For job applicants with a criminal record, showcasing the right credentials can make a difference

Peer-Reviewed Publication

AMERICAN SOCIETY OF CRIMINOLOGY

Employment is believed to reduce the likelihood of criminal recidivism, but a criminal record is a significant barrier to employment. People with a criminal record are more likely to be unemployed or underemployed, or to have a job that does not match their skills or interests. In a new study, researchers asked business managers to make hypothetical hiring decisions about males with a criminal conviction, changing the characteristics of the applicants to identify their effect on managers’ decisions.

The study found that applicants with a criminal record were unlikely to be hired when compared with applicants without a record, but that some credentials—such as more education, certain references, and more years of experience—changed managers’ decisions. In fact, some credentials, such as a recommendation by a college professor, a GED, or a college degree, made the applicant with a criminal record more likely to be hired than a similar applicant without a criminal record who lacked those credentials.

The study, by researchers at the University of South Florida (USF), appears in Criminology, a publication of the American Society of Criminology.

“Having a criminal record is very costly in the labor market, but this cost can be superseded by specific credentials that likely signal an applicant’s reliability, which can be provided by existing programs and institutions,” says Mateus Rennó Santos, assistant professor of criminology at USF, who led the study.

Using a nationwide sample of nearly 600 hiring managers in 2021, researchers catalogued responses about hypothetical hiring decisions between two male applicants for entry-level jobs. The main difference between the applicants was a prior criminal conviction for drug possession with intent to distribute. The authors randomly manipulated the education, references, wages, or experience of the applicant with the criminal record to identify which factors could offset the existence of the record in terms of the applicant’s probability of being hired.

When credentials were the same, the applicant with a criminal record was consistently much less likely to be hired. However, that applicant was more likely to be hired if he had at least one year of relevant experience, a GED or college degree, or references from a former employer or a university professor. Incomplete degrees, references from criminal justice professionals (e.g., a prison reentry program supervisor, a probation or parole officer), or wage discounts did not make the applicant with the record more likely to be hired than a similar applicant without a criminal record.

With respect to experience, the study found no difference in effect on employability between experience obtained in or out of a correctional facility. This suggests that there is little need to hide or gloss over jobs inside prison if a potential employer is already aware of the applicant’s criminal record. In addition, increasing an applicant’s experience from nothing to one year was very helpful to employability, but any increase after the first year had little benefit to being hired for an entry-level position.

The study also found that managers who had criminal records were more likely to hire applicants with records, which speaks to potential empathy in the hiring process. In addition, managers in public-facing industries, especially those serving vulnerable populations (e.g., education, health care), were less likely to select applicants with criminal records than were managers in occupations such as manufacturing and transportation.

Finally, the study investigated managers’ justifications for their hiring choices, which included their desire to help people with a criminal record, their belief in redeemability, the expected benefits of hiring a candidate with better credentials, and the positive impressions signaled by certain credentials (e.g., greater commitment or skill). When deciding against the candidate with a criminal record, managers often said they wanted to minimize risk to their business, employers, or clients; worried about having someone with a drug conviction in the workplace; or dismissed the benefits of improved credentials for their particular business.

“In mitigating the cost of a criminal record for employment, hiring managers identified several ways to boost employability, most of which take advantage of interventions already available at many correctional institutions and re-entry programs,” notes Chae M. Jaynes, assistant professor of criminology at USF, who coauthored the study. “Not only can these factors be addressed individually, but they can be combined in single programs to increase the likelihood of employability for formerly incarcerated individuals.”

The study’s findings have practical implications, say the authors, including:

• Correctional institutions are increasingly partnering with universities to offer incarcerated people opportunities to obtain college credits; such initiatives would be most beneficial if they focused on degree completion, which can provide a clearer signal of employability.
• Professors considering becoming involved with prison education and re-entry initiatives should consider the value they can bring to the employability of individuals with criminal records, both in terms of skills and by lending their credibility through a recommendation.
• Correctional institutions and re-entry programs should ensure that incarcerated individuals are offered the opportunity to work before their entry into the labor market, advise re-entering individuals that working while incarcerated is valued work experience, and discuss ways to showcase this experience on job applications.

Among the study’s limitations, the authors say their findings are specific to the scenarios they established and do not necessarily generalize to complex hiring settings with multiple applicants (e.g., to females, people with records for violent crimes, managers hiring for higher-level jobs). Also, because the study was done when many employers were having difficulty finding workers, managers may have been more open to hiring people with a criminal record.

“Putting our findings into practice can help justice-involved individuals in search of opportunities, as well as their communities, and the employers who are willing to hire them,” suggests Danielle Thomas, a doctoral student in criminology at USF, who coauthored the study.

The study was supported by USF’s College of Behavioral & Community Sciences.

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JOURNAL

Criminology

DOI

10.1111/1745-9125.12345 

ARTICLE TITLE

How to overcome the cost of a criminal record for getting hired

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

27-Jun-2023

 

Study shows significant decline of snow cover in the Northern hemisphere over the last half century

Snow cover plays a major role in global energy balance, continental thermal stability, and regional temperatures

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA - SANTA CRUZ

 

IMAGE: ICE FLOES IN THE ARCTIC. view more 

CREDIT: MIKE DUNN, NOAA CLIMATE PROGRAM OFFICE, NABOS 2006 EXPEDITION

In the face of the ongoing climate crisis, scientists from many fields are directing their expertise at understanding how different climate systems have changed and will continue to do so as climate change progresses. Robert Lund, professor and department chair of statistics at the UC Santa Cruz Baskin School of Engineering, collaborated on a new study that uses rigorous mathematical models and statistical methods and finds declining snow cover in many parts of the northern hemisphere over the last half century.

Understanding snow cover trends is important because of the role that snow plays in the global energy balance. Snow’s high albedo – the ability to reflect light – and insulating characteristics affects surface temperatures on a regional scale and thermal stability on a continent-wide scale.

In the new study published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology, researchers analyzed snow cover data gathered from weekly satellite flyovers between 1967 (when satellites became more common) and 2021, which was divided into grid sections for analysis. Of the grids that researchers determined had reliable data, they found that snow cover is declining in nearly twice as many grids as it is advancing.

“In the Arctic regions, snow is going away more often than not – I think climatologists sort of suspected this,” Lund said. “But it's also going away at the southern boundaries of the continents.”

In a study that took about four years to complete, the researchers show that snow presence in the Arctic and southern latitudes of the Northern hemisphere is generally decreasing, while some areas such as Eastern Canada are seeing an increase in snow cover. This could be due to increasing temperatures in areas that are typically very cold but still below freezing, allowing the atmosphere to hold more water, which then falls as snow.

Lund believes this is the first truly dependable analysis of snow cover trends in the Northern hemisphere due to the rigor of the researchers’ statistical methods. It is often challenging for non-statisticians to extract trends from this type of satellite data, which comes as a sequence of 0s or 1s to indicate if snow was present during a certain week. The researchers also had to take correlation into account when looking at trends, as the presence of snow cover one week greatly affects the likelihood of snow cover the following week. These two factors were taken into account with a Markov chain based model. Accurate uncertainty estimates of the trends could be computed from the model. The researchers found hundreds of grids where snow cover was declining with at least 97.5% certainty.

However, they also found that some of the satellite data gathered in mountainous regions was unreliable, showing no snow in the winter and several weeks of snow in the winter. This was likely due to a flaw in the algorithm that processed the satellite data to determine if snow was present or not.

“The reason this study took a lot of work is because the satellite data is so doggone poor,” Lund said. “Whatever the meteorologists did to estimate snow from the pictures in some of the mountainous regions just didn't work, so we had to take all the grids in the Northern hemisphere, and figure out whether the data was even trustworthy or not.”

By determining which satellite data is unreliable, this study can serve as a resource to the scientific community who also may want to evaluate this snow cover data for their research.

Lund collaborated on this study with UCSC Ph.D. candidate Jiajie Kong, Assistant Professor of Math and Statistics at the University of North Florida Yisu Jia, Professor of Meteorology and Climatology at Mississippi State University Jamie Dyer, Associate Professor of Statistics at Mississippi State University Jonathan Woody, and Professor of Statistics and Operations Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill J. S. Marron. This research was supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

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JOURNAL

Journal of Hydrometeorology

DOI

10.1175/JHM-D-22-0182.1 

ARTICLE TITLE

Trends in Northern Hemispheric Snow Presence

 

Energy insecurity is an underappreciated social and environmental determinant of health

The clean energy economy is out of reach for many households

Peer-Reviewed Publication

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY'S MAILMAN SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

In light of climate change and the impending transition to clean energy, many long-standing programs to address energy insecurity need to be refreshed. A new paper published online in the journal Health Affairs provides growing documentation of the connections between energy insecurity and poor health. The paper, by Diana Hernandez, PhD, associate professor of sociomedical sciences at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health, also offers an overview of current policy initiatives and discusses ways that current policies can be improved upon.

The average U.S. household allocates 3.1 percent of its income to energy expenses but for low-income households, this figure is upward of 8.1 percent, according to Hernandez. “This financial hardship often means that for low-income households there are fewer financial resources available for other basic needs such as housing, food, clothing, child care, medical expenses, digital access, and transportation.”

Disconnection of electric or gas service is considered the crisis point of energy insecurity and is disproportionately high among households below the poverty level and headed by persons of color. Nearly 15 percent of households received at least one disconnection notice during the prior twelve months, Earlier research by Hernandez was the first known prevalence study of shutoffs in the U.S.

Energy insecurity or the “inability to adequately meet basic household energy needs has profound implications for health and health equity,” says Dr. Hernandez, who is also managing director of the Energy Opportunity Lab’s Domestic Program at the Center for Global Energy Policy in Columbia’s School of International and Policy Affairs. “Energy insecurity encompasses much more than electricity, gas, or other power sources used for lighting, cooling, and heating. Instead, there are three primary dimensions of energy insecurity—the physical, economic, and coping which reflect financial hardship, housing quality issues and the adaptive strategies people use to manage unaffordable bills and subpar living conditions.”

Hernandez makes the following key points:

• As of 2020 more than thirty million U.S. households were energy insecure.
• Low-income households and those comprised of people of color are disproportionately affected by energy insecurity.
• Structural racism, poor housing conditions, inflation, climate change, and the clean energy transition contribute to and exacerbate energy insecurity.
• Energy insecurity adversely affects physical and mental health and can be fatal.
• Policy and programmatic solutions exist to reduce and eliminate energy insecurity.

Home renters, rural dwellers, residents of houses built before 1980 with inadequate insulation, and people living in the Northeast and Southern regions were at greatest risk of experiencing energy insecurity as well as mobile home occupants and households with children compared to those with an elderly resident, according to Dr. Hernandez. “The latter is, in part, because of shutoff protections for seniors.”

“The somewhat good news is that there is hope for addressing energy insecurity now with recent world events including the COVID-19 pandemic, global social unrest and the war in Ukraine which may spur further investments in renewable energy,” noted Hernandez.

The policy brief was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (grants 78975 and 84643); Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, and National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Center for Environmental Health and Justice in Northern Manhattan (grant P30 ES009089).

Addendum: This energy insecurity  dashboard:  https://energyinsecuritydashboard.shinyapps.io/shinyappDeploy/  provides state level estimates on energy insecurity using government sponsored survey data (the Census' Household Pulse Survey, which has been tracking EI regularly throughout the pandemic; and the Residential Energy Consumption Survey, which was administered in 2020 and is the basis of the estimates reported in the policy brief and fact sheet. 

Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health

Founded in 1922, the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health pursues an agenda of research, education, and service to address the critical and complex public health issues affecting New Yorkers, the nation and the world. The Columbia Mailman School is the fourth largest recipient of NIH grants among schools of public health. Its nearly 300 multi-disciplinary faculty members work in more than 100 countries around the world, addressing such issues as preventing infectious and chronic diseases, environmental health, maternal and child health, health policy, climate change and health, and public health preparedness. It is a leader in public health education with more than 1,300 graduate students from 55 nations pursuing a variety of master’s and doctoral degree programs. The Columbia Mailman School is also home to numerous world-renowned research centers, including ICAP and the Center for Infection and Immunity. For more information, please visit www.publichealth.columbia.edu

JOURNAL

Health Affairs

DOI

10.1377/hpb20230518.472953 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Energy Insecurity And Health: America’s Hidden Hardship”

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jun-2023

 

New single-photon Raman lidar can monitor for underwater oil leaks

System could be used aboard underwater vehicles for many applications

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OPTICA

 

IMAGE: RESEARCHERS DEVELOPED A SINGLE-PHOTON RAMAN LIDAR SYSTEM THAT OPERATES UNDERWATER AND CAN REMOTELY DISTINGUISH VARIOUS SUBSTANCES THEY DEMONSTRATED THE SYSTEM BY USING IT TO DETECT VARYING THICKNESSES OF GASOLINE OIL IN A QUARTZ CELL THAT WAS 12 METERS AWAY FROM THE SYSTEM IN A LARGE POOL. view more 

CREDIT: MINGJIA SHANGGUAN, XIAMEN UNIVERSITY

WASHINGTON — Researchers report a new single-photon Raman lidar system that operates underwater and can remotely distinguish various substances. They also show that the new system can detect the thickness of the oil underwater up to 12 m away, which could be useful for detecting oil spills.

“Differentiating substances in water and detecting their distribution characteristics in the ocean are of great significance for marine monitoring and scientific research,” said research team leader Mingjia Shangguan from Xiamen University in China. “For instance, the remote sensing of underwater oil that we demonstrated could be useful for monitoring leaks in underwater oil pipelines.”

Although lidar approaches based on Raman signals have been previously used for detection of underwater substances, existing systems are impractical because they are bulky and require large amounts of power.

In the Optica Publishing Group journal Applied Optics, the researchers describe their new lidar system, which uses just 1 μJ of pulse energy and 22.4 mm of receiver aperture. The entire lidar system is 40 cm long with a diameter of 20 cm and can be operated up to 1 km underwater. To boost sensitivity, the researchers incorporated single-photon detection into their compact underwater Raman lidar system.

“Mounting an underwater Raman lidar system on an autonomous underwater vehicle or remotely operated vehicle could enable monitoring for leaks in underwater oil pipelines,” said Shangguan. “It could potentially also be used to explore oceanic resources or be applied in detecting seafloor sediment types, such as coral reefs.”

Single-photon sensitivity in underwater lidar

Traditional lidar systems designed to operate above water on ships, aircraft or satellites can achieve large-scale ocean profiling, but their detection depth is limited, especially during rough sea conditions. Raman lidar systems, however, can be used for analysis underwater at different depths without being affected by sea conditions.

Raman lidar works by emitting a pulse of green laser light into the water that interacts with substances such as oil. This excites inelastic Raman signals that can be used to identify substances. By measuring the intensity of Raman signals at specific wavelengths, lidar can provide information about the oil content in the water.

“Traditional Raman lidar systems rely on increasing laser power and telescope aperture to achieve remote sensing detection, which leads to a large system size and high-power consumption that make it difficult to integrate lidar systems onto underwater vehicles,” said Shangguan. “The use of single-photon detection technology made this work possible by improving detection sensitivity to the level of single photons.”

The researchers demonstrated their new lidar system by using it to detect varying thicknesses of gasoline oil in a quartz cell that was 12 m away from the system. Both the lidar system and the quartz cell were submerged at a depth of 0.6 m underwater in a large pool. The lidar system was able to detect and distinguish all thicknesses of gasoline, which ranged from 1 mm to 15 mm.

  

Mingjia Shangguan from the State Key Laboratory of Marine Environmental Science at Xiamen University's College of Ocean and Earth Sciences led a Lidar team at the Optical Oceanography Laboratory in developing a new Raman underwater lidar system for stand-off detection of oil in water.

CREDIT

Mingjia Shangguan, Xiamen University

The researchers are now working to increase the number of detection channels and the Raman spectral resolution of the single-photon lidar system to enhance its ability to distinguish different substances in water. This would allow it to be used to analyze underwater bubble types and to detect corals and manganese nodules.

Paper: M. Shangguan, Z. Yang, M. Shangguan, Z. Lin, Z. Liao, Y. Guo, C. Liu, “Remote sensing oil in water with an all-fiber underwater single-photon Raman lidar,” Applied Optics vol. 62 issue 19  pp. 5301-5305 (2023).
DOI: doi.org/10.1364/AO.488872

About Applied Optics

Applied Optics publishes in-depth peer-reviewed content about applications-centered research in optics. These articles cover research in optical technology, photonics, lasers, information processing, sensing and environmental optics. Applied Optics is published three times per month by Optica Publishing Group and overseen by Editor-in-Chief Gisele Bennett, MEPSS LLC. For more information, visit Applied Optics .

About Optica Publishing Group

Optica Publishing Group is a division of Optica (formerly OSA), Advancing Optics and Photonics Worldwide. It publishes the largest collection of peer-reviewed content in optics and photonics, including 18 prestigious journals, the society’s flagship member magazine, and papers from more than 835 conferences, including 6,500+ associated videos. With over 400,000 journal articles, conference papers and videos to search, discover and access, Optica Publishing Group represents the full range of research in the field from around the globe.

 

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JOURNAL

Applied Optics

DOI

10.1364/AO.488872 

ARTICLE TITLE

“Remote sensing oil in water with an all-fiber underwater single-photon Raman lidar

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jun-2023

 

A seed survival story: How trees keep ‘friends’ close and ‘enemies’ guessing

Global study uncovers intricate balance between seed defense and dispersal by forest trees

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PENN STATE

UNIVERSITY PARK — Around the globe, forests are facing unprecedented challenges. They're grappling with wildfires, diseases, droughts and deforestation. The survival of these great forests hinges on their ability to regrow — and for many trees, a process called "masting" is key to this regeneration.

Masting — the unpredictable boom-and-bust cycle of seed production — can have profound consequences for plant populations and the food webs that are built on their seeds. But the complex relationship between seed-production cycles and seed consumers and dispersers has been poorly understood.

A new study by an international team of scientists that included millions of tree-year observations worldwide, published today (July 29) in Nature Plants, for the first time documents and analyzes the intricate balance between seed defense and dispersal by forest trees at a global scale. 

Seeds, fruits and nuts — high in carbohydrate, fat and protein content — are among the highest quality plant foods in nature, noted the study’s lead author Tong Qiu, assistant professor in Penn State’s College of Agricultural Sciences. When there are a lot of seeds, seed consumers such as birds, squirrels and insects have a feast. Their populations grow because there is plenty of food for them to eat and feed their offspring. But in the years following a mast, when seed production is low, these animals might struggle to find enough food, and this could lead to a drop in their populations.

“At the same time, some seeds that aren't eaten during the mast year might germinate and grow into new trees, and this can lead to an increase in tree numbers, affecting the forest's overall growth and the habitat for other creatures,” Qiu said. “Understanding masting patterns can guide forest managers in their conservation efforts. During lean years of seed production, conservationists may choose to plant seeds manually or implement measures to protect struggling animal populations.”

Erratic seed crops may help trees confound their seed predators, but Qiu and colleagues wondered what they do to the seed dispersers the trees may need to insure successful germination? If unreliable seed production that thwarts a tree’s "enemies" has the same negative impacts on their disperser friends, they hypothesized, then perhaps the tree species that rely most heavily on animal disperser species must forego this defensive option.

“When trees have big swings in seed production, take a long time between high seed years and all produce lots of seeds at the same time, predators can be overwhelmed,” Qiu said. “This seed-production strategy potentially hampers the ability of seed consumers to mitigate the effects of interannual fluctuations by foraging among various host trees. Our research revealed that masting relies on three critical aspects that affect both trees’ friends and foes, seed dispersers and seed predators.”

In the paper, the researchers introduce three elements of masting based on 12 million tree-year observations worldwide. The first is volatility, which reflects the amount seeds fluctuate year to year. The second is periodicity, which refers to the time interval between the years of high seed production. Third is synchronicity, representing a common trend where many trees bear large seed crops in the same years.

But there is a problem with this explanation for masting, pointed out the study’s senior author James Clark, Nicholas Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science at Duke University, who has built the Mast Inference and Forecasting network, better known as MASTIF.

The same tree species that attract seed predators may also depend on mammals and birds to disperse their seeds, he suggested. These friends are so valuable that many tree species pack their fruits and nuts with extra resources and advertise them with colorful displays, all to attract their important mutualist dispersers.

In the paper, the researchers evaluated whether the unreliable seed production that thwarts a tree’s enemies had the same negative impacts on their disperser friends. If masting effectively guards against enemies — and it does, they confirmed — then perhaps the tree species that rely most heavily on animal disperser species must forego this defensive option.

“An analysis of seed production in hundreds of tree species across five continents shows this mixed benefit of masting — the tree species that depend most on animal dispersers are the ones that avoid masting,” Clark said. “In the temperate forests of North America and Eurasia, oaks and firs are prolific mast species. Pines and spruces also mast, but to a lesser degree. Hickories and walnuts still less. Chestnut and the fleshy fruits of black gum, holly, hack- and sugarberry, persimmon, juniper, yew and pawpaw, hardly at all — they are reliable resources.”

The masting firs, pines and spruce fall prey to birds and many rodents in the canopy and also when they reach the forest floor, Clark added. In the tree, conifers can defend their seeds in woody, resin coated cones, many of which are armed with spines. Once on the forest floor, the exposed seeds are rapidly depleted by rodents. With few mutualist dispersers, they are prime candidates for masting.  

Nutrient and climate gradient also play a role in masting, the researchers reported. Species that require a lot of nutrients tend to have low year-to-year changes in seed production, while those often found in nutrient-rich, warm and wet areas show shorter time intervals between high-seed- production years. Meanwhile, masting is more common in cold and dry places.

“Interestingly, this happens in areas where weather conditions mean there is less need for animals to spread seeds, unlike in the wet and warm tropics where such help from animals is more common,” Qiu said. “This fascinating interplay reminds us that our diverse forests are a result of countless factors working together in harmony, adapting to their unique circumstances to thrive.”

At the opposite extreme, rich, colorful fruits avoid wild fluctuations — the trees that produce them depend on their animal dispersers, Clark said. Although there is still plenty of year-to-year variation, because a large, expensive fruit is sensitive to moisture stress.

“A good two-week drought in mid-summer will see many trees abandoning much of their fruit crop — early abortion,” he said. “This includes not only fleshy fruits like persimmon, hackberry (including nettle tree in Europe), and black gum. Acorns and hickory nuts also have high moisture content; they too will abort many partially developed seeds to trim the resource demand. Still, a string of years with suitable climate conditions can see reliable crops in many of these species, one after another.”

Researchers from 70 institutions contributed to the Nature Plants paper. Principal funding came from the National Science Foundation, the Belmont Forum, NASA, and France’s Programme d’Investissement d’Avenir (Make Our Planet Great Again) initiative.

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JOURNAL

Nature Plants

DOI

10.1038/s41477-023-01446-5 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Observational study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Masting is uncommon in trees that depend on mutualist dispersers in the context of global climate and fertility gradients

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jun-2023

 

Sociogenomics: The intricate science of how genetics influences sociology

Using genetics to understand human behavior

Peer-Reviewed Publication

PURDUE UNIVERSITY

 

IMAGE: ROBBEE WEDOW IS AN EXPERT IN SOCIOGENOMICS. HIS RESEARCH WORKS TO INTEGRATE DATA SCIENCE APPROACHES WITH SOCIOLOGY RESEARCH FOR DEEPER INSIGHTS INTO HOW GENETICS HELPS SHAPE HUMAN BEHAVIOR. view more 

CREDIT: PURDUE UNIVERSITY PHOTO/KELSEY LEFEVER

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Humans contain multitudes. Each person on the planet contains enough DNA to stretch to Pluto – several times. 

Studying how all this genetic material works, and especially how genes influence human behavior, is an enormously complicated undertaking – one that’s being made easier by the emergence of massive banks of genetic data and complex data science analysis techniques to parse that data.

Robbee Wedow, an assistant professor of sociology and data science in Purdue University’s College of Liberal Arts, an adjunct assistant professor of medical and molecular genetics in the Indiana University School of Medicine, and Purdue’s inaugural faculty-in-residence at AnalytiXIN/16 Tech in Indianapolis, maps those miles of genes for insights into how genetics interacts with social forces and environments. He uses genetic databases to study how tiny bits of genes called single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs, affect complex, overarching traits including sexual behavior, educational attainment, socioeconomic status, health behaviors and more.

“We know that social forces like socioeconomic status play a role in influencing a person’s life and life outcomes,” Wedow said. “But we also know there is a genetic component to every behavior. What we don’t understand yet is how these biological forces interact with the environment and what these sorts of interactions might mean for social science – and what we think we know about social science research to date. We are using well-powered genetic data to do more accurate and replicable social science and to explore what might be possible at the intersection of genetic and behavioral science.”

When scientists sequenced the first human genome in 2003, the true scale of genetics started to become apparent. Early geneticists thought that finding a gene for each trait was simply a matter of looking in the right place. 

However, DNA bases and genes are not simply keys on a massive piano upon which human lives are played like masterpieces. Instead, DNA operates more like a pipe organ, where stops, switches and pedals can change the way notes sound, mute them or increase their volume. Environment, nutrition, pollution, life experiences and other circumstances can change when and how genes matter for certain outcomes, and even change which places in the genomes matter for those outcomes altogether. There isn’t a single gene for a behavioral outcome. Biology isn’t destiny: It may lay out the musical score, but musicians are free to improvise and interpret as they play.

The idea, Wedow stresses, is not that these genes control a person’s life or destiny. Each SNP, in fact, has a very small effect on an overall outcome like educational attainment. No “Gattaca”-level reading of one’s destiny from their genes – in the style of the dystopian 1990s movie – is on the horizon. Rather, being able to clarify the genetics of certain behaviors can help scientists understand the nuances of human behavior.

“People think that genetics is always about biology, but in the case of sociogenomics it’s more about using the advantages of this new, well-powered data to better understand the outcomes themselves, or about allowing researchers to do more accurate social science and behavioral research,” Wedow said. “The social sciences have recently struggled with replicating studies. Oftentimes the sample sizes are too small for rigorous estimates and certainty. That’s where the potential of using these huge banks of genetic data for the social sciences comes in. They help us get a much clearer, more certain look at what’s really going on.”

Analyzing the genetics is only the first step. An American geneticist in the early 1800s could have correlated genetics with educational mastery and concluded that anyone with two X chromosomes tended to have less education. That is not because the chromosomes had anything at all to do with education. Rather, the correlation reflected social and gender biases present in the culture at the time. Similar insights lurk in Wedow’s research.

“Sociogenomics isn’t necessarily about biology, like some might think,” Wedow said. “When someone studies cancer genetics, they are studying it because they want to elucidate the biology of cancer; they want to figure out ways to better diagnose it, track it and treat it. But researchers in the field of sociogenomics want to study the genetics in order to do better social science. No one would ever study sociology without considering socioeconomic status and environment. We want to be able to take genetics into account in the same way.”

In a study in volume 7, No. 7 of the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Wedow, his co-corresponding author Andrea Ganna from the University of Helsinki, and his other co-authors looked at 109 survey questions in over 300,000 individuals to examine the ways that people’s genes correlated with whether they answered certain questions or left them blank in surveys answered in the UK Biobank. That may sound fairly abstruse, but it fills a gap that the field of sociology has struggled with for decades.

“How do you know what you don’t know or how someone might have answered a question if they choose not to answer it?” Wedow said. “It turns out that the genetics of people who either answer the survey question, or do not, overlaps with the genetics of other outcomes like education, income or certain health behaviors.”

That means that scientists can use this type of data to get a better understanding of how people who choose not to answer questionnaires might also share similar responses to questions about health or social behaviors. Geneticists can also use the results of this study to correct for bias in genetic studies of any behavioral, psychiatric or medical outcomes.

“We can’t parcel out the signal from the noise yet or causally tease apart the effects of environment from the effects of biology,” Wedow said. “We know the genetics correlate with certain outcomes, but we are not at a point where we can say any specific gene causes any one outcome. The effect of each individual gene is small. It’s only in large data sets that we start to get the statistical power to get meaningful, reproducible results. We are using these new exciting, emerging data and tools to revolutionize social science.”

About Purdue University

Purdue University is a top public research institution developing practical solutions to today’s toughest challenges. Ranked in each of the last five years as one of the 10 Most Innovative universities in the United States by U.S. News & World Report, Purdue delivers world-changing research and out-of-this-world discovery. Committed to hands-on and online, real-world learning, Purdue offers a transformative education to all. Committed to affordability and accessibility, Purdue has frozen tuition and most fees at 2012-13 levels, enabling more students than ever to graduate debt-free. See how Purdue never stops in the persistent pursuit of the next giant leap at https://stories.purdue.edu.

Writer/Media contact: Brittany Steff, bsteff@purdue.edu        

Source: Robbee Wedow, rwedow@purdue.edu

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JOURNAL

Nature Human Behaviour

DOI

10.1038/s41562-023-01632-7 

ARTICLE TITLE

Patterns of item nonresponse behaviour to survey questionnaires are systematic and associated with genetic loci

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jun-2023

Analysis of cancer mortality trends reveals disparities for Hispanic populations

In multi-year study, Mass General Cancer Center researchers found increase in rates for liver cancer deaths among Hispanic men and rates for liver, pancreatic, and uterine cancer deaths among Hispanic women

Peer-Reviewed Publication

MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM

While cancer mortality rates in the U.S. have decreased, cancer remains the leading cause of death among Hispanic individuals, who generally having lower cancer incidence compared to non-Hispanic white individuals. A new study by investigators from the Mass General Cancer Center, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, evaluated cancer mortality trends and identified disparities for Hispanic men and women by age group, cancer type, and United States region over two decades. They found that while cancer mortality rates overall declined, rates of liver cancer death among Hispanic men and women and rates of pancreatic and uterine cancer deaths among women increased from 1999 to 2020. Their results are published in JAMA Oncology.

“Despite the great strides in cancer screening, education and treatment advances, there are  populations in the U.S. that haven't benefited from these improvements equally,” said senior and corresponding author Sophia C. Kamran, MD, of the Department of Radiation Oncology at the Mass General Cancer Center. “Cancer incidence is fairly low among Hispanic populations, but it the leading cause of death. My team wanted to know which cancers might be driving this.”

Kamran and colleagues used data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s public Wide-ranging ONline Data for Epidemiologic Research (WONDER) database to answer this question. The database captures the cause of every death in the U.S. from death certificates and is maintained by the National Center for Health Statistics. Data are disaggregated by sex, age of death, place of death, and more.

The researchers analyzed 690,677 cancer deaths among Hispanic individuals and found that, overall, cancer mortality decreased for Hispanic individuals from 1999 to 2020, with a larger decrease among men compared to women. One exception was an increase in cancer mortality rates among Hispanic men between the ages of 25 to 34 years. Upon further analysis, the team discovered that rates of colorectal and testicular cancer deaths were especially high for men in this group.

“This finding was pretty striking and may be driving the increase in overall cancer specific mortality in this particular age group,” Kamran said. “There could be a lack of awareness, education, and screening since there is a stigma associated with testicular cancer. And we know colorectal cancer mortality is increasing among younger populations in general.”

The team found additional cancer types where mortality also increased across all age groups from 1999 to 2020: liver cancer among men and liver, pancreatic, and uterine cancer among women. Liver cancer mortality rate also increased significantly in the West for Hispanic men and women compared to other regions of the U.S.

The authors have some hypotheses that may help explain these disparities: Hispanic immigrants may have less access to health care and insurance coverage, and Hispanic patients are more likely to be diagnosed at advanced cancer stages, which could drive poor survival. In addition, Hispanic patients are often not well-represented in cancer clinical trials.

Researchers did see substantially reduced lung cancer mortality rates among both Hispanic men and women.

“This might be pointing to the fact that there’s been a lot of education about smoking cessation and improvement in screening and treatment for this cancer,” Kamran said. “That was very encouraging.”

Equipped with this information about cancer mortality trends, researchers, educators, and policymakers can identify populations and cancer types that require additional efforts to reverse increasing mortality trends.

Limitations of the study included potential for the WONDER database misclassifying cause of death. The study also does not include undocumented populations nor account for migration or changes in zip code over time. Further, data about stage of cancer, previous treatments, insurance status, education, employment, or language were not available so the analysis could not account for these factors that might affect cancer mortality rate.

More granular data collection and analysis could strengthen investigations and allow researchers to replicate results in similar studies for specific disaggregated Hispanic subpopulations. Still, current findings underscore unique disparities that exist for Hispanic individuals.

“Clearly, the Hispanic population can't just be lumped together with all other U.S. cancer patients,” Kamran said. “We have to think a little bit differently and target specific cancer research, education, and treatments toward this population, so we are caring for these patients as best we can.”

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JOURNAL

JAMA Oncology

DOI

10.1001/jamaoncol.2023.1993 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Data/statistical analysis

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

US Cancer Mortality Trends Among Hispanic Populations From 1999 to 2020

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

29-Jun-2023

COI STATEMENT

Dr. Fumiko Chino reported receiving a grant from the National Cancer Institute during the conduct of the study.