Education
PhD, Demography and Rural Sociology, Pennsylvania State University, 2008
MA, Social Development and Policy, National Taiwan University, 2003
BS, Rural Sociology, National Taiwan University, Taiwan, 2001
About
Expertise:
Demography
Recent Research Projects
- Professor Yang’s substantive research interests are spatial demography, mortality, and health disparities. Specifically, he investigates whether, and if so, how social and built neighborhood environment factors explain the gaps in a range of health outcomes across racial/ethnic, geographic, and socioeconomic dimensions.
- His methodological interests focus on developing geographic information systems and spatial statistical methods. His current projects explore the determinants of breast and colorectal cancer patients’ care in Appalachia and investigate how an individual’s distrust of health care system and perceived discrimination contribute to health inequalities.
- Echoing his methodological interests, he is developing a probability-based randomization method to address the data sharing/confidentiality issue in social sciences and a spatial quantile regression method that simultaneously explores both statistical and spatial heterogeneity.
Research Interests
- Demography of health and mortality
- Health disparities and medical sociology
- Research methods
- Spatial analysis and geographic information systems (GIS)