Tyler W. Myroniuk

University of Missouri | Mizzou · Department of Public Health

Strong expectations exist for the selectivity of migration along key demographic characteristics, such as age, sex, and education, which are often linked to social and economic drivers. Scholars acknowledge, however, that migratory behavior is also likely to be selective on characteristics that are less readily observable. This research note expand...

The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound effect on health workers; one of the most affected occupational groups. In Sierra Leone, health workers were already scarred by the 2014 Ebola outbreak that claimed many lives; this study aimed to explore the experiences of health workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, with particular attention to this context. I...

Objectives We assess how age, the presence of mature adults aged 45+ years, and recent deaths in rural households are associated with coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) preventative actions and the likelihood of getting vaccinated against the virus in Malawi during early stages of the pandemic. Methods We draw upon data from 2,187 rural Malawians...

Purpose COVID-19 continues to infect and affect college-aged youth. We lack information about how students experienced the pandemic day-to-day and what they need for recovery, from their own perspectives. This study employed peer ethnography to explore student’s insights for current and future prevention and care. Methods A team of eight students...

Introduction College students routinely visit their families due to geographic proximity and their financial dependence. Consequently, the potential of transmitting COVID-19 from campus to their families’ homes is consequential. Family members are key sources of support for one another in nearly all matters but there is little research uncovering t...

The widespread availability of health information and treatment for HIV in Southern Africa does not reach all populations. Few programs and materials are developed with middle-aged and older rural individuals living with HIV as the target audience, despite this being a growing population. This vacuum inevitably exacerbates the disjuncture between c...

Canada and the USA are often compared for their markedly different approaches to health care despite cultural similarities and sharing the world’s longest international boundary. The period between the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in January 2020 and the availability of a vaccine in December 2020 offers an ideal opportunity to compare subnational...

The COVID-19 pandemic not only had detrimental effects on physical health but also had adverse effects on college students’ mental health. This paper begins to fill a gap in knowledge related to the contextual factors that impacted college students’ mental health during COVID. Using in-depth interviews with a diverse sample of 33 college students a...

Racially minoritized groups have disproportionately borne the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in America. We draw on Public Health Critical Race Praxis to investigate racial differences in college students' attitudes about mitigation efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 and concerns about one's own and others' actions in these efforts. We used...

Purpose: In the US, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deeply rooted resistance to public health. This has important consequences for SARS-CoV-2 variant spread and for future uptake of influenza and other vaccines. We examine these phenomena in Missouri, where its low vaccination rates, high levels of uninsured residents, predominance of conservati...

Internal migration has been an institutionalized part of life for Black South Africans from the 1800s, when men left their rural homes to work in mines, through apartheid and into the present. Like other settings in the Global South, we know surprisingly little about the emotional well-being of migrants, especially in sub-Saharan Africa contexts. W...

Physicians work in complex adaptive systems. For complex medical problems, physicians are often quick to seek solutions before understanding the problems before them. This is due to engrained mental models of hierarchies of evidence that often fail to recognize the practical difficulties in translating evidence into changes in medical practice. The...

Background The severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and the diseases it causes remain a public health threat. Data describing health education campaigns for COVID-19 on university and college campuses are lacking, however. Purpose This study explored college students’ experiences of a USA campus COVID-19 campaign encouragin...

Physicians work in complex adaptive systems. For complex medical problems, physicians are often quick to seek solutions before understanding the problems before them. This is due to engrained mental models of hierarchies of evidence that often fail to recognize the practical difficulties in translating evidence into changes in medical practice. The...

Background Sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors (SGLT2i) and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1RA) have shown benefits in patients with diabetes and cardiovascular disease (CVD), heart failure (HF), and chronic kidney disease (CKD). Objective We assessed benchmark outcomes (Hemoglobin A1c, LDL-C, and blood pressure), identified...

When participants define and share their lives through photovoice, they can potentially become empowered as experts in their health needs. Images from photovoice exhibits confront gaps between what researchers and policy makers assume people need and what people show that they need. The exhibit is bridge to action across the socioecological spectru...

Objective We describe our Fall 2020 study of college students’ COVID-19 related behaviors, attitudes, and antibody test results. Participants The study included 1,446 randomly selected and self-enrolled undergraduate and graduate students from a midwestern university. Methods An online survey was distributed to a sample of students, between Septe...

High-quality data are fundamental to healthcare research, future applications of artificial intelligence and advancing healthcare delivery and outcomes through a learning health system. Although routinely collected administrative health and electronic medical record data are rich sources of information, they have significant limitations. Through fo...

Introduction Adrenal insufficiency (AI) is an uncommon, life-threatening disorder requiring lifelong treatment with steroid therapy and special attention to prevent adrenal crisis. Little is known about the prevalence of AI in Canada or healthcare utilization rates by these patients. Objective We aimed to assess the prevalence and healthcare burde...

Trans and gender non-conforming (TGNC) patients need better care; providers need TGNC focused medical trainings. TGNC health conferences can help, yet these events occur mostly in urban centers. Meanwhile, patients in non-metropolitan areas often face significant discrimination and notably poor access to TGNC care. This study explores the ongoing n...

Stigma research among people living with HIV (PLWH) has been increasingly interpreted through the framework of intersectionality, which comprehends the interwovenness of vulnerable individuals’ identities. However, community-based participatory methods have not been widely employed to better understand these forms of stigma through an intersectiona...

Background: The Edmonton Obesity Staging System (EOSS) combined with body mass index (BMI) enables improved functional and prognostic assessment for patients. To facilitate application of the EOSS in practice, we aimed to create tools for capturing comorbidity assessments in electronic medical records and for automating the calculation of a patien...

The objective of this study was to explore how PLWH use visual metaphors to describe and make sense of stigma. This study solicited PLWH’s experiences with stigma via photovoice—a participatory research method in which participants use images to identify, share, and advocate for their needs and experiences. Photographs and discussions centered on s...

Nationwide rollout of antiretroviral treatment (ART) is increasing the number of older persons living with HIV (OPLWH) in South Africa. Yet, little is known about how the sociological aspects of ageing – stigma, finances and family dynamics – impact access to ART. Qualitative interviews with 23 persons aged 50‐plus living near Cape Town highlight t...

Background: Advancing efforts to unpack the complex relationship between marital dissolutions and health outcomes increasingly requires assessing the marital histories and health of individuals who have lived long enough to experience divorce or widowhood ‒ or even multiples of each ‒ and measurable changes in health. Objective: To explore this...

Household living arrangements play a crucial role in survival efforts throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Household living arrangements foster the development of informal insurance that can mitigate economic or filial shocks, and potentially improve the overall well-being of kin. However, scholarship in sub-Saharan African settings has not been able to,...

In a rural African context, the saying, “it takes a village to raise a child,” suggests that community characteristics are substantially important in children’s lives as they transit to adulthood. Are these contextual factors also related to youth migration? Demographers are uncertain about how community characteristics improve our understanding of...

Under the Demand-Resources framework, more household dependents and higher levels of work–family conflict are demands on workers in high-income countries, yielding negative effects on worker wellbeing. The authors investigate how living in a household characterized by multiple types of dependency – where children and other adults are living with ma...

BACKGROUND Research on the relationship between shocks and migration has primarily focused on large shocks, such as natural disasters or economic crises. Far less is known about smaller shocks, despite the fact that these shocks are common and often have a large impact on individuals and households, particularly in developing settings. OBJECTIVE We...

Background: Demographers have long been interested in the relationship between living arrangements and gendered outcomes for children in sub-Saharan Africa. Most extant research conflates household structure with composition and has revealed little about the pathways that link these components to gendered outcomes. Objectives: First, we offer a...

Social science research has shown there is a nearly universal norm of seeking assistance from family members in times of need. However, when do individuals prefer to rely on friends, rather than family members, when they need support? This question has not been carefully addressed. To fill this gap in the literature we examine why rural Malawians –...

It is well-documented that established networks in a destination increase the chances of an individual moving to that destination, but rarely have migration scholars examined how these networks are linked to the duration of one’s stay. This paper examines whether the presence of kin and/or friends known at a location prior to moving is associated w...

In the classic formulations of social capital theory, families employ their social capital resources to enhance other capitals, in particular their human capital investments. Social capital would seem to be especially important in the case of India, where, in recent years, higher education has been under considerable stress with rising educational...

Objectives: Research from high-income countries has often found a negative relationship between marital dissolutions and health. This paper assesses that relationship among older sub-Saharan Africans, on a now-aging continent. Such individuals are likely to be at risk of a dissolution, or have already experienced one, due to high rates of marriage....

Social capital research rarely takes a gendered approach. This article explores how black women and men from a marginalized community in Johannesburg, South Africa, rely on family, friends, and community members to survive and strategize for the future by utilizing social capital. The results from 30 semi-structured interviews and ego network mappi...

In this paper we investigate how structural patterns of international trade give rise to emissions inequalities across countries, and how such inequality in turn impact countries' mortality rates. We employ Multi-regional Input-Output analysis to distinguish between sulfur-dioxide (SO2) emissions produced within a country's boarders (production-bas...

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Research on the relationship between social capital and individual health often suffers from important limitations. Most research relies on cross-sectional data, which precludes identifying whether participation predicts health and/or vice versa. Some important conceptualizations of social capital, like social participation, have seldom been examin...

This dissertation consists of three papers that examine topics related to the three components of demography. This research is situated in rural Malawi and I evaluate under-explored mechanisms in demographic and sociological research that aim to explain fluctuations in fertility, the duration of migration spells, and predictors of old-age health. T...

Foreign-born migrants – a group rarely compared with both internal migrants and long-term residents – are often positioned as the most disadvantaged South African urban population. We use data from a 2008 cross-sectional household survey conducted in Johannesburg to compare a contextually relevant measure of social capital and livelihood advantages...

Since the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the perspectives of secondary and tertiary school graduates in sub-Saharan Africa regarding the effectiveness of government and international HIV/AIDS policies and programmes have not been thoroughly examined. When extensive monetary aid is directed toward "development" in a country like Malawi, it is t...