Short and H. Xu, PSTC graduate trainee, examine disparities in health insurance across rural and urban China over the 1997-2006 period. Despite similar levels of health insurance coverage in urban and rural areas by 2006, differences in outpatient and inpatient reimbursement rates suggest continued urban advantage.

This research investigates the relationship between family organization and child well-being in Southern Africa, a region with substantial variation and change in children's living arrangements due to the current HIV/AIDS epidemic.

PSTC researcher Short joins Juhua Yang of People’s University in Beijing to examine patterns of housework among husbands and wives in China over the period 1989 to 2006.  They find that as of 2006, Chinese wives on average do five times more housework than their husbands, a gender difference that is little changed since 1989.  This study suggests that highly asymmetric housework arrangements can be maintained in settings with high female labor force participation.

Recent advances in genomic science, and understandings of biological difference, present new research opportunity in regard to social inequality.  In particular, researchers can consider more explicitly whether and how human physiology is relevant to institutional and structural explanations of inequality.  This grant supports the PI in development of this line of inquiry through funding training in relevant areas of inquiry outside of sociology.