We used data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to explore potential explanations for racial/ethnic disparities in coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) hospitalizations and mortality. Black adults in every age group were more likely than White adults to have health risks associated with severe COVID-19 illness. However, Whites were older, on average, than Blacks. Thus, when all factors were considered, Whites tended to be at higher overall risk compared with Blacks, with Asians and Hispanics having much lower overall levels of risk compared with either Whites or Blacks. We explored additional explanations for COVID-19 disparities-namely, differences in job characteristics and how they interact with household composition. Blacks at high risk for severe illness were 1.6 times as likely as Whites to live in households containing health-sector workers. Among Hispanic adults at high risk for severe illness, 64.5 percent lived in households with at least one worker who was unable to work from home, versus 56.5 percent among Black adults and only 46.6 percent among White adults.I n many areas of the US, non-Hispanic Blacks and Hispanics are more than twice as likely as non-Hispanic Whites to die from coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). [1][2][3][4][5] The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that ageadjusted COVID-19 hospitalization rates for Blacks and Hispanics as of May 30, 2020, were 4.5 and 3.5 times those of Whites, respectively. 6 The magnitude of these disparities has focused renewed attention on the consequences of longstanding structural inequality along racial/ ethnic lines with respect to a wide range of outcomes including income, health, health care, employment, and living circumstances. [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15] In this article we use data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS) to recast and build on pre-COVID-19 disparities research, offering insights into a number of hypotheses that have been proposed with regard to the causes of COVID-19 disparities.One common hypothesis is that disparities in COVID-19 outcomes arise from preexisting differences in underlying health conditions that increase the severity of COVID-19 illness for Blacks and Hispanics, conditional on exposure to the virus. To explore this hypothesis, we examined racial/ethnic differences in health risks that the CDC associates with severe COVID-19 illness. Because many reported statistics regarding COVID-19 disparities have not been age adjusted, we examined health risks both without age adjustment and by age group, as is more conventional in the disparities literature. Estimating risks in both ways yields important insights, because age itself is a key COVID-19 risk factor and because average age varies considerably across racial/ethnic groups.We also used MEPS data to examine the hypothesis that COVID-19 disparities stem from racial/ethnic differences in employment-related risk for infection. Prior research shows that com-
Past research has assessed gender differences in delinquency due to differential social controls, yet important questions remain regarding gender and social bonding. As much of this work was premised on Hirschi's measurement of the social bond, we examine whether gender moderates two parts of the social bond: the measurement of the social bond and structural differences between the social bond and delinquency. Using multiple-group structural equation modeling, we find that neither the measures of the social bond nor their relationships with property crime are gender-specific. The structural relationship between the elements of the social bond and violent delinquency differs slightly for boys and girls. We discuss implications of this research for social control theory, measuring the social bond and for gender-specific theories of social bonding and control.
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