Ellen L. Idler
Full Professor
Department of Sociology
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322
Telephone: 404-727-9148
FAX: 404-727-7532
E-MAIL: eidler@emory.edu
OFFICE: 209 Tarbutton Hall
Curriculum Vitae (PDF format)
Degree: Ph.D., Yale University, 1985
General Research Area: social epidemiology, sociology of religion, individual and population aging and the life course, medicine and health care, social science writing.
Current Research: religion and public health; cohort and age patterns in suicide rates; end of life decision-making; marital status and survival following heart surgery; religion and the quality of the last year of life; religious practice, ritual, and health.
Selected Publications:
“Religion and Adult Mortality.” In International Handbook of Adult Mortality, Eileen Crimmins and Richard Rogers, Editors. MS 55 pp.
Idler, Ellen, Julie McLaughlin, and Stanislav Kasl. 2009. “Religion and the Quality of Life in the Last Year of Life”. Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences 64B(4): 528-537.
Idler, Ellen. In press. “Health and Religion.” In Blackwell Companion Series on Medical Sociology. William Cockerham, Editor. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. MS 44 pp.
Idler, Ellen, Richard J. Contrada, David A. Boulifard, Erich W. Labouvie, Yung Chen, Tyrone J. Krause. 2009. “Looking in the Black Box of ‘Attendance at Services’: Exploring an Old Dimension for Religion and Health Research.” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 19:1-20.
Contrada, Richard J., David A. Boulifard, Eric B. Hekler, Ellen L. Idler, Tanya M. Goyal, Erich W. Labouvie, and Tyrone J. Krause. 2008. “Psychosocial Factors in Heart Surgery: Presurgical Vulnerability and Postsurgical Recovery.” Health Psychology 27:309-19.
Groenvold, Mogens, Morten Aagaard Petersen, Ellen Idler, Jakob Bjorner, Peter Fayers, Henning Mouridsen. 2007. “Psychological Distress and Fatigue Predicted Recurrence and Survival in Primary Breast Cancer Patients.” Breast Cancer Research and Treatment 105:209-219.
Idler, Ellen. 2006. “Religion and Aging.” In Handbook of Aging and the Social Sciences 6th Edition. Robert H. Binstock and Linda K. George, (Editors), pp.277-300. San Diego: Elsevier.
Selected Courses
Additional Info:
ELLEN L. IDLER, Director, Religion and Public Health Collaborative, and Professor, Departments of Sociology and Epidemiology. Dr. Idler received her Ph.D. and M.Phil. from Yale University (1985), her B.A. from the College of Wooster (1974, Phi Beta Kappa) and she attended Union Theological Seminary on a Rockefeller Brothers Fellowship. She taught at Rutgers University from 1985 to 2009, in the Department of Sociology and the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. Dr. Idler is a Fellow and the current past chair of the Behavioral and Social Sciences Section of the Gerontological Society of America. She studies the influence of attitudes, beliefs, and social connections on health, including the effect of self-ratings of health on mortality and disability, and the impact of religious participation on health and the timing of death among the elderly, research supported by National Institute on Aging funding, including a FIRST Award. She has served on the editorial boards of the American Journal of Sociology, the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Sociological Forum, the Slovenian Journal of Aging, and Rutgers University Press.