Jeralynn S Cossman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4272369 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jeralynn S Cossman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jeralynn S |
| FAMILY NAME | Cossman |
| SIGNATURE | COSSMAN J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Mississippi State University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9630-7506 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2000 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
How Long Will I Live? Understanding Subjective Life Expectancy in Comparison to Actuarial Estimates
Most individuals have a general awareness of how long they might live—their subjective life expectancy (SLE). However, these perceptions often differ from actuarial estimates of life expectancy. We examine factors associated with SLE and deviations from actuarial estimates, including demographic characteristics that drive actuarial life tables, socioeconomic status, and psychosocial measures such as perceptions of health and health locus of contr…
Stress, Psychological Distress, Suicide Ideation, and Physical Health by Sexual Orientation
Divine Control Beliefs, Health Locus of Control, and Subjective Life Expectancy in the United States
Escalating costs of self-injury mortality in the 21st century United States
The scale and surge in the economic costs of SIM to society are large. Federal and state prevention and intervention programs should be financed with a clear understanding of the total costs-fiscal, social, and personal-incurred by deaths due to self-injurious behaviors
Interstates of Infection
PURPOSE: The COVID-19 pandemic has illuminated various heterogeneities between urban and rural environments in public health. The SARS-CoV-2 virus initially spread into the United States from international ports of entry and into urban population centers, like New York City. Over the course of the pandemic, cases emerged in more rural areas, implicating issues of transportation and mobility. Additionally, many rural areas developed into national …
A Commentary on Rural‐Urban Disparities in Covid‐19 Testing Rates per 100,000 and Risk Factors
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently released a list of risk factors for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). Among those at greatest risk in the COVID-19 pandemic are people aged 65 and older,1 severely obese people (BMI ≥ 40),1 those who are immunocompromised,1 and those who smoke or use e-cigarettes.2 People with other underlying medical conditions like diabetes,1 high blood pressure,1 and heart conditions1 are also at…
Assessing Trustworthiness in Research
When scholars express concern about trust in science, they often focus on whether the public trusts research findings. This study explores a different dimension of trust and examines whether and how frequently researchers misrepresent their research accomplishments when applying for a faculty position. We collected all of the vitae submitted for faculty positions at a large research university for 1 year and reviewed a 10% sample for accuracy. Of…
Physical Health, Mental Health, and Fear of Crime Among College Students
This article examines how physical health and mental health affect college students' fear of crime. Few studies have examined the influence of fear of crime on both objective and subjective measures of physical and mental health and-to our knowledge-none has examined how health measures vary by sex in the United States. In addition, most of the existing research targets older individuals, rather than college students. Using the ACHA-NCHA data set…
Characteristics of persistently unhealthy counties
This research examines differences in white and black persistence of mortality in the United States over a period of nearly 50 years. Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality File, we calculated race-specific, all-cause age-adjusted mortality rates for ten time periods from 1968 to 2015. Counties ranking in the top 20% of mortality in at least half of the time periods are classified as persistently unhealthy.…
Oral Health Interventions in Appalachian States
The purpose of this study was to identify common themes among interventions that seek to improve oral health in Appalachia. We interviewed oral health stakeholders in each of the thirteen states in Appalachia, obtaining information on 134 oral health interventions. Using a content analysis approach, we identified eight themes from the stakeholder-provided descriptions of these interventions: access to care, adult services, education and outreach,…
Persistence of death in the United States
Geographic disparities in mortality have been analyzed by place in myriad ways. Although the people who live in a place continuously change, the health characteristics of those places tend to stay the same; they are persistent. Our work analyzes persistenc
Long‐Term Trends in Black and White Mortality in the Rural United States
PURPOSE: The rural mortality penalty-growing disparities in rural-urban macro-level mortality rates-has persisted in the United States since the mid 1980s. Substantial intrarural differences exist: rural places of modest population size, close to urban areas, experience a greater mortality burden than the most rural locales. This research builds on recent findings by examining whether a race-specific rural mortality penalty exists; that is, are s…
The differential effects of rural health care access on race-specific mortality
We examined the relationship between race-specific rural mortality and the health infrastructure of rural counties in light of America's recent emergence of a rural mortality penalty. Using the Compressed Mortality File from National Center for Health Statistics (2008-2012) and county-level demographic, socioeconomic, and health care indicators from the Area Health Resource File and the US Census, we created a rural public health infrastructure i…
Oral Health in Appalachia
This study compares oral health measures within Appalachia, Appalachian states, and the rest of the United States to determine which geographic areas experienced the poorest oral health. We aggregated oral health indicators from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate prevalence of poor oral health indicators between Appalachian and non-Appalachian regions, as well as metropolitan and non-metropolitan differences within regions…
Socioeconomic Status and Health Well-Being during Later Life
This study explores the socioeconomic status (SES)-perceived health association, with special attention on living arrangements. It improves upon existing explanations of causal mechanisms underlying the impact of SES on health among the elderly. Using Health and Retirement Study to run ordered logistic regression, it addresses the importance of living arrangements for self-reported health. Income and education are both important predictors of sel…
Fear of crime and vulnerability
Gender Differences in U.S. College Students’ Fear for Others
Fear of Crime and Personal Vulnerability
This research considers the relationship between self-reported health and fear of crime. Fear of crime literature suggests women, the elderly, or the impoverished may experience heightened fear of crime. It is hypothesized that it is a sense of vulnerability that leads individuals to believe they would be unable to protect themselves should an attack occur, increasing their personal fear of crime. We argue in this article that poor self-reported …
Underlying Causes of the Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty
The nonmetropolitan mortality penalty results in an estimated 40 201 excessive US deaths per year, deaths that would not occur if nonmetropolitan and metropolitan residents died at the same rate. We explored the underlying causes of the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty by examining variation in cause of death. Declines in heart disease and cancer death rates in metropolitan areas drive the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty. Future work should ex…
Reconsidering the Rural–Urban Continuum in Rural Health Research
Preliminary Evidence for an Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty in the United States
We discovered an emerging non-metropolitan mortality penalty by contrasting 37 years of age-adjusted mortality rates for metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan US counties. During the 1980s, annual metropolitan–nonmetropolitan differences averaged 6.2 excess deaths per 100000 nonmetropolitan population, or approximately 3600 excess deaths; however, by 2000 to 2004, the difference had increased more than 10 times to average 71.7 excess deaths, or app…
Persistent Clusters of Mortality in the United States
We explored how place shapes mortality by examining 35 consecutive years of US mortality data. Mapping age-adjusted county mortality rates showed both persistent temporal and spatial clustering of high and low mortality rates. Counties with high mortality rates and counties with low mortality rates both experienced younger population out-migration, had economic decline, and were predominantly rural. These mortality patterns have important implica…
Altruism or Self-interest? Social Spending and the Life Course
The primacy of self-interested individuals is often regarded as the appropriate basis for US social spending decisions. One thread of this argument has advanced age-based self-interest and politically powerful elderly to explain why Social Security and Medicare have thrived in a policy environment that has seen retrenchment in other programs. We argue that crude self-interest and individual programs considered in isolation are insufficient to und…
Does regional variation affect ecological mortality research? An examination of mortality, income inequality and health infrastructure in the Mississippi Delta
Greatest Generation or Greedy Geezers? Social Spending Preferences and the Elderly
Some researchers, policy makers, and media accounts have challenged the equity of U.S. age-based social spending, invoking concerns about generational equity. The generational equity position, as expressed in the U.S. political landscape, attributes Social Security and Medicare's relative political invulnerability to elderly Americans' willingness to support spending on themselves, to the exclusion of spending on others. We use data from the Gene…
Greatest Generation or Greedy Geezers? Social Spending Preferences and the Elderly
Some researchers, policy makers, and media accounts have challenged the equity of U.S. age-based social spending, invoking concerns about generational equity. The generational equity position, as expressed in the U.S. political landscape, attributes Social Security and Medicare's relative political invulnerability to elderly Americans' willingness to support spending on themselves, to the exclusion of spending on others. We use data from the Gene…
Fear of crime and vulnerability
Preliminary Evidence for an Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty in the United States
We discovered an emerging non-metropolitan mortality penalty by contrasting 37 years of age-adjusted mortality rates for metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan US counties. During the 1980s, annual metropolitan–nonmetropolitan differences averaged 6.2 excess deaths per 100000 nonmetropolitan population, or approximately 3600 excess deaths; however, by 2000 to 2004, the difference had increased more than 10 times to average 71.7 excess deaths, or app…
Underlying Causes of the Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty
The nonmetropolitan mortality penalty results in an estimated 40 201 excessive US deaths per year, deaths that would not occur if nonmetropolitan and metropolitan residents died at the same rate. We explored the underlying causes of the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty by examining variation in cause of death. Declines in heart disease and cancer death rates in metropolitan areas drive the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty. Future work should ex…
Persistence of death in the United States
Geographic disparities in mortality have been analyzed by place in myriad ways. Although the people who live in a place continuously change, the health characteristics of those places tend to stay the same; they are persistent. Our work analyzes persistenc
Fear of Crime and Personal Vulnerability
This research considers the relationship between self-reported health and fear of crime. Fear of crime literature suggests women, the elderly, or the impoverished may experience heightened fear of crime. It is hypothesized that it is a sense of vulnerability that leads individuals to believe they would be unable to protect themselves should an attack occur, increasing their personal fear of crime. We argue in this article that poor self-reported …
Persistent Clusters of Mortality in the United States
We explored how place shapes mortality by examining 35 consecutive years of US mortality data. Mapping age-adjusted county mortality rates showed both persistent temporal and spatial clustering of high and low mortality rates. Counties with high mortality rates and counties with low mortality rates both experienced younger population out-migration, had economic decline, and were predominantly rural. These mortality patterns have important implica…
Mapping high or low mortality places across time in the United States
Physical Health, Mental Health, and Fear of Crime Among College Students
This article examines how physical health and mental health affect college students' fear of crime. Few studies have examined the influence of fear of crime on both objective and subjective measures of physical and mental health and-to our knowledge-none has examined how health measures vary by sex in the United States. In addition, most of the existing research targets older individuals, rather than college students. Using the ACHA-NCHA data set…
Multiple Meanings of Minority Concentration
Gender Differences in U.S. College Students’ Fear for Others
Reconsidering the Rural–Urban Continuum in Rural Health Research
Does regional variation affect ecological mortality research? An examination of mortality, income inequality and health infrastructure in the Mississippi Delta
Characteristics of persistently unhealthy counties
This research examines differences in white and black persistence of mortality in the United States over a period of nearly 50 years. Using data from the National Center for Health Statistics Compressed Mortality File, we calculated race-specific, all-cause age-adjusted mortality rates for ten time periods from 1968 to 2015. Counties ranking in the top 20% of mortality in at least half of the time periods are classified as persistently unhealthy.…
Assessing Trustworthiness in Research
When scholars express concern about trust in science, they often focus on whether the public trusts research findings. This study explores a different dimension of trust and examines whether and how frequently researchers misrepresent their research accomplishments when applying for a faculty position. We collected all of the vitae submitted for faculty positions at a large research university for 1 year and reviewed a 10% sample for accuracy. Of…
Altruism or Self-interest? Social Spending and the Life Course
The primacy of self-interested individuals is often regarded as the appropriate basis for US social spending decisions. One thread of this argument has advanced age-based self-interest and politically powerful elderly to explain why Social Security and Medicare have thrived in a policy environment that has seen retrenchment in other programs. We argue that crude self-interest and individual programs considered in isolation are insufficient to und…
When People Died
Data from cemeteries can provide social scientists with rich, longitudinal data on death patterns (Trevino-Richard 1984 Trevino-Richard , Terry . 1984 . “Death Timing Among Deceased Married Couples in a Southern Cemetery.” Phylon XLV : 323 – 330 . [CSA] [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). To improve social scientist's understanding of the seasonal patterns of deaths to African Americans in the postemancipation era, this research uses cemetery records…
Parents' Heterosexism and Children's Attitudes Toward People With Aids
This research examines how parental heterosexism—negative attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality—and other family characteristics relate to the development of children's attitudes toward people with HIV/AIDS (PWA). Attention is directed to the overall relationship between parents' and children's attitudes and to the potential mechanisms through which these linkages are manifested. Based on social learning theories of childhood socializati…
Structured Inequality in the United States
The Right-to-Die Movement
A national membership survey of Hemlock Society USA was conducted by Fox and Kamakahi (1995). Respondents (N=6398) were asked a variety of questions, but in this paper we perform a longitudinal analysis of the characteristics of Hemlock Society USA members. Hemlock Society USA members are divided into three 5-year cohorts: Early Joiners (11 or more years of membership), Middle Joiners (6 to 10 years membership), and Late Joiners (5 or fewer years…
The Hemlock Society Membership
While most Right to Die studies have examined the ethical and moral implications of assisted suicide, few have investigated the active membership of Right to Die organizations. Two studies, one in 1983 and one in 1995, have surveyed The Hemlock Society USA membership in an effort to identify those who are actively involved in the Right to Die social movement. This study compares the social demographic descriptors of members of the Hemlock Society…
Mapping high or low mortality places across time in the United States
Multiple Meanings of Minority Concentration
Parents' Heterosexism and Children's Attitudes Toward People With Aids
This research examines how parental heterosexism—negative attitudes toward homosexuals and homosexuality—and other family characteristics relate to the development of children's attitudes toward people with HIV/AIDS (PWA). Attention is directed to the overall relationship between parents' and children's attitudes and to the potential mechanisms through which these linkages are manifested. Based on social learning theories of childhood socializati…
Altruism or Self-interest? Social Spending and the Life Course
The primacy of self-interested individuals is often regarded as the appropriate basis for US social spending decisions. One thread of this argument has advanced age-based self-interest and politically powerful elderly to explain why Social Security and Medicare have thrived in a policy environment that has seen retrenchment in other programs. We argue that crude self-interest and individual programs considered in isolation are insufficient to und…
Does regional variation affect ecological mortality research? An examination of mortality, income inequality and health infrastructure in the Mississippi Delta
Greatest Generation or Greedy Geezers? Social Spending Preferences and the Elderly
Some researchers, policy makers, and media accounts have challenged the equity of U.S. age-based social spending, invoking concerns about generational equity. The generational equity position, as expressed in the U.S. political landscape, attributes Social Security and Medicare's relative political invulnerability to elderly Americans' willingness to support spending on themselves, to the exclusion of spending on others. We use data from the Gene…
When People Died
Data from cemeteries can provide social scientists with rich, longitudinal data on death patterns (Trevino-Richard 1984 Trevino-Richard , Terry . 1984 . “Death Timing Among Deceased Married Couples in a Southern Cemetery.” Phylon XLV : 323 – 330 . [CSA] [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). To improve social scientist's understanding of the seasonal patterns of deaths to African Americans in the postemancipation era, this research uses cemetery records…
Persistent Clusters of Mortality in the United States
We explored how place shapes mortality by examining 35 consecutive years of US mortality data. Mapping age-adjusted county mortality rates showed both persistent temporal and spatial clustering of high and low mortality rates. Counties with high mortality rates and counties with low mortality rates both experienced younger population out-migration, had economic decline, and were predominantly rural. These mortality patterns have important implica…
Reconsidering the Rural–Urban Continuum in Rural Health Research
Preliminary Evidence for an Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty in the United States
We discovered an emerging non-metropolitan mortality penalty by contrasting 37 years of age-adjusted mortality rates for metropolitan versus nonmetropolitan US counties. During the 1980s, annual metropolitan–nonmetropolitan differences averaged 6.2 excess deaths per 100000 nonmetropolitan population, or approximately 3600 excess deaths; however, by 2000 to 2004, the difference had increased more than 10 times to average 71.7 excess deaths, or app…
Underlying Causes of the Emerging Nonmetropolitan Mortality Penalty
The nonmetropolitan mortality penalty results in an estimated 40 201 excessive US deaths per year, deaths that would not occur if nonmetropolitan and metropolitan residents died at the same rate. We explored the underlying causes of the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty by examining variation in cause of death. Declines in heart disease and cancer death rates in metropolitan areas drive the nonmetropolitan mortality penalty. Future work should ex…
Gender Differences in U.S. College Students’ Fear for Others
Fear of Crime and Personal Vulnerability
This research considers the relationship between self-reported health and fear of crime. Fear of crime literature suggests women, the elderly, or the impoverished may experience heightened fear of crime. It is hypothesized that it is a sense of vulnerability that leads individuals to believe they would be unable to protect themselves should an attack occur, increasing their personal fear of crime. We argue in this article that poor self-reported …
Fear of crime and vulnerability
Socioeconomic Status and Health Well-Being during Later Life
This study explores the socioeconomic status (SES)-perceived health association, with special attention on living arrangements. It improves upon existing explanations of causal mechanisms underlying the impact of SES on health among the elderly. Using Health and Retirement Study to run ordered logistic regression, it addresses the importance of living arrangements for self-reported health. Income and education are both important predictors of sel…
Oral Health in Appalachia
This study compares oral health measures within Appalachia, Appalachian states, and the rest of the United States to determine which geographic areas experienced the poorest oral health. We aggregated oral health indicators from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System to estimate prevalence of poor oral health indicators between Appalachian and non-Appalachian regions, as well as metropolitan and non-metropolitan differences within regions…
Long‐Term Trends in Black and White Mortality in the Rural United States
PURPOSE: The rural mortality penalty-growing disparities in rural-urban macro-level mortality rates-has persisted in the United States since the mid 1980s. Substantial intrarural differences exist: rural places of modest population size, close to urban areas, experience a greater mortality burden than the most rural locales. This research builds on recent findings by examining whether a race-specific rural mortality penalty exists; that is, are s…
The differential effects of rural health care access on race-specific mortality
We examined the relationship between race-specific rural mortality and the health infrastructure of rural counties in light of America's recent emergence of a rural mortality penalty. Using the Compressed Mortality File from National Center for Health Statistics (2008-2012) and county-level demographic, socioeconomic, and health care indicators from the Area Health Resource File and the US Census, we created a rural public health infrastructure i…
Oral Health Interventions in Appalachian States
The purpose of this study was to identify common themes among interventions that seek to improve oral health in Appalachia. We interviewed oral health stakeholders in each of the thirteen states in Appalachia, obtaining information on 134 oral health interventions. Using a content analysis approach, we identified eight themes from the stakeholder-provided descriptions of these interventions: access to care, adult services, education and outreach,…
Persistence of death in the United States
Geographic disparities in mortality have been analyzed by place in myriad ways. Although the people who live in a place continuously change, the health characteristics of those places tend to stay the same; they are persistent. Our work analyzes persistenc
Assessing Trustworthiness in Research
When scholars express concern about trust in science, they often focus on whether the public trusts research findings. This study explores a different dimension of trust and examines whether and how frequently researchers misrepresent their research accomplishments when applying for a faculty position. We collected all of the vitae submitted for faculty positions at a large research university for 1 year and reviewed a 10% sample for accuracy. Of…
Physical Health, Mental Health, and Fear of Crime Among College Students
This article examines how physical health and mental health affect college students' fear of crime. Few studies have examined the influence of fear of crime on both objective and subjective measures of physical and mental health and-to our knowledge-none has examined how health measures vary by sex in the United States. In addition, most of the existing research targets older individuals, rather than college students. Using the ACHA-NCHA data set…
Medicine (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Demography (17 works) · Population (14 works) · Geography (13 works) · Health disparities and outcomes (13 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Environmental health (10 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Demography (8 works)