionalization of these categorizations in policy have material consequences? This study examines the relationship between the decline of traditional cash welfare between 2001 and 2015 and two direct measures of wellbeing among households with children: household food insecurity and public school child homelessness. Using models that control for state and year trends, along with other factors, we find that the decline of cash assistance was associated with increases in both forms of hardship.

How do authoritarian regimes weather the political strain of severe eco­nomnic sanctions? In 1990, the United Nations Security Council annoui1ced an economic embargo on Iraq that was unprecedented in terms of its com­prehensiveness. Sanctions affected virtually all Iraqis, creating distress and suffering at every level of society. The sanctions came as a particular shock since Iraqis had enjoyed among the highest per capita food availability rat­ings in the Middle East prior to the imposition of the embargo (Gordon 2010, 33). During the sanctions period, malnutrition became widespread and Iraq saw the rise of both child mortality and childhood stunting. Using data from multiple sources, I provide information about the geographic distribution of human suffering within Iraq, with a special emphasis on the harm sanctions caused to Iraqi children. The sanctions regime had implications that went beyond the health and well-being of Iraqi citizens, however. In this chapter, I examine the domestic political impact of the massive, prolonged economic shock asso­ciated with the international sanctions regime using Iraqi archival sources captured in the wake of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. On the one hand, the economic embargo strengthened the regime's hand in a numbe1· of meaningful ways, particularly through state control of both the rations...

Objective: Despite the long-term decline, heart disease has remained the leading cause of death in the United States (US) over the past eight decades, accounting for 23% of all deaths in 2017. Although psychological distress has been associated with cardiovascular disease mortality, the relationship between different psychological distress levels and heart disease mortality in the US has not been analyzed in detail. Using a national longitudinal dataset, we examined the association between levels of psychological distress and US heart disease mortality. Methods: We analyzed the Kessler 6-item psychological distress scale as a risk factor for heart disease mortality using the pooled 1997-2014 data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) linked to National Death Index (NDI) (N=513,081). Cox proportional hazards regression was used to model survival time as a function of psychological distress and sociodemographic and behavioral covariates. Results: In Cox models with 18 years of mortality follow-up, the heart disease mortality risk was 121% higher (hazard ratio [HR]=2.21; 95% CI=1.99,2.45) in adults with serious psychological distress (SPD) (p<0.001), controlling for age, and 96% higher (HR=1.96; 95% CI=1.77,2.18) in adults with SPD (p<0.001), controlling for age, gender, race/ethnicity, immigrant status, education, marital status, poverty status, housing tenure, and geographic region when compared with adults without psychological distress. The relative risk of heart disease mortality associated with SPD decreased but remained significant (HR=1.14, 95% CI=1.02,1.28) after controlling for additional covariates of smoking, alcohol consumption, self-assessed health, activity limitation, and body mass index. There was a dose-response relationship, with relative risks of heart disease mortality increasing consistently at higher levels of psychological distress. Moreover, the association varied significantly by gender and race/ethnicity. The relative risk of heart disease mortality for those who experienced SPD was 2.42 for non-Hispanic Whites and 1.76 for non-Hispanic Blacks, compared with their counterparts who did not experience psychological distress. Conclusions and Global Health Implications: US adults with serious psychological distress had statistically significantly higher heart disease mortality risks than those without psychological distress. These findings underscore the significance of addressing psychological well-being in the population as a strategy for reducing heart disease mortality.

Whether parents have health insurance coverage affects not only their health care access but the financial stability and well-being of the entire family. The harmful consequences of parents' uninsurance may be magnified for young children, given early childhood's importance for long-term growth and development. Moreover, compared with a vast body of evidence on maternal and child health, research on fathers' insurance coverage and its implications for children and families is limited. In this brief, we assess uninsurance among parents living with young children from birth to age 5, using National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data from 2017 and 2018, and report separate estimates for mothers and fathers. Our main findings are as follows: - More than 4 million parents living with young children-2.2 million mothers and 2.2 million fathers-were uninsured in 2017-18, representing a 40 percent decline in uninsurance since 2013, following implementation of the major coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). - In 2018, fathers living with young children were more likely to be uninsured than mothers living with young children (15.2 percent versus 13.0 percent). Both mothers and fathers who were living with young children and were Hispanic, noncitizens, living in the South, lacking a high school diploma, or in a family with low income faced uninsurance rates greater than 20 percent. - Of the estimated 4.4 million uninsured parents living with young children in 2017-18, most were under age 35, about half were Hispanic, and more than half lived in the South. Compared with uninsured fathers, uninsured mothers living with young children were considerably less likely to be working and more likely to have low incomes. - Both mothers and fathers living with young children most commonly reported being uninsured because of cost, and many reported becoming uninsured after losing employer or public coverage. Uninsured fathers living with young children were more likely than such mothers to have gone more than three years without coverage. - Many uninsured parents living with young children also reported problems affording needed health care, low levels of health care use, and concerns about affording other basic needs. Many uninsured parents experience unmet health needs, financial hardships, and worries about affording the family's medical care, which can have adverse effects on both their and their children's health in the short and long run. Reducing uninsurance among parents-such as through Medicaid expansion in the remaining states, increasing coverage affordability and accessibility for people who are eligible for Medicaid or Marketplace coverage but not enrolled, and eliminating eligibility restrictions based on immigration status-would likely improve parents' ability to access and afford needed care and reduce related financial concerns. Moreover, expanding coverage for parents could improve family financial stability and long-term well-being for approximately 4.0 million children under 6 who live in a family with at least one uninsured parent.

Almost one-fifth of tropical forest cover has been lost in the last two decades, leading to local temperature increases that can surpass warming from 21st century climate change projections. Although it is known that working outdoors in high temperatures reduces worker productivity and increases heat strain, the extent to which deforestation-driven temperature change affects people across the tropics is unknown. Using satellite data combined with worker health guidelines, we show that warming associated with deforestation is already impacting human health and well-being in low latitude countries. We estimate that more than 2.5 million people in recently deforested tropical biome now face heat exposure that reduces safe work hours by at least two hours per day. This warming has particularly large impacts on populations in Brazil, Belize, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nigeria, and Cameroon. We highlight these effects by examining the Brazilian states of Mato Grosso and Pará, which have experienced particularly large-scale deforestation, and showing that temperatures and human heat exposure are increasing disproportionately quickly in these locations. Future global climate change magnifies heat exposure in deforested areas across the tropics; an additional 2°C of global warming will increase exposure to multiple hours of unsafe working conditions for over 1.6 million people in recently deforested areas. Tropical deforestation is hastening the arrival of climate change impacts in the tropics, highlighting the need to shift local land use practices and to slow global greenhouse gas emissions so the most vulnerable populations are not forced to bear the brunt of warming impacts.

In April, 1970, Atlanta Journal Constitution (AJC) reporter Lorraine M. Bennet wrote an article headlined, “How Far Yet to Go, Baby? Some Atlanta Women in Revolt.” It focused on how the Atlanta Women’s Liberation Movement was the only organization in the metro area fi ghting discrimination against women whose members were publicly labeled “man-haters.” In one passage, a member responded, “Certainly Not!” Bennet goes on to write: “responds one member, a dark-eyed brunette with a masters degree” (40). By today’s standards, the fact that this article described the eye and hair color, as well as the education level of this member would be considered irrelevant. Was this “code” for describing a nontraditional southern woman? Indeed, things have come a long way for the women of Georgia: in the workforce, in family life, education, employment income, healthcare, and in elected offi ce. And yes, you can be a dark-eyed brunette with a master’s degree and belong to a women’s rights organization without being labeled a “man-hater.” Georgia’s women make a signifi cant contribution to the state’s GDP, now the ninth largest in the country. Yet Georgia continues to lag behind other states, the nation as a whole, and other developed Western countries on many measures of women’s equality and well-being: earnings parity, maternal mortality, family planning, family and maternity leave, and aff ordable childcare (Phadke, Ravi, and McGrew 2018). The poor status of reproductive health and justice in Georgia is compounded by the persistence of racial inequality, compromising the lives of women of color (Prather et al. 2018).

The time after giving birth is critical to the health of new mothers and their children. Though most women have health insurance coverage during their pregnancy and delivery, new mothers often become uninsured postpartum, which can threaten their abilities to access and afford needed health care. Following implementation of the coverage provisions of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2014, thousands of new mothers gained insurance coverage, but few analyses have assessed how much new mothers’ health care access and affordability have improved under the law. In this brief, we examine changes in access to and affordability of health care services for new mothers under the ACA using data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). 1 We also assess whether changes in the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of our sample of new mothers contributed to observed changes in health care access and affordability. We find the following: ◼ The uninsurance rate for new mothers fell from 20.2 percent in 2011 to 11.3 percent in 2015 and remained relatively stable through 2018. ◼ New mothers were less likely to report unmet health care needs due to cost after implementation of the ACA coverage expansions in 2014; between 2011–13 and 2015–18, the share of new mothers reporting unmet needs for medical care dropped by 60 percent, and the shares reporting unmet needs for prescription medicines and specialist care fell by 40 percent and 44 percent. ◼ The share of new mothers very worried about paying their medical bills also fell from 20.9 percent in 2011–13 to 15.5 percent in 2015–18. ◼ In 2015–18, new mothers were more likely to report having seen a general doctor (60.9 percent versus 55.6 percent) and received a flu vaccine (52.5 percent versus 44.6 percent) in the past 12 months than in 2011–13. ◼ Changes in health care affordability and access were generally consistent with and without adjusting for new mothers’ changing demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, suggesting these changing characteristics were not driving health care access and affordability improvements during the study period. We find that new mothers experienced significant improvements in health care access and affordability after implementation of the ACA’s major coverage provisions. Together with other evidence on the ACA’s role in reducing uninsurance among women and new mothers and improving access to and affordability of health care among parents with low incomes and other adults, our results suggest the ACA likely contributed to new mothers’ gains in health care access and affordability over the study period. But even after ACA implementation, many new mothers still faced barriers to accessing needed health care services, which can negatively affect their health and their family’s well-being.

Working longer – in the sense of choosing to delay retirement beyond traditional retirement ages – is widely proposed as the best way for older Americans to boost their fragile retirement security. But the policy goal of increasing labor force participation among older Americans is fundamentally in tension with a precarious low-wage economy because jobs that feature low wages, high turnover rates, and few benefits do not provide a solid foundation for sustained employment at older ages. Many Americans in their 50s are already out of the labor force, and many retire involuntarily before traditional retirement ages – a situation that has been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Better jobs for prime-age workers help to pave the way for longer working lives. I outline three specific policy proposals: improved minimum wage, fair workweek laws, and a universal paid family and medical leave benefit. As others have argued, these policies would improve the well-being of prime-age workers. What has been less appreciated is that these policies would also put older Americans in a better position to extend their working years.

Wildfire is increasingly entering the global consciousness as severe events in California, Australia, and Greece elicit intense emotional response while exposing the consequences of a changing climate. In concert with uncertainties around climate change, policymakers, scientists, and activists call for supporting the resilience of social and ecological systems. Yet resilience as a concept is not monolithic. Resilience speaks to maintaining core structures and functions, but also adapting and transforming them so they may coexist with current and future disturbances. Questions remain over who decides which core structures and functions of a particular system are most valued, whether they should be adapted or transformed, and who benefits from system interventions. In an age where knowledge is situated by media outlets, policies, and worldviews, resilience is a goal that can be easily usurped by those who benefit from extant system structures and functions. Therefore, from a social justice framework, if resilience goals are to enhance equity and well-being, grassroots efforts must engage in creation and pursuance. In the case of wildfire, this includes mobilizing the communities which have and potentially will be exposed to wildfire events. Communities, a compilation of social and institutional structures, will need to consider and work within, or seek to modify, institutional barriers to pursue their resilience goals. Because wildfire does not recognize boundaries, local resilience goals will need to be situated in the fire susceptibility of the landscape in which communities are built. Overall, if resilience is to be a productive goal for communities to pursue, communities themselves must comprehensively articulate the values they wish to be resilient, identify the disturbances or perturbations those values need to be resilient to, select the form of resilience they wish to support, and ensure that resilience benefits are distributed equitably and fairly. Perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire events may indicate how successful community resilience building efforts are in articulating and pursuing resilience goals. Here, I 2 conceptualize community resilience as a process that allows communities to thrive during and between disturbance events such as wildfire. Utilizing this framework, perceptions of positive outcomes following a wildfire event indicate resilience efforts are achieving their aim. To study these dynamics with my thesis research, I utilized concepts from community resilience theory and assessed how individual perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire events were associated with community level resilience building efforts. I acknowledge the inherent limitations to employing individual perceptions in the study of community-level phenomena, as perceptions may not reflect actions taken to support community-level resilience and are subject to the conceptualization and definitions that each may ascribe their ‘community.’ However, by adopting individual perceptions to study community-level resilience, I sought to better understand which theorized community resilience efforts were viewed in a positive light by individuals affected by wildfire, thus shedding light on important individual and community-level dynamics related to wildfire and wildfire response. To pursue my research questions, I analyzed survey responses and facilitated group discussion dialogue, both conducted in the Bitterroot Valley, Montana and in the Methow Valley, Washington in the United States of America. In Chapter One, I review the literature on community resilience to wildfire, concluding with pertinent research questions guiding the following chapters. In Chapter Two, I built a multiple linear regression model to assess which community-level characteristics and wildfire impact factors were associated with individual responses to the statement “Wildfire events made my community stronger,” a metric of perceptions of community-level outcomes. Model results suggested that perceptions of strong leadership and community engagement, a sense of feeling at home in the community, effective communication with wildfire managers and access to wildfire information, adequate protection from wildfire, and contextual community and wildfire factors were associated with people perceiving positive community-level outcomes following wildfire. Interestingly, negative impacts caused by wildfire, an understanding of wildfire risk, loss of cellphone connection, internet connection, 3 and television service, a sense of community, gender, and age fell out of the final model, suggesting they did not affect perceptions of community-level outcomes, at least in these instances. Although these findings did not address the question of who benefits from community resilience building efforts, nor whom the survey respondents viewed as their community, they do suggest that certain community-level processes in the resilience literature and certain wildfire impact factors are associated with perceptions of positive community-level outcomes whereas others are not. To my knowledge, this is the first research study that empirically evaluates whether factors theorized to support community resilience are in fact associated with perceptions of positive community-level outcomes. Thus, this research contributes to resilience literature by identifying which social factors are associated with community resilience as a process, and supports managers, political figures, and community members investing in select social factors that support community-level resilience. In Chapter Three, I seek a more nuanced understanding of how perceptions of community-level outcomes may relate to community-level resilience through an analysis of notes and records from facilitated group discussions in the same two valleys in which the survey was conducted. From these discussions I found that individual perceptions of community-level outcomes following wildfire exposure were influenced by people in the valleys sharing resources during wildfire events, seeing wildfire agencies improve coordination and cooperation between and during wildfire events to support fuel mitigation and wildfire response measures, and increasing social investment in wildfire preparedness in the valleys. Taken together, my research suggests there is a connection between residents of the valleys perceiving positive community-level outcomes and residents of the valleys investing in measures that support community-level resilience to wildfire. These findings suggest that resilience literature can utilize perceptions of positive community-level outcomes as an indicator of community resilience, when appropriate caution is exercised. Additionally, these findings encourage managers, researchers, and politicians to further investigate why perceptions of community-level outcomes are positive or negative, 4 as it may reveal mechanisms behind the productivity (or failure) of community resilience building efforts. The Thesis Conclusion further summarizes these findings and calls for more empirical evidence on which factors are associated with perceptions of community-level outcomes, and what that may mean for community-level resilience.

Until the 1960s, little was known inside or outside Iran about the tribes living in the country. The anthropological research of Erika Friedl is now renowned for presenting comprehensive data collected over a 50-year period from her time among the Boir Ahmad tribal people living in the Zagros Mountains of Iran. In this new book, Friedl turns her attention to the subject of religion, which she had only touched upon in her previous work. About ninety percent of people in Iran and nearly everybody in Boir Ahmad are Muslims of the Twelver Shia group. However, studies of tribal people's religiosity, beliefs and rituals are scarce, and many researchers have discounted their views and experience, regarding the tribes as only “nominally religious” because their practices do not fit in with the mainstream practices and ideas in Iran. Religion and Daily Life in the Mountains of Iran corrects this view and provides a hallmark study of tribal people's religiosity. Demonstrating the great diversity of their philosophical and religious ideas, the book reveals the ways in which the tribes choose and express their religion, define their communities and understand their world. From conversations about God and his relationships with people, to observations on ageing and death, and research into the tribe's use of spells, amulets and sacrifices, to their beliefs about saints, health and well-being, the book is an original ethnographic exploration of religion and daily life.

Private vehicle travel entails costs to society. However, in a world designed around the automobile, adults who lack access to a vehicle for economic reasons may experience a significant handicap due to constrained mobility and accessibility. This paper examines whether private vehicle access is associated with the quantity and quality of out-of-home activities in which low-income individuals participate. We use pooled data from multiple time use surveys drawn from the Netherlands, Canada, Spain, and the United Kingdom, and employ Cragg two-part hurdle modeling to determine whether there is an association between household vehicle access and participation in twelve out-of-home activity types. As a robustness check, we also estimate multiple discrete continuous extreme value (MDCEV) models. Further, we examine travel time by mode for those with and without vehicles. Finally, we use American Time Use Survey data and fixed-effects panel models to determine the subjective well-being that is associated with our out-of-home activity types. A lack of private vehicle access is associated with significantly less frequent out-of-home activity participation, both in the aggregate and for seven of the twelve individual activities. Moreover, the activities most likely to be foregone are generally associated with high subjective well-being, suggesting that constrained mobility comes with significant emotional costs. We find a greater “activity penalty” for rural residents and for Canadian residents without vehicle access; urbanites without vehicles in the U.K. are the only geographic group which do not exhibit an activity penalty. Finally, respondents with vehicle access spend more total time traveling, although those without private vehicles partially offset spending less time in them with higher use of alternative modes. Overall, the findings suggest that the lack of a private vehicle is deleterious for quality of life, raising troubling questions about inequity possibly arising when people are denied access to vehicles for economic reasons.