By Jade Pearce

In this Q&A, Jeanie Santaularia, assistant professor of epidemiology discusses her recently awarded R01 grant (Structural Factors Impacting Community Violence (STRIVE): The Role of Minimum Wage, COVID-19, and Discrimination) through the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. Santaularia will collaborate with a team of researchers and her colleague Shabbar Ranapurwala from the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill who is the Co-PI on this grant.  Read more about Santaularia in this article.

Can you describe the purpose and goals of the grant?

Our team will employ rigorous quasi-experimental designs (synthetic controls and controlled interrupted time series) with quantitative bias analyses, on six national datasets from 2000-2021 to capture community violence victimizations, assault injuries, and homicide deaths in all 50 states. We will then examine the interaction of minimum wage with income inequality measured using living wage. We will estimate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the impact of state level increases in minimum wage during the pandemic on community violence outcomes. Through all these analyses we will examine disparities by race, sex, age and rurality.

Our goals are to understand whether SMW inversely impacts violent victimizations (including robberies, sexual assaults, and intimate partner violence, assault-related injuries, and homicides, including mass shootings, in the U.S. Additionally, a few of our hypotheses are to determine whether minimum wage increases and COVID-19 impacted women, especially minority women, more than other demographics.

Can you describe any unique aspects or nuances of this grant?

This study will be the first to comprehensively assess the impact of minimum wage increases on violent victimizations, injuries and homicide deaths, and the racial, sex- and age-based, and geographical disparities therein. Further, this study will also be the first to examine how state minimum wage (SMW) increases and economic impact payments may have moderated the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on community violence in the U.S.

You have had to be intentional and organized with applying to this grant. Now that you have received it, what does that scope of intentionality look like?

I think about the team I am working with (the community, the Co-PI, the Co-Is, etc.) and our shared goals. Ultimately, I want to work with good people who are passionate about their work and prioritize equity and justice.

What are some of the gaps that this grant wishes to address?

Overall, this grant addresses missing information. We want to ask some important questions that remain unanswered, namely:

1. What role does minimum wage increases play in violence prevention?
2. Does minimum wage increase or lack thereof differentially affect violence among different demographic groups (race/ethnicity, sex, age and rurality)?
3. How has the COVID-19 pandemic impacted community violence and whether SMW increases played a role in mitigating pandemic effects?

By providing the data we generate from this project, we will be helping researchers that study violence prevention.

You have previously worked in the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and as a postdoctoral scholar at UNC Chapel Hill. How will these experiences help shape your research?

My public health practice experience and my own lived experiences are fundamental to my day-to-day life as a researcher. These experiences have given me a more holistic view of the public health system. They have also taught me that: translational research is fundamental for creating tangible change; working with/for communities is critical and necessary for amplifying voices and understanding their needs; and interdisciplinary research is required for identifying solutions.

In a previous article, you mentioned that you view your work in public health as a form of activism. How will this grant extend your mission and philosophy?

We hope the results from this grant will lead to significant policy changes regarding SMW. The results from this work can provide clear evidence to support the necessary increase in SMW by demonstrating social consequences of a lower SMW. Additionally, it’s important for me to define how I view my work as activism, and one component of that is I am constantly trying to challenge systems of oppression that exist in the work that I do. This grant is directly doing that by looking at how we choose to pay people and the policies that surround it.

What are you most excited to explore/share about this grant?

This grant is also in partnership with UNC, and I will be closely work with my colleague and Co-PI, Dr. Shabbar Ranapurwala. His insight and background in advanced analytics and quasi-experimental methods with big data is valuable to this work. I am also excited about working with our research team on this grant. The team is comprised of individuals from different disciplines. It’s exciting that we will each have the chance to add our own expertise to this topic in order to reach our study goals. 
We hope to understand the impact of SMW increases, which greatly affects racialized minorities and women, which will in turn provide guidance for reducing systemic inequities.