Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Research has established that legal vulnerability has detrimental consequences for the mental health of undocumented individuals. The purpose of our study is to consider how practicing agency is associated with mental health in the face of such structural marginalization. To meet this goal, we conceptualize actions taken to resist structural inequality as acts of resistance to center immigrants’ agency in navigating and contesting their marginalization. Drawing on survey data with California undocumented college students, we examine to what extent eng ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. This study examines the longitudinal association between cumulative exposure to social isolation and life satisfaction and whether this association differs by gender. Using seven waves of the Korean Longitudinal Study of Aging from 2006 to 2018 (3,543 adults aged 65 or older), fixed effects models were estimated. Cumulative social isolation was longitudinally associated with a decline in life satisfaction in older adults. Gender-specific analyses revealed that older women exposed to cumulative social isolation continued to experience a decline in life ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Building on the stress process model and adopting an intersectionality framework, this study highlights the formation of a stronger intergenerational family symbiosis system in China. It offers a systematic understanding of the association between multigenerational caregiving and sandwich women’s stress, extending prior research by exploring the mitigating effect of husbands. Drawing upon China Health and Nutrition Survey data, findings indicate that sandwich women experience less stress than non-sandwich women. Particularly among sandwich women, upwa ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. The COVID-19 pandemic generated mental health stressors for parents as they faced new health risks and navigated disruptions to employment, schooling, and care arrangements. Drawing on 2021 survey data from Canadian parents of children 10 years old and younger, we describe the relationship between work/care pandemic stressors and mental health, and employ Kitagawa-Oaxaca-Blinder decompositions to examine how these contribute to mental health gaps by gender and its intersection with having household members perceived to be at high risk in relation to C ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Emerging research documents concerning mental health outcomes among essential workers at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, mental health outcomes may have varied across states in the United States, as state-level policies differed. Questions also remain about the mental health of workers during the second year of the pandemic. Using nationally representative data from the U.S. Household Pulse Survey (April–July 2021), we documented the mental health of essential workers and tested whether state-level policies (e.g., mask mandates) reduced m ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Recent scholarship suggests that personal tie instability, that is, the dissolution of old ties and the formation of new ties, may lead to psychological distress. However, this association remains understudied among the immigrant population, for whom acculturation may present unique challenges to both personal tie stability and psychological well-being. Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we investigate the mental health implications of instability in immigrant adolescents’ same-sex best friends, and how it e ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Might “impostor syndrome” be more than the private trouble it is often described to be? Instead, might it be deeply rooted in sociological processes? I explore this possibility drawing on my personal experience and Pearlin’s insistence that much that distresses us in our personal lives originates in social structures. I use Bourdieu’s theory to conceptualize the processes that may instill the “syndrome,” and once in place, surreptitiously recreate inequality. I test this conceptualization, using new sociologically relevant measures, in a stratified sa ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Adolescent refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region face significant acculturation challenges and stressors in the United States. This qualitative study draws upon the integrated motivational-volitional model to understand MENA-background adolescents’ psychosocial wellbeing and suicide risk in three U.S. cities. Local service providers served as key informants (n = 27), sharing in-depth reflections on supporting newcomer students in education, mental health, and refugee services. Analysis also includes focus group discussions with ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. This study examines whether (and why) the accumulation of perceived work-related demands associated with social change in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic relates to psychological distress among a sample of employed adults in dual-earning relationships living in the United States. Using data from a cross-sectional online survey (N = 418) administered during the early months of the pandemic, multivariate results indicate a positive association between demands of social change and distress, net of other COVID-19-related factors. This association is ..read more

Society and Mental Health, Ahead of Print. Literature indicates that subjective social status (SSS) is a robust predictor of health outcomes net of objective social status (OSS). However, research that has considered gender in the relationship between SSS and health is limited. Using 2016–2018 data from the Wave V biomarker sample of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, we investigate the relationship between SSS and two health outcomes—allostatic load and depressive symptoms—and the moderating role of gender in these relationships among a nationally representative sa ..read more