Despite increased attention to the disturbing problem of disparities, certain groups of Americans remain healthier than others, due largely to differences in race and ethnicity, income, education, residential segregation, and other social factors. Co-PIs Alberto Palloni, Ph.D. and Carolina Milesi, Ph.D. seek to better understand the mechanisms that lead to health gaps by probing the connections between child and adult health. Their project, Early Childhood Conditions, Reproduction of Socioeconomic Inequalities, and the Persistence of Adult Health Disparities, employs innovative methods to study how pathways to fair or poor health in adulthood unfold from early childhood. Drs. Palloni and Milesi analyze a host of factors, including the effects of parents' socioeconomic status, their health and use of tobacco and alcohol, child health outcomes, development of personality traits such as tenacity and perseverance, exposure to stressful environments, and educational attainment. Project findings should help improve the design of strategies aimed at reducing disparities by identifying options for mitigating the consequences of poor health in children.

Another stream of her work examines the trajectories youth follow in post-secondary education and in particular the impact that increasingly alternative trajectories have had on the completion of a post-secondary degree. The American Educational Research Association awarded her a grant to compare the pathways to college across two youth cohorts born about 20 years apart. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997, this project describes how the process of college enrollment, college persistence, and college completion had changed throughout these two decades.