UAB sociology professor receives 5-year grant to study women’s health disparities

Mieke Beth Thomeer, Ph.D., has received a nearly $1.3 million grant to study midlife health disparities related to motherhood.Mieke Beth Thomeer, Ph.D., associate professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, has received a five-year R01 grant totaling $1,295,411 from the National Institute on Aging to investigate ways that motherhood experiences shape women’s health and health disparities at ages 40 and 50.

Thomeer, with Joseph D. Wolfe, Ph.D., associate professor in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Sociology, and colleagues from The Ohio State University, will analyze a survey of more than 4,000 women who have been interviewed regularly during the past four decades. This study will be among the first to examine ways in which motherhood biographies and midlife motherhood contexts impact women’s health and how these effects vary by education, race and ethnicity.

The study will use nationally representative data from the 1979-2018 waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth-79. The team will look for health disparities present at midlife related to health behaviors, physical health and mental and cognitive health.

The researchers hope identifying potential health disparities can lead to better care for the current generation of midlife women in the United States as they age. 

Thomeer, whose research and teaching interests are aging, family, gender, health and sexuality, also was recently named deputy editor of the Journal of Marriage and Family.