Lauren Dunne is a first year Masters of Public Health student in the Health Promotion Tract. She graduated with her Bachelors in Psychology from California State University Long Beach where she worked on several NIH-funded community-based health interventions as a research assistant. She is passionate about health and wellness and seeks to share her interest with children and families of underserved backgrounds. Her long-term goals are to create clinical research-based interventions that focus on the positive development of children and families.
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Background: Latinas experience differential exposures to psychosocial stress, poor nutrition and limited physical activity rooted in social stratification. These combined exposures are likely the result of limited access to resources or residence in less affluent neighborhoods. Few studies investigate the role of documentation status and how it relates to residence in under-resourced neighborhoods.
Aim of study: The objective of this abstract is to present preliminary findings testing the hypothesis that undocumented women are more likely to live in neighborhoods (proxied using census tracts) with higher levels of poverty and unemployment and lower levels of education and family income.
Methods: Birth records (2010-2014) were linked with US Census data (2010) resulting in a retrospective cohort design. 14,822 Mexican women were identified, a portion of whom paid for their delivery costs using emergency medical coverage for non-citizens not meeting Medicaid immigration status requirements; this form of payment was used to identify undocumented women. Continuous % poverty, unemployment, low education and median family income represented low-resourced census tracts. Unpaired t-tests were used to compare residential tracts of documented and undocumented Mexican women.
Results: Undocumented Mexican women were more likely to live in census tracts characterized by poverty (15%), unemployment (10%), low education (28%), and lower median family income ($30k) compared to documented women (11%, 9%, 23%, $35k, respectively).
Conclusion: Documentation status and under-resourced neighborhood environments may exacerbate adverse pregnancy outcomes. Future analyses will explore the role documentation status will play on both neighborhood composition and pregnancy outcomes of these Latina women.
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/dawn_richardson/13/