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Staff Profiles
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Brian Karl FinchSanta Monica Office Sociologist and Professor of Public Policy EducationPh.D. in sociology, University of Texas at Austin |
Biography
Brian Karl Finch is a Sociologist and Professor of Public Policy at RAND and a Health Disparities Scholar with the National Center on Minority Health and Health Disparities (National Institutes of Health). He is also a core member of the RAND Center for Population Health and Health Disparities. Before joining RAND, Dr. Finch was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Scholar in the School of Public Health at the University of California at Berkeley. He received his B.A. in Peace & Conflict Studies and Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Finch's work crosses the disciplinary boundaries of social demography, social epidemiology, and medical sociology to investigate the causes and correlates of population health disparities, specifically socioeconomic and race/ethnic disparities in health outcomes and behaviors among adults and biological/social interactions across the early life-course. He is a Principal- or Co Principal- Investigator on several NIH- and DHHS-funded projects researching population health disparities. His research also explicitly addresses the effect of neighborhood context on health behaviors using multi-level methodologies including hierarchical linear models and complex survival models.
Research Focus
Social demography; medical sociology/social epidemiology: social determinants of health; Latina(o) health: immigrant health behaviors & outcomes; social stratification & inequality: race/ethnicity; immigration and poverty; quantitative methods/social statistics
RAND Research Areas
Selected Publications
Finch BK, Cohen DA, Bower A, "Collective Efficacy and Obesity: The Potential Influence of Social Factors on Health. -- 2006", Social Science & Medicine, 62(3) 769-778, 2006
Frank, Reanne and Brian Karl Finch, "Los Años de la Crisis: An Examination of Change in Differential Infant Mortality Risk Within Mexico", Social science & medicine, 59(4) 825-835, 2004
Finch, Brian Karl, Reanne Frank, and William A. Vega, "The Effects of Acculturation and Acculturation Stress on Migrant Farm-Workers' Health", International Migration Review, 38(2), 2004
Finch, Brian Karl and William A. Vega, "Acculturation Stress, Social Support, and Self-Rated Health among Latinos in California", Journal of Immigrant Health, 5(3) 109-117, 2003
Finch, Brian Karl, "Early Origins of the Gradient: The Relationship between Socio-Economic Status and Infant Mortality in the United States", Demography, 40(4) 675-699, 2003
Finch, Brian Karl, Ralph C. Catalano, Raymond W. Novaco, and William A. Vega, "Employment Frustration and Alcohol Abuse/Dependence among Mexican Labor Migrants", Journal of Immigrant Health, 5(4) 181-186, 2003
Finch, Brian Karl, "Socio-Economic Gradients & Low Birth-Weight: Empirical and Policy Considerations", Health Services Research, 38(6) 1819-1842, 2003
Finch, Brian Karl, Robert A. Hummer, Maureen Reindl, and William A. Vega, "The Validity of Self-Rated Health among Latino(a)s", American Journal of Epidemiology, 155(8) 755-759, 2002
Finch, Brian Karl, Jason D. Boardman, and Robert A. Hummer, "Race, Birth-weight, and Maternal Reports of Childhood Respiratory Disease in the United States", Population Research and Policy Review, (20) 187-206, 2001
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