AAAS Brown Bag: Racial Residential Segregation, Social Networks, and Health among Black Americans

When:
Wed, Feb 19, 2025 - 12:30PM
to
Wed, Feb 19, 2025 - 2:00PM

Where:
1102 Taliaferro/ Zoom

Host:
Department of African American & Africana Studies

Speakers:
Nicholas Chad Smith

 

Join the Department of African American and Africana Studies for its first Brown Bag of the semester featuring Dr. Nicholas Chad Smith. He will be presenting his work, "Racial Residential Segregation, Social Networks, and Health among Black Americans: The Moderating Roles of Social Leverage, Social Bridging, and Social Bonding Ties." 

Racial residential segregation is a powerful determinant of health, especially among Black Americans. Despite this, various social factors that may attenuate the negative health effects of segregation are poorly understood. Using insights from the social network perspective and theories of social capital, I examine the moderating roles of multiple network-based resources in the association between racial residential segregation and health among Black Americans. Specifically, I ask: to what extent, if at all, do social leverage (operationalized by network members’ levels of educational attainment), social bridging (assessed by the presence of weak ties and structural holes), and social bonding (measured by strong, emotionally supportive kin ties) moderate the association between segregation and health among Black Americans? To conduct this research, I draw on U.S. census data and individual-level survey data from the Person to Person Health Interview Study, a stratified probability household survey of Indiana residents.

Dr. Nicholas Smith is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. His research lies at the intersection of medical sociology, social psychology, and race-ethnicity, focusing on stress-related mechanisms of health inequalities, the role of social networks in health disparities, and the social mechanisms linking racial residential segregation to health. He employs quantitative methods and leverages U.S. census and individual-level survey data in his work. His research has received several national awards and has been supported by multiple charitable organizations, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Ford Foundation, and Horowitz Foundation.

Please register for the Zoom link: https://go.umd.edu/Smith2025