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Research over the last several years has demonstrated a wide variety of inequalities in the COVID-19 pandemic by socio-demographic characteristics, place, and political and religious ideology. In this study, by combining several county-level data sources, we examine how the social conditions of counties across the United States relate to their differential COVID-19 mortality rates. We find that percent Black, percent Hispanic, and income inequality are all positively related to higher mortality rates at the county level. Moreover, the percentage of the population that voted for Trump in the 2020 election was a significant and substantively large predictor of higher mortality rates. We also include healthcare-related variables, but compared to the social circumstances of the pandemic, these effects are relatively small. These results indicate that the social conditions of areas are strong predictors of how counties have experienced the pandemic and where the greatest loss of life has occurred. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide is steadily rising. Many blamed worsening economic conditions for this trend. Sociological theory established clear pathways between joblessness and suicide focused on status threat, shame, and consequent disruption of social relationships. However, recent empirical research provides little support for a link between unemployment and suicide. I attempt to reconcile this contradiction by focusing on white suicide and white employment-to-population ratio. Whiteness is not just a default category but a pervasive ideology that amplifies the effects of status loss. The white employment-to-population ratio represents a form of racialized economic threat and accounts for discouraged workers who have exited the labor force. I use longitudinal hybrid models with U.S. state-level data, 2000 to 2016, and find that decreasing employment is associated with increasing suicide among the white population and white men. I discuss this study's contributions to the literature on suicide and joblessness and the emerging scholarship on whiteness and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While impacts on health have been devastating, the COVID-19 pandemic has metastasized through entire societies and nearly every aspect of social life. As Guest Editors, it is our hope that this special issue is successful in generating future research on the social causes and social consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the field of sociology and other disciplines. The COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case to examine the formation of pandemic health behaviors and lifestyles. Since emerging in late December 2019, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has contributed to over 4.5 million deaths worldwide, and many more "long-haulers" have been left to endure a range of long-term side effects. [Extracted from the article]

The publication of The Spirit Level (Wilkinson and Pickett, 2009) marked a paramount moment in the analysis of health and inequality, quickly attracting a remarkable degree of attention, both positive and negative, both in academic and in public discourse. Following at least 20 years of research, the book proposes a simple and powerful argument: inequality per se, more specifically income inequality, is harmful to every aspect of social life. In order to confirm this idea, the authors present a series of bivariate, cross-sectional associations showing comparisons across countries and within the United States. Despite the methodological limitations of this approach, the authors advance causal claims concerning the detrimental effects of income inequality. They also rule out poverty as a plausible alternative explanation, without directly measuring it. Meanwhile, over the last decade stratification scholars have demonstrated the nonlinear effect of economic factors, especially income, on health. The results suggest that a relative approach is best for analyzing dynamics at the top of the income distribution, whereas an absolute approach seems most appropriate for studying the bottom of the distribution. Consistent with this perspective, here I reanalyze data from The Spirit Level , adding a measure of poverty, in order to control the effect of inequality and explore its interaction with poverty. The findings show that inequality and poverty—which I contend are two interdependent but nonetheless distinct phenomena—interact across countries, such that the detrimental effects of inequality are present or stronger in countries with high poverty, and absent or weaker in countries with low poverty; poverty replaces inequality as the favored explanation of health and social ills across states. The new evidence suggests that income distributions are characterized by a complex interplay between inequality and poverty, whose interaction deserves further analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States. The rise in suicide rates is contributing to the recently observed decline in life expectancy. While previous research identified a solid association between economic strain and suicide, little attention has been paid to how specific welfare policies that are designed to alleviate economic strain may influence suicide rates. There is a growing body of research that is using an institutional approach to demonstrate the role of welfare-state policies in the distribution of health. However, this perspective has not been applied yet to the investigation of suicide. In this study, I combine these approaches to analyze the association between two specific policies, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), and overall and gender-specific suicide rates across the 50 U.S. states between 2000 and 2015. I estimate two-way fixed-effects longitudinal models and find evidence of a robust association between one of these policies – SNAP – and overall and male suicide. After adjusting for a number of confounding factors, higher participation in SNAP is associated with lower overall and male suicide rates. Increasing SNAP participation by one standard deviation (4.5% of the state population) during the study period could have saved the lives of approximately 31,600 people overall and 24,800 men. • Combines economic strain and institutional theory to investigate welfare and suicide. • Estimates the relationship across 50 U.S. states, 2000–2015. • Uses two-way state and year fixed-effects. • SNAP participation is associated with lower overall and male suicide rates. • Increasing SNAP participation may reduce suicide during economic downturns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employed data from the 2011 Miami-Dade Health Survey (n = 444) to formally test whether the association between religious struggles and psychological distress is mediated by psychosocial resources. We found that religious struggles were associated with lower levels of social support, self-esteem, the sense of control, and self-control. We also observed that religious struggles were associated with higher levels of non-specific emotional distress, depression, and anxiety, but not somatization. Our mediation analyses revealed significant indirect effects of religious struggles on emotional distress (not somatization) through social support, self-esteem, and the sense of control, but not self-control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]