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The decline of employment-based health plans is commonly attributed to rising premium costs. Using restricted data and a matched sample from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey–Insurance Component, the authors extend previous studies by testing the relationships among premium costs, employment relationships, and the provision of health benefits between 1999 and 2012. The authors report that both establishment- and state-level union densities are associated with a higher likelihood of employers’ providing health plans, whereas right-to-work legislation is associated with lower provision. These factors combined rival rising premium cost in predicting offering. This finding indicates that the declining provision of health benefits could be in part driven by the transformation of the employment relationship in the United States and that labor unions may remain a critical force in sustaining employment-based coverage in the twenty-first century.

Discrimination-health research has been critiqued for neglecting the endogeneity of reports of discrimination to negative affect and the multidimensionality of mental health. To address these challenges, we model discrimination’s relationship to multiple psychological variables without directional constraints. Using time-dense data to identify associational network structures allows for joint testing of the social stress hypothesis, prominent in discrimination-health literature, and the negativity bias hypothesis, an endogeneity critique rooted in social psychology. Our results show discrimination predicts negative emotions from day-to-day but not vice versa, indicating that racial discrimination is a risk factor and not symptom of negative emotion. Furthermore, we identify sadness, guilt, hostility, and fear as a locus of interrelated emotions sensitive to racism-related stressors that emerges over time. Thus, we find support for what race scholars have argued for 120+ years in a model without a priori directional restrictions and then build on this work by empirically identifying cascading mental health consequences of discrimination.

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Service and advocacy organizations have long struggled to find the appropriate language to name traumatic experiences when working with vulnerable populations. Organizations have been pressed to adopt either “victim”-based language or “survivor”-based language, with both terms seen as having mutually exclusive meanings. However, despite academic and popular debates, no recent studies have documented trends in language used to describe traumatic experiences, whether of sexual and relationship violence, or of experiences of war, disaster, or major illness. In this research note, we use administrative data from the Internal Revenue Service to analyze how 3,756 service and advocacy organizations use trauma-related language between 1998 and 2016. Descriptive analysis shows that survivor language has been on the rise as victim language declined. Victim remains a common way to name trauma, however, and survivor tends to join, rather than displace, victim terminology. Further analysis also points to gendered use of both terms. Victim and survivor are used together most often in organizations that work with trauma experienced by women and in the field of sexual and relationship violence. We suggest these findings indicate a more complex story of how communities of language users emerge, which aligns with recent sociological treatments of discourse.