Projects

Community Resilience and Public Health – Robert Bossarte, Vivian Guetler, and Wolf

Before the formation of the Cossman Research Team (CRT), Cossman and her previous students began amassing numerous county-level datasets.  Since coming to WVU, students working with Cossman on the CRT have continued the tradition resulting in 20+ years of data collection covering 50+ years of data.  We are going to explore portions of this data related to community resilience and public health with Dr. Robert Bossarte and SOCA graduate student Vivian Guetler.  Our goals are to develop measures of community resilience and examine the longitudinal nature of community resilience, along with health and crime correlates of community resilience.  We also want to explore deaths of despair and interpersonal violence as they related to community resilience.

Deaths of Despair (Case and Deaton 2017) by State – Sally Hodder, Cossman, and Wolf

Mortality has increased among white non-Hispanic Americans in midlife from 1999-2015  (Case and Deaton 2015,  2017).  Increases in suicides, drug overdoses, and alcohol-related liver mortality driving these findings have led to them being called “deaths of despair.”  We have begun examining these trends at the state-level with a particular focus on West Virginia.  We plan to explore how educational attainment affects these state-level trends. 

Health of the Amish – Cossman and Rachel Stein

Many Americans are limiting their family size and controlling birth spacing with contraceptives; however, the Amish are one societal niche where contraception is not used regularly.  Cossman and Stein will interview Amish woman in summer 2019 to gather health histories.  These health histories will let us examine the effects of birth spacing on women’s health—along with many other health effects of large families that tend to be nominally spaced.

Hierarchy of Needs – Wolf and Cossman

Social scientists have explored spatial patterns in mortality in the US for more than 20 years without discovering the root causes for them.  While there is evidence for individual-level risk by sociodemographic characteristics and health behaviors, as well as for geographical differences in mortality, we still do not know the mechanisms influencing these disparities.  Specifically, research has shown mortality disparities at the county-level that do not follow state or regional boundaries.  What factors at the county-level may be driving these disparities?  Macintyre, Ellaway, and Cummins (2002) put forth a “hierarchy of human needs” that outlines 17 categories of “place effects” that may influence health.  We have gathered an assortment of contextual county-level variables so several can be operationalized for each category outlined by MacIntyre and colleagues.  We are using the hierarchy of needs framework to explore its association with overall county-level mortality patterns, county-level sex-specific mortality, and county-level rural versus urban mortality.  

Persistent Clusters of Mortality in the United States – Cossman, Wes James, and Wolf

Geographic disparities in mortality have been analyzed in myriad ways.  Although the people who live in a place continuously change, the health characteristics of those places frequently stay the same; they are persistent. Our work analyzes persistence of mortality across various geographic designations and uncovers the wide-ranging disparities in death across the United States.  Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality File (1968-2015), we’ve calculated nine 5-year age-adjusted all-cause mortality rates. We’ve mapped the number of times counties were one standard deviation above or below the mean national mortality rate across the ten time periods.  We’ve also analyzed disparities across rural-urban distinctions and census-based region and division classifications. Our research moves forward the literature on place-based mortality disparities in two important areas by testing the notion of persistence of poor health in place, and by identifying geographic disparities based on classifications not previously tested.  

Regional Classification – Wolf, Cossman, and Douglas Myers

Research has found sex-specific disparities in obesity, physical activity, smoking, and mortality rates across areas of the United States. However, these areas are typically operationalized as the census regions or divisions which were defined without considering sociological theories of health.  Underlying reasons for areal variations remain unclear.  We’ve tested the empirical predictive capability of more theoretically informed regional classifications of the US on these health behaviors and outcomes by sex.  The classifications include the US Census Bureau’s administrative divisions and regions, Joel Garreau's (1981) economic “Nine Nations of North America,” and Colin Woodard's (2011) eleven cultural “American Nations.”  

Research Ethics – with Trisha Phillips and Kyle Saunders

This project explores a dimension of trust in science, specifically, whether researchers can trust each other. Given recent news stories about faculty having misrepresentations on their CVs, we collected all the CVs from all non-health faculty searches and coded a 10% sample for misrepresentations. In brief, 54% of authors had at least one misrepresentation.  16% of publications could not be verified.  Books and book chapters were less likely to be verified than journal articles.

Spatial Variation of Violence Against Women – Harris, Walter DeKeseredy, and Cossman

In a trio of studies, we use secondary data from the National Longitudinal Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) study to investigate regional variations in intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration and victimization. We subsequently examine 1) an important cause of perpetration of male violence against women (male peer support networks) and 2) a potential consequence of the victimization of women (use of unprescribed pain medication) in the United States – as well as regional variation in these relationships. 

WV CCCP Evaluation – Cossman, Dudley, Weeks, and Hudnall

Members of the research team are implementing the five-year evaluation plan for the West Virginia Comprehensive Cancer Program (WV CCCP), including the Mountains of Hope (MOH) Coalition, created by the team in January 2018. This evaluation will continue the process by which the program and stakeholders can assess and evaluate partnerships, programs, and outcomes within the program and coalition. The Team engages stakeholders following the CDC evaluation framework and use the evaluation plan along with the cancer logic model and stakeholder feedback to guide collection, analysis, and synthesis of data. This includes continued work on the WV CCCP dashboard, infographic deliverables, and manuscripts for peer review. These outputs are used to engage additional stakeholders in the WV CCCP and in the MOH coalition efforts, improve the coalitions efficiency, and increase the coalitions ability to measure attributable outcomes.