# Early-Life Health Consequences of Unequal Kinship Networks

> **NIH NIH R00** · EMORY UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $242,050

## Abstract

Project Summary
I graduated with a joint Ph.D. in Demography and Sociology from University of Pennsylvania and an M.Eng in
Operations Research and Industrial Engineering from Cornell University. My dissertation examined the
consequences of health insurance policies on inequalities between gender, race/ethnicity, and access to care.
During my postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA’s Department of Health Policy and Management (HPM), I
expanded my work in safety nets to include informal kin-based sources. My work thus far has focused on
dyadic relationships and proximate determinants of health. The K99 will allow me to broaden this focus and (1)
develop of methodological expertise in network analyses; and (2) gain expertise in the study of biological
markers of health to address the question: “Do differences in kinship support networks explain the health gap
between socioeconomic groups?” The R00 phase will allow for a pilot study whose findings will motivate a
future R01 that will collect data needed to answer this question directly. Current health policy strengthens the
importance of kin through dependent coverage of spouses and children. The changing landscape of family ties
is often missing from policy debates. Diverging trends in mortality, family formation, and childbearing between
people who have more, and less socioeconomic resources may reinforce or exacerbate health inequalities.
Adults with supportive ties to their spouses and parents may benefit from stronger safety nets. Children who
are born and grow up in these strong kinship networks may have access to greater resources than children
who have fewer parents, grandparents, and whose family relationships are made complex by step-kin. This
proposal will (1) quantify the unequal kinship networks stemming from diverging trends in mortality, fertility and
martial histories and its resulting disparities in support; (2) establish an association between kin-based safety
nets with health in-utero and early life; and (3) simulate the potential population-level health impact of kinship
networks stemming from unequal demographic histories of multiple generations. The proposed training
program and research project will set the foundations for an independent research program whose goal is to
ascertain the contribution of disparate family processes in population health inequality. The findings will help to
create health policies that consider the diverse and evolving kinship networks that beneficiaries are embedded
in and to identify effective opportunities for intervention. During the K99 phase, I will develop methodologies to
create simulations of kinship networks using population-representative data. I will also collaborate with a
research lab to collect repeated biomarker data along with information on social support from families as they
go through pregnancy, birth, and the first year of the infant’s life. During the R00 phase, I will analyze the data
and incorporate its findings into the kinship netwo...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10215577
- **Project number:** 5R00HD096322-04
- **Recipient organization:** EMORY UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Heeju Sohn
- **Activity code:** R00 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $242,050
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-08-01 → 2023-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10215577

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10215577, Early-Life Health Consequences of Unequal Kinship Networks (5R00HD096322-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10215577. Licensed CC0.

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