Primary Submission Category: Life-course/developmental
Same Start, Diverging Destinations: Associations between State Mortality Contexts and Health in Midlife among Siblings
Authors: Christine Percheski,
Presenting Author: Christine Percheski*
Health is impacted by the full constellation of characteristics of a place, including public health policies, health behaviors, and health care infrastructure, but also economic conditions, social cohesion, social support, environmental toxins and resources, carceral policies, and more. To better isolate the causal effects of place on health, we compare the self-rated health (SRH) of siblings who lived in the same place in childhood but resided in different states for at least some of the years between the ages of 18 and 49. To do this, we use data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) for years 1968 to 2021 for all individuals with at least one sibling in the dataset who were observed around age 50 (n = 2334). For every year of observation, we link individuals to the prevailing age-adjusted all-cause mortality rates (from the CDC) in their state of residence. Our analytic sample is comprised of the 756 individuals who had moved out of the state of their childhood and had a sibling who had also moved out of their childhood state. In ordinal logit models predicting self-rated health at age 50, we find a small but statistically significant effect of number of years of living in a state in the quintile with the highest age-adjusted mortality rates on self-rated health at age 50. Based on our estimates,living for 23 years in a state in the highest mortality quintile (compared to all other states) between the ages of 18 and 50 has the equivalent effect on self-rated health as being assigned male rather than female at birth.Perhaps surprisingly, we do not find that the number of years lived in a state in the quintile with the lowest age-adjusted mortality is a statistically significant predictor of self-rated health at age 50. These preliminary results suggest that, for health at mid-life, improving conditions in the states with the highest all-cause mortality rates would have the largest impact on population health.