CSDE Affiliate, Professor Peter Catron (Sociology), will present new research findings from an innovative and newly constructed longitudinal database of U.S. immigrants. His research examines a long-standing debate concerned with how long premigration socioeconomic differences persist for immigrants and their descendants who entered at the turn-of-the-twentieth century. Some researchers argue that differences exist today, over 100 years after first arrival, while others argue that most differences disappeared after the third generation. However, none of this research has directly measured pre-migration socioeconomic status nor has it directly linked immigrants to their children.

Nikki Eller recently published her master’s thesis in Health Education and Behavior. Her analysis of survey data from mothers of healthy newborns in Washington State examines the association between parental trust in their child’s health care provider and vaccine information sources. She finds, for instance, that mothers with less trust in their child’s health care provider used more and different sources, especially more informal sources, and were less likely to consider their child’s pediatrician their main source of vaccine information compared with more trusting mothers.

CSDE Affiliate Nathalie Williams (Professor International Studies & Sociology) and CSDE Trainee Christina Hughes (Sociology) co-authored an article in Demography that analyzes longitudinal data from Nepal to assess the influence of material aspirations on decisions to migrate and where to locate.

Using detailed continuous migration histories from the 2008–2012 Chitwan Valley Family Study, they estimate logistic and alternative-specific conditional logit models, and find strong evidence that material aspirations have large effects on overall rates of migration and affect destination-specific migration rates, particularly for relatively wealthy Western and Asian destinations.