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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Department of Sociology, UCLA

UCLA

This series is automatically populated with publications deposited by UCLA Department of Sociology researchers in accordance with the University of California’s open access policies. For more information see Open Access Policy Deposits and the UC Publication Management System.

Cover page of “A good client gets arrested a lot”: Constructing and maintaining profitable subjects through marking and surveillance

“A good client gets arrested a lot”: Constructing and maintaining profitable subjects through marking and surveillance

(2025)

Criminal legal processing is an arduous classification, supervision, and extraction cycle increasingly administered by private entities. This article spotlights processing within commercial bail and uncovers profitable subjects—people (re)identified as future assets—as a stratifying and elusive construction with implications for criminal legal experiences. Bail agents deploy marking and surveillance like other legal professionals to process people. However, a profit objective and financial risk framework give rise to distinct applications. First, a shift in marking occurs in which legal involvement operates as credit and stratifies people into “classification situations” where they unevenly, and sometimes counterintuitively, access resources. Second, marked individuals are matched to different forms of surveillance that deviate in the degree of felt hassle and punishment. Surveillance is used for people to repeatedly prove their profitability in an environment where a dominant perception is that defendants are liabilities. Consequently, few can avoid the conditions that define their varying and unequal experiences.

Cover page of Individual and community socioeconomic status and receipt of influenza vaccines among adult primary care patients in a large academic health system: 2017–2019

Individual and community socioeconomic status and receipt of influenza vaccines among adult primary care patients in a large academic health system: 2017–2019

(2024)

Introduction

Influenza causes significant mortality and morbidity in the U.S., yet less than half of adults receive influenza vaccination. We use census-tract level social vulnerability index (SVI) to examine community- and individual-level characteristics of influenza vaccine coverage among primary care patients at an academic health system in Los Angeles, CA.

Methods

We used electronic medical records (EMR) data of 247,773 primary care patients for 2017-18 and 2018-19 influenza seasons. We geocoded patients' addresses to identify their SVI and merged them with EMR data. We specified mixed-effects logistic regression models estimating the association between patient's vaccine receipt and SVI, adjusting for sociodemographics, Charlson Comorbidity Index, and health insurance.

Results

Vaccination coverage was higher during the 2018-19 influenza season (34%) compared to the 2017-18 season (23%). In adjusted analyses, higher SVI, lower individual socioeconomic status and racial and ethnic minority status were independently associated with lower odds of vaccination. Patients on Medicaid had lower odds of vaccine receipt (adjusted Odds Ratio [aOR] = 0.77 for <65, aOR = 0.30 for 65+) than patients on commercial health insurance. Asian Non-Hispanic patients had higher odds than White Non-Hispanic patients (aOR = 2.39 for <65, aOR = 1.91 for 65+), while Black Non-Hispanic patients had lower odds (aOR = 0.49 for <65, aOR = 0.59 for 65+).

Conclusions

Community and individual socioeconomic status and race and ethnicity were associated with influenza vaccination. Health systems can use SVI to identify communities at increased risk of influenza mortality and morbidity, and engage with community partners to develop communication strategies and invest in interventions to increase vaccine accessibility in under-resourced neighborhoods.

Cover page of First- and Second-Generation Womens Economic Assimilation: An Analysis of Longitudinal Earnings Records.

First- and Second-Generation Womens Economic Assimilation: An Analysis of Longitudinal Earnings Records.

(2024)

Research on the economic assimilation of immigrants and their descendants has dispropor tionately focused on men. In this study, we examine the life-course employment and earnings trajectories of first- and second-generation women using a restricted-use dataset linking individual respondents of the Current Population Survey (CPS) to their tax earnings records We compare the age-specific probability of employment and annual earnings of women of each immigrant generation by race and ethnicity from early to middle adulthood covering a span of 20 years. We consider alternative explanations for observed disparities including differences in the level of education and the timing and response to childbearing. Our analyses reveal distinct patterns across immigrant generations and ethnoracial groups. We find that first- and second-generation women are assimilating economically at a fast pace although significant ethnoracial differences remain. First-generation Hispanic women in particular experience low employment and earnings growth. Second-generation women have higher employment rates than later-generation Whites and avoid the dip in employment trajectories in early and middle adulthood experienced by the latter group. The higher employment rates of second-generation women cannot be fully explained by differences in educational attainment or the presence of young children.

Cover page of Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century.

Implausibility of radical life extension in humans in the twenty-first century.

(2024)

Over the course of the twentieth century, human life expectancy at birth rose in high-income nations by approximately 30 years, largely driven by advances in public health and medicine. Mortality reduction was observed initially at an early age and continued into middle and older ages. However, it was unclear whether this phenomenon and the resulting accelerated rise in life expectancy would continue into the twenty-first century. Here using demographic survivorship metrics from national vital statistics in the eight countries with the longest-lived populations (Australia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) and in Hong Kong and the United States from 1990 to 2019, we explored recent trends in death rates and life expectancy. We found that, since 1990, improvements overall in life expectancy have decelerated. Our analysis also revealed that resistance to improvements in life expectancy increased while lifespan inequality declined and mortality compression occurred. Our analysis suggests that survival to age 100 years is unlikely to exceed 15% for females and 5% for males, altogether suggesting that, unless the processes of biological aging can be markedly slowed, radical human life extension is implausible in this century.

Subnational Environmental Policy: Trends and Issues

(2024)

Policies relevant to many key sociological processes are often subnational, enacted at the regional, state/provincial, and/or local levels. This applies notably in the politics of the environmental state, where public and private subnational environmental policies (SNEPs) have major consequences for managing climate change, addressing environmental injustices, regulating land uses, greening energy markets, limiting pollution, and much more. While sociologists focus more on national policies, diverse sociological contributions emphasize the importance of SNEPs and their origins, diffusion, implementation, and sources of backlash. We begin by providing a typology of SNEPs. Next, we highlight not only environmental sociology (with its particular attention to climate change and energy) but also the sociologies of social movements, politics, the economy, science, risk, and organizations, which have each offered unique perspectives. Finally, we outline an agenda for how sociologists can further elaborate a distinctive perspective that highlights inequality, valuation, diffusion, scale shifts, and venue-shopping up to national and global policy systems.

The Sociology of Entrepreneurship Revisited

(2024)

Over the last two decades, the sociology of entrepreneurship has exploded as an area of academic inquiry. Most of this research has been focused on understanding the environmental conditions that promote entrepreneurship and processes related to the initial formation of an organization. Despite this surge in activity, many important questions remain open. Only more recently have scholars begun to turn their attention to what happens to organizations, and the people connected to them, as they mature and move through the life cycle of entrepreneurship. These open questions, moreover, connect to many classic themes in the literature on careers, organizational sociology, stratification, and work and occupations. Using a framework that focuses on three phases of the entrepreneurial life cycle—pre-entry, entry, and post-entry—we summarize sociological research on entrepreneurship and highlight opportunities for future research.

Cover page of Parental Loss and Mental Health in Post-Khmer-Rouge Cambodia.

Parental Loss and Mental Health in Post-Khmer-Rouge Cambodia.

(2024)

Adverse childhood events (ACE) may have lasting consequences throughout the life course. We focus on one particular type of ACE, parental loss in Cambodia-a country that lost nearly 25% of its population during the 1975-79 Khmer-Rouge regime-and on mental health disorders, one of the potential mechanisms through which ACE may have long-term consequences. Self-reports of symptoms that map on to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Health Disorders (DSM) criteria for anxiety, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were collected from 4,405 adults aged 20 and over. We first assess exposure to traumatic events and the prevalence of anxiety, depression, and PTSD using the DSM and alternative criteria. Based on the DSM criteria and previously validated Likert-scale thresholds, we find a high prevalence of anxiety (56.0%), depression (42.8%), and PTSD (2.3%), and even higher levels even among KRR survivors. We then use logit models to analyze the effect of parental loss before age 20 on the likelihood of having experienced traumatic events and experiencing mental health disorders. We find the loss of one parent increases the likelihood of full-PTSD symptoms, but the loss of both parents does not. These findings may result from positive selection into better-off households for orphans whose parents have both died but may also reflect the grief-related difficulties faced by the surviving parent of paternal or maternal orphans. While alternative thresholds for PTSD produced higher prevalence estimates, these measures did not perform better for assessing the effect of parental loss on mental health.