This week, Drs. Marissa Baker (UW Dept of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences), Rachel Fyall (UW Evans School of Public Policy and Governance, CSDE Affiliate), and Chelsea Rose (UW Department of Nutritional Sciences) will present their research on the far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington state. Dr. Baker will present her research on the experiences of and impacts on app-based drivers in Seattle during the pandemic, Dr. Fyall will share her research on housing security in Washington amongst low-income tenants, and Dr. Rose will present her research on food security in the state.

You can register for the seminar HERE, and check out all the upcoming topics and register for future seminars on our website.

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CSDE Affiliate Scott Allard's and CSDE Trainee Lizzy Pelletier's co-authored paper “Spatial Patterns of Poverty, Hardship & Nonprofit Safety Net Provision in the U.S.” appeared in the Journal of Social Security Research this week. Their analyses describe the geography of poverty across urban, suburban, and rural areas. The authors draw connections between the presence of community-based non-profits and their uneven presence across the urban-rural divide, finding that these social-supportive institutions are more commonly present in urban areas.

In early August, CSDE Affiliate Mark Long published, “Altruism and the Statistical Value of Human Life for Policy and Regulation,” in Social Indicators Research. The paper interrogates the current measurement of the 'Value of Statistical Life' used to evaluate the relative costs and benefits of policies in the US and how they affect mortality.  Long proposes an alternative metric that is adjusted for altruistic sentiment.  Long’s analyses reveals that by not accounting for health altruistic sentiments current VSL’s are underestimates of the valuing of life in policy and program regulatory review.  These underestimates are particularly dramatic for child health altruistic sentiment, yielding altruistic adjustments by a factor of three. 

CSDE Trainee Neal Marquez and co-authors published "COVID-19 Incidence and Mortality in Federal and State Prisons Compared with the US Population, April 5,2020, to April 3, 2021," in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) this week. The authors observe differences in COVID-19 incidence and deaths in US prisons, relative to those same statistics for the non-incarcerated US population. They find that the consistently higher prevalence in the prison population led to a much greater cumulative toll, despite efforts by prison systems to adopt policies to prevent contagion.

In late July, CSDE Trainee Connor Gilroy and co-author Ridhi Kashyap (University of Oxford) published the article, "Digital Traces of Sexualities: Understanding the Salience of Sexual Identity through Disclosure on Social Media," in Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World. Using a dataset from the Facebook advertising platform of 200 million users, the authors explore the likelihood of users disclosing sexual identity on their profile across age, gender, and relationship status. The authors find differences across generations in the likelihood of expressing sexual identity on their profile, with younger users more likely than older users to disclose their sexuality, and older users substitute this disclosure by including marital status on their profile. For further details about the intersectionality of disclosing sexuality on Facebook, check out the full article HERE.

CSDE welcomes and encourages graduate students to submit abstracts for the CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session! This is a wonderful, low-stakes opportunity to present your research, receive feedback, and practice your presentation skills.

Submit a brief abstract and information about yourself and your collaborators here by October 22nd.

The session will take place on Friday, December 10th on Zoom.