Joseph Lariscy

Joseph is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology and a Pre-doctoral Trainee at the Population Research Center. His research examines the joint influence of race/ethnicity/nativity and educational attainment on mortality risk, physical heath, and mental health among older adults in the United States. Under the supervision of Robert Hummer and Mark Hayward, his Master’s thesis demonstrated differential record linkage by Hispanic ethnicity, nativity, and age in the 1989-2002 National Health Interview Survey-Linked Mortality Files. This paper was published in the Journal of Aging and Health. Dr. Hummer and Joseph contributed a chapter to the International Handbook of Adult Mortality (2011) that reviewed the literature and presented a new analysis of the relationship between educational attainment and adult mortality. Joseph is currently developing a study of the link between cigarette smoking throughout the life course and adult mortality risk.

Joseph’s dissertation examines current racial and ethnic inequalities in adult survival in the United States. The first chapter compares the quality of the linkage of survey records to death records for black and white adults throughout the life course. The second chapter addresses racial/ethnic inequalities in lifespan variation by decomposing this variation into a) the contribution of each cause of death and b) the contributions of cause-specific variation in age at death, cause-specific means, and number of deaths attributable to each cause. The third chapter examines racial/ethnic/nativity differences in cigarette smoking throughout the life course and how disparate tobacco use and initiation patterns influence racial/ethnic inequalities in adult survival.