Please join us for our Fall CSDE trainee lightning talks and poster presentations!
The following CSDE trainees will be presenting their research:

• Erin Carll, Sociology: Sociodemographic and Housing Market Predictors of Residential Disadvantage for Households with Children
• Youngjun Choi, Social Work: Can Internet Use Buffer Older Adults’ Cognitive Decline? Findings from the Health and Retirement Study
• Lee Fiorio, Geography: Regularities in Mobility Patterns at Different Time Scales
• Connor Gilroy, Sociology: Extending the Demography of Sexuality with Digital Trace Data
• Chris Hess, Sociology: Black Hypersegregation, Neighborhood Compositions, and Zillow Housing Value Trajectories 2000-2016
• Yuan Hsiao, Sociology: Gender Networks of Aggressive and Prosocial Behavior: The Role of Ecological Fallacy
• Yicheng Li, Statistics: Accounting for Smoking in Probabilistic Projections of Life Expectancy
• Neal Marquez, Sociology: Estimating Small Area Changes in Child Mortality Over Time in Mexico

CDSE Fellow Jessica Godwin—a graduate student in the Department of Statistics—and affiliate Adrian Raftery—Professor of Statistics and Sociology—recently published their article “Bayesian projection of life expectancy accounting for the HIV/AIDS epidemic” in Demographic Research. In the article, Godwin and Raftery expand Bayesian probabilistic projection methods previously developed by Raftery and colleagues in order to include measures of HIV prevalence and antiretroviral therapy (ART) coverage for adults in life expectancy projections for countries suffering from generalized HIV/AIDS epidemics. Their findings demonstrate that the projection method that accounts for HIV prevalence and ART coverage in these countries performs better than methods that do not. Moreover, these projections indicate that broad ART coverage in these countries would not only improve life expectancy to pre-epidemic levels, but also lead to a continued increase in life expectancy over the course of the century.

Affiliate Sarah Elwood, Professor of Geography, was quoted last week in a Yes! Magazine article on the science behind reducing inequality. In the article, Elwood discusses how big data is changing the way social scientists and activists approach poverty-related work. “We’re seeing more of these sorts of practices that sort of try to get at the behaviors of individual people and try to get them to do something different,” she said. Elwood also addresses nudge policies, which she believes are capable of influencing individual behavior to drive change, but not of fixing the structural issues that contribute to poverty. “It’s important to differentiate between questions of inequality and questions of impoverishment. You can change the degree of inequality in a society without having acted to change the big processes of impoverishment.”

Affiliate René Flores, Assistant Professor of Sociology, was quoted in a recent KMALAND article regarding his study “Do Anti-Immigrant Laws Shape Public Sentiment? A Study of Arizona’s SB 1070 Using Twitter Data,” published in the American Journal of Sociology in September. In the study, Flores finds that anti-immigrant sentiments in Arizona increased once the bill was passed, demonstrating how policies can affect public behaviors. In the article, he explains, "Some people, especially those who are more critical of immigrants, began tweeting more. They became energized, they became activated and this was what caused the change in the distribution of sentiment after (the) law was passed. So, it's really in agreement with my own prior research that showed this activation effect."