Center for Social Data Analytics Colloquium-Ashton Verdery – PSU

Title: The Bereavement Toll of Overdose and Cancer in the United States: Computational Modeling of Experiences of Family Death in Childhood

Abstract: Recent work has begun to describe how major public health challenges have secondary impacts on the population of people whose lives are disrupted by the deaths these challenges create, but in general these studies exclude children - a group that faces substantial risks from the loss of those close to them. I describe new mathematical demography methods to estimate children's exposure to two key sources of death in the family, overdose and cancer.  We use recent demographic kinship modeling advances and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s most recent underlying cause of death estimates to model how many children under 18 in 2019 had lost one or more parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts or uncles, or cousins to overdose mortality since birth. We calculate the number and proportion of children with such exposures and consider age, cohort, and gender patterning. Attention to the large population with lives disrupted by public health threats should include affected children who lose relatives. The long-arm consequences of these crises will continue to define the public health landscape for decades. Portions of this work are coauthored with Cayley Ryan-Claytor, a graduate student in Sociology and Demography.