Profile

Kammi K. Schmeer
Assistant Professor, Sociology, Ohio State University

Project Title: Poverty, Chronic Stress, and Child Well-Being

Project Description: This project will assess the effects of economic distress on chronic stress in children. This is an important next step in identifying mechanisms through which poverty creates child health and development disadvantages and reinforces the intergenerational transmission of poverty. It is critical that we understand how economic disadvantage produces physiological changes in children, since altered stress response systems have the potential to impact multiple aspects of child well-being and long term outcomes not yet evident in childhood. Findings from this research will inform the further development of conceptual models of poverty effects on children, the incorporation of child stress measures into future poverty studies, and the design of policies aimed to improve outcomes among poor children by buffering them from the chronic stress of poverty.

Biography: Dr. Schmeer’s research focuses on how family and household contexts affect women and children’s health outcomes in disadvantaged populations. In the U.S., Dr. Schmeer has studied how family structure and transitions, poverty, and household chaos are associated with health outcomes among children in the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Her international work includes the study of the effects of various aspects of family structure and transitions on adult depressive symptoms, adult obesity, child illness, and child anemia using survey and biomarker data from Mexico. Most recently, Dr. Schmeer is collaborating with a colleague in the OSU Department of Anthropology to design and collect survey and biomarker data from 500 households in urban and rural León, Nicaragua. The study aims to assess multiple economic and social aspects of poor households with children aged 2-10 and their links with food security and maternal/child health outcomes. Dr. Schmeer is a faculty affiliate of the Institute for Population Research and a member of the Food Innovation Center at Ohio State.