Deborah Carr

About

Deborah Carr is an A&S Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Boston University and director of BU's Center for Innovation in Social Science. She earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997 and has held faculty positions at the University of Michigan, University of Wisconsin, and Rutgers University, where she was acting director of the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy & Aging Research. Her research focuses on aging and the life course, psychosocial factors influencing health over the life course, and end-of-life issues. Carr's work explores how family roles and relationships affect health and well-being, with an emphasis on stressors such as divorce, caregiving, functional impairment, and marital strain. She also investigates bereavement and end-of-life decision-making among older adults, examining how demographic, technological, and social/political changes impact the experiences of the dying and their families. Additionally, her research addresses the social, psychological, and interpersonal consequences of health-related stigma, particularly related to disability and obesity. Carr is the author of several books including Golden Years: Social Inequalities in Later Life, which received the 2020 Kalish Innovative Publication Award from the Gerontological Society of America, and Aging in America, published in 2023. She co-edited the Handbook of Aging & the Social Sciences and Spousal Bereavement in Late Life. She has also…

Research topics

• Psychology
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Social psychology
• Nursing
• Gerontology
• Psychiatry
• Law
• Gender studies

Selected publications

• Families in Later Life: A Decade in Review

  Journal of Marriage and Family · 2020 · 239 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Later-life families encompass the legal, biological, romantic, and kin-like relationships of persons ages 65 and older. Research on older families has flourished over the past decade, as population aging has intensified concerns regarding the capacities of families to care for older adults and the adequacy of public pension systems to provide an acceptable standard of living. Shifting patterns of family formation over the past half-century have created a context in which contemporary older adult…

  DOI

• Bereavement in the Time of Coronavirus: Unprecedented Challenges Demand Novel Interventions

  Journal of Aging & Social Policy · 2020 · 191 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  COVID-19 fatalities exemplify "bad deaths" and are distinguished by physical discomfort, difficulty breathing, social isolation, psychological distress, and care that may be discordant with the patient's preferences. Each of these death attributes is a well-documented correlate of bereaved survivors' symptoms of depression, anxiety, and anger. Yet the grief experienced by survivors of COVID-related deaths is compounded by the erosion of coping resources like social support, contemporaneous stres…

  DOI

• Global projections of heat exposure of older adults

  Nature Communications · 2024-05-14 · 88 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The global population is aging at the same time as heat exposures are increasing due to climate change. Age structure, and its biological and socio-economic drivers, determine populations' vulnerability to high temperatures. Here we combine age-stratified demographic projections with downscaled temperature projections to mid-century and find that chronic exposure to heat doubles across all warming scenarios. Moreover, >23% of the global population aged 69+ will inhabit climates whose 95th percen…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Physical Disability at Work: How Functional Limitation Affects Perceived Discrimination and Interpersonal Relationships in the Workplace

  Journal of Health and Social Behavior · 2021 · 57 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Adults with disability have significantly lower rates of labor force participation relative to persons without disability, although it is unclear whether this disparity extends to subjective workplace experiences. Using data from the 2004 to 2006 wave of the National Survey of Midlife Development in the United States (n =2,030), we evaluate: (1) whether U.S. workers with physical disability report higher levels of perceived job discrimination and unequal workplace opportunities and lower levels…

  DOI

• Gender differences in the economic consequences of life‐long singlehood among older white U.S. adults

  Journal of Marriage and the Family · 2024-05-28 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Objective Drawing on life course frameworks, this study examines how never married older adults differ from their married, cohabiting, divorced, and widowed peers with respect to three dimensions of late‐life economic security, and gender differences in these associations. Background Lifelong singlehood has become increasingly common over the past five decades, although little is known about the economic security of never married older adults relative to their currently and formerly mar…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• STATISTICS CORE

  NIH · $88.5M · 2002–2018

• NIH Grant P01AG021079

  NIH · $22.8M · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• Erik Olín Wright

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  36 shared

• Jeffrey Prager

  University of California, Los Angeles

  36 shared

• Avery F. Gordon

  36 shared

• Mary Pattillo

  36 shared

• Ted Conover

  New York University

  36 shared

• Camille B. Wortman

  33 shared

• David Crotty

  Clarke (United States)

  32 shared

• Rachel Pruchno

  Rowan University

  31 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  University of Wisconsin Madison

  1997

Awards & honors

• 2022 Matilda White Riley Distinguished Scholar Award
• 2023 Outstanding Mentorship Award from the ASA Aging & Life…
• Elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2024

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Loretta Leesh-45
• Patrick Sheehanh-24
• Nazli Kibriah-23