Ongoing Research Projects
Pandemic Bereavement in California Immigrant Communities
Team Members: Eileen Amador, Robin Hernandez, Alicia R. Riley, Adriana Maroto Vargas
Supported by a Sprout Grant from the UCSC Institute for Social Transformation
“Pandemic Retelling: What GoFundMe Posts Reveal about the Social Context of COVID-19 Deaths in Latinx & Spanish-speaking Communities in the U.S.”
Team Members: Eileen Amador, Robin Hernandez, Alicia R. Riley
COVID-19 has had an outsized impact on Latinx immigrant communities in the US, turning thousands of individuals into newly-bereaved survivors. Despite an eagerness among scholars to document racial/ethnic inequities in COVID-19, data limitations prevent a deeper understanding of the social context of COVID-19 deaths. This mixed-methods study explores the social relationships, structural factors, and significant events that surround COVID-19 deaths among members of Latinx and Spanish-speaking communities in the U.S., as retold in user-written posts on the GoFundMe crowd-funding platform. GoFundMe posts for funeral and related expenses in the aftermath of a COVID-19 death are an unexplored source of information about COVID-19 decedents and their families, as well as the social impacts of COVID-19 mortality inequities. First, we use computational query methods to systematically identify a corpus of Spanish-language/bilingual GoFundMe posts from US locations referencing the death of someone to COVID-19. Then we use deductive and inductive coding to analyze the corpus and explore references to structural positionality (e.g. occupation, nativity, financial burdens), social network positionality (e.g., network members, household membership, breadwinner status), financial hardship, and grief surrounding COVID-19 deaths as well as the meaning-making and collective memory work practiced to honor deceased loved ones. While surveillance data and vital statistics data fail to capture how COVID-19 decedents belong to social networks and communities, this study leverages a novel data source in order to tell a more complete story about the social context of COVID-19 mortality inequities and pandemic grief in Latinx and Spanish-speaking communities.
Supported by a Sprout Grant from the UCSC Institute for Social Transformation
“Unequal Loss: Disparities in Social Network Proximity to a COVID-19 Death Among U.S. Older Adults”
Co-Authors: Alicia R. Riley, Louise Hawkley, Lissette Piedra
Racial-ethnic and language disparities in COVID grief may be even more extreme than those in individual mortality. Survey data can shed light on how individuals are impacted by the pandemic to varying degrees depending on the various social networks they beyond to. We used descriptive analysis to evaluate disparities by race/ethnicity/language subgroups in social network proximity to a COVID-19 death (aquaintaince < friend/family member < household member < spouse) and multiple logistic regression to evaluate disparities in experiencing at least one COVID-19 death in one’s social network.
“Source of Information about COVID-19 Differentiates Masking Behavior and Vaccination Intentions Among Latinos in the Southwest”
Co-Authors: Alicia R. Riley, Gilberto Lopez, Alan Yang
Using survey data, we explored how respondents’ preferred sources of information about COVID-19 differentiated their self-reported mask usage and their self-reported likelihood of COVID-19 vaccination.
“A demographic profile of mortality due to COVID-19 among California Farmworkers”
We drew on California death records and limited our analysis to individuals aged 18 to 65 in California whose primary occupation was as an agricultural worker. To estimate excess mortality, we compared the deaths observed from March 2020 through February 2022 to the average number of deaths over the same months in 2018 and 2019.