Spencer Allen

Spencer Allen (he/him) is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology at the University of Michigan. A predoctoral trainee in the Population Studies Center, Spencer's research interests are in social demography and population health inequity. In his dissertation research, Spencer looks beyond traditional social determinants of health to investigate the role of political polarization on mortality and longevity. He uses quantitative data from administrative and survey resources to understand how shifts in individual- and community-level partisanship affect one's health across the life course. In past work, Spencer sought to understand the health consequences of disparities in internet access in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. He has also compared prospectively-collected survey responses from the American's Changing Lives Study across over three decades with retrospectively-collected responses to evaluate trends in recall error and recall bias.

Spencer's work has been published in Social Science & Medicine - Population Health and Socius. Spencer earned an M.A. in Sociology from the University of Michigan and A.B. in Sociology from Dartmouth College. In his free time, Spencer enjoys ceramics, reading, and long walks around Ann Arbor.