Join us for CSDE’s annual closing reception on Friday May 31st at 12:30PM! We’ll present Demographic Methods Certificates and celebrate the end of a successful academic year. Please join us in recognizing all of these accomplishments! Every member of the CSDE community plays an important role in our broader research network and training program.

We will also select winners of the punch-card raffle!

CSDE Trainee Zeruiah Buchanan (Epidemiology) and CSDE Affiliate Alison Fohner (Epidemiology) released an article with colleagues in Public Health, titled “Electronic health record reveals community-level cardiometabolic health benefits associated with 10 years of community-based participatory research“. While a major goal of community-based participatory research (CBPR) is to improve community health, it is unclear how to measure longstanding success of CBPR. Authors sought to determine the impact of ongoing CBPR on cardiometabolic health in participating communities, including in people not directly participating in research. They used linear mixed-effects modelling with electronic medical records from 2002 to 2012 from the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, which provides health care to all Alaska Native people in southwestern Alaska, to compare rates of change in cardiometabolic risk factors between communities that did and did not participate in ongoing CBPR beginning in 2003.

CSDE Affiliate Emily Godfrey (Family Medicine) and colleagues released an article in JAMA Internal Medicine, titled “Primary Care’s Role in Prescribing Mail-Order Mifepristone“. This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide on the case, Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v US Food and Drug Administration, determining whether to limit the FDA’s approval to allow mifepristone to be delivered by mail-order pharmacies. Godfrey and colleagues summarize research which demonstrates that mifepristone is safe and effective to prescribe directly to mail-order pharmacies in the primary care setting. They discuss current policy around mifepristone and highlight the potential significance of telehealth and primary care for expanding access to reproductive care.

CSDE Affiliate Kristian Jones (Social Work) published an article in Cureus with colleagues, titled “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Time to Completion of Academic Enrichment Program Applications“. Diversity in healthcare and research is integral to serving our increasingly diverse population. Access to academic enrichment programs, an important pathway to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers promotes educational attainment through academic preparation and increased interest, useful strategies for improving diverse representation in higher learning. Given this important pathway to STEM fields, attention to equity in enrichment programs admissions is as important as the increasing focus on mitigating racial/ethnic disparities in undergraduate and graduate admissions. In a retrospective cohort study at the University of Washington, authors compare a hybrid competitive summer application program with stipend with an asynchronous first-come, first-served enrollment program in injury and violence prevention research. The main findings illustrate that academic programs with stipend programs result in more Black applicants. And free enrollment programs did not result in any Native American participants. This project was funded NICHD and also included UW Medicine's Dr. Marie Angele Theard as the senior author.

CSDE Affiliate Claire Rothschild (Population Services International) released an article with co-authors in BMJ Global Health, titled “Preference-aligned fertility management among married adolescent girls in Northern Nigeria: assessing a new measure of contraceptive autonomy“. Universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare—including family planning (FP)—is a global priority, yet there is no standard outcome measure to evaluate rights-based FP program performance at the regional, national or global levels. Authors collected a modified version of preference-aligned fertility management (PFM), a newly proposed rights-based FP outcome measure which they operationalized as concordance between an individual’s desired and actual current contraceptive use, within a cohort of married adolescent girls in Northern Nigeria. The study found that PFM captured meaningful discordance between contraceptive use desires and behaviours in this cohort. Observed discordance provides actionable insights for program intervention to better support people to achieve their self-identified contraceptive preferences.

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (Sociology, UC Riverside) co-authored new research in Papers in Applied Geography, titled “Using cluster analysis to identify communities of interest for purposes of legislative redistricting: A case study of parishes in Louisiana“. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology has been found to limit the kinds of communities that can in principle achieve political representation through redistricting because the process excludes “communities of interest” (COIs) that cannot be mapped. Authors argue that these limits can be overcome using empirically based variables to define a COI in conjunction with an empirically based classification system, cluster analysis.

CSDE Affiliate Rachel Heath (Economics) co-authored a policy research working paper with the World Bank, titled “Gender, Social Support, and Political Speech: Evidence from Twitter“. Despite evidence that women’s political preferences differ from those of men, women are less likely to participate in political and social discussions on Twitter and other social media. Following recent evidence that in-person social support matters for women’s political participation, women are hypothesized to form similarly supportive communities online. This paper tests this hypothesis using data from Twitter. The collected data comprises 451 hashtags on a broad range of (non-mutually exclusive) topics: social, gender, racial, LGBTQ, religion, youth, education, economic, health, COVID, climate, political, security, entertainment and lifestyle, and the Middle East and Northern Africa. The empirical results indicate that women are more likely to participate when the debate(s) feature female influential voices. This finding supports the potential role of mutual support in bolstering women’s participation in important debates.

In spring quarter, CSDE will be hosting a workshop series and several working groups. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington for our remote workshops as well.

Please reach out to CSDE’s Training Director, Jessica Godwin (jlg0003@uw.edu), if you have additional workshops you would like to see offered in the future and we will do our best to accommodate those requests. View the schedule as a pdf here.

CSDE Workshops

No remaining workshops this quarter.

CSDE Working Groups

• Computational Demography Working Group
  • Date: Wednesdays @ 9AM-10AM
  • Location: Raitt 223/Zoom
  • Contact: June Yang (jyang32@uw.edu) and Ihsan Kahveci (ikahveci@uw.edu)
• Biomarker Working Group
  • Date: 1st Thursdaysof each month (4/4, 5/2, 6/6) @ 12:30PM-1:30PM
  • Location: Raitt 223
  • Contact: Tiffany Pan (tpan@uw.edu)
• Migration & Settlements Working Group
  • Date: Every other Friday @ 9:00AM starting March 29th
  • Location: Raitt 114/Zoom (meeting link)
  • Contact: Aryaa Rajouria (rajouria@uw.edu)

CSDE is happy to welcome Amy Bailey who will be at CSDE for the 2024-2025 academic year! Amy has also been a CSDE external affiliate since 2008 when she received her PhD in Sociology at UW. Dr. Bailey’s research focuses on racial inequality – specifically, the contemporary consequences of historical racial violence, the contextual factors associated with increased risk of lethal mob violence, and the characteristics of people who were targeted and killed by lynch mobs. Bailey’s earlier scholarship finds links between the local religious marketplace and the incidence of lynching, and that a higher percentage of potential lynchings were prevented in Southern counties with greater reliance on “New South” economic structures. Her work also demonstrates that Black and multiracial men who were killed by lynch mobs differed in important, status-linked, ways from other Black and multiracial men living in their counties. An additional line of scholarship examines the links between the US military and multiple forms of inequality, including incarceration, the community features associated with high levels of enlistment, and elevated rates of migration among veterans. Dr. Bailey will be sitting in CSDE, participating in CSDE events, and is happy to meet with any member of the CSDE community who also shares her research interests!

On May 29th from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, Dr. Risto Conte Keivabu will join CDWG to present his research. Dr. Risto Conte Keivabu is a postdoc in the Laboratory of Digital and Computational Demography of Emilio Zagheni at the Max Planck Institute of Demographic Research in Rostock (Germany). His research interests are in climate change, socio-demographic inequalities and demography. More precisely, in his work he tries to understand the population consequences of climate change and environmental exposures. The event will take place in 223 Raitt (the Demography Lab) and on Zoom (register here). Learn more in the full story!

The Census Bureau’s Economic Measurement and Research Internship (EMRI) program seeks to hire interns in economics, sociology, statistics, and other social sciences. The Center for Economic Studies (CES) is recruiting for multiple positions and seeks interns who have successfully completed a full 4-year course of study in an accredited college or university leading to a bachelor's or higher degree to provide research assistance to Ph.D. social scientists with research projects using confidential microdata. The internship is an excellent opportunity, especially for social science graduate students or those who might be interested in returning to school to earn their Ph.D., to gain experience in conducting original social science research and in developing advanced programming and data analysis skills. The EMRI Program Coordinator will accept applications from Monday, May 20, 2024, until Monday, June 3, 2024 at 11:59p.m. EST. See a pdf version of the announcement here.

Registration is now open for the Behavior Maintenance Approaches in Clinical and Community Settings Workshop! The event will occur on Tuesday, June 4th from 8:00am to 12:30 (PST). See the workshop agenda here. This is the fourth workshop in the series, “An Action Agenda: Promoting the Science and Practice of Health Behavior Maintenance,” hosted by the Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (OBSSR) and the Adherence Research Network at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). After this workshop, high-level summaries and contact information for speakers will be available for workshops 1-4 on the OBSSR website. Registration closes on Monday, June 3.

The NIH issued a Request for Information (RFI) on identifying and addressing gaps in (1) the impact of structural racism on brain, cognitive (such as learning, memory, attention, decision-making), and behavioral function across the lifespan and (2) the role of structural and systemic racism on the conduct of brain and behavioral health research. This RFI seeks input from healthcare providers, scientific research communities, patient advocacy groups, people with lived experience of brain or behavioral health disorders (such as substance use and mental health disorders), educators, and other interested parties. All responses must be submitted electronically on the RFI submission website by June 14th.

Katharina Natter and Lieneke Slingenberg are pleased to invite paper proposals for the 1.5-day interdisciplinary workshop: “Who rules over migrants? Autocratic elements in migration policies”, that will take place at the University of Leiden on 14 and 15 November 2024. They aim to bring together political scientists and legal scholars to examine the variegated uses of autocratic policy tools in migration policy across the Global North and South, with a particular attention to how these uses relate to political regime contexts and to policy outcomes. See a pdf version of the call here.

At a recent meeting, Rebecca Clark, chief of the Population Dynamics Bureau (PDB) at NICHD, provided useful insights on how researchers developing new proposals should contact officials at NIH. Her remarks were focused on PDB at NICHD, but the advice seems broadly generalizable to other institutes as well. She states: If you have specific aims, please send them to just one PDB Program Officers in one email. (NB: Do not send separate emails to each program officer within a branch, since they all confer and collaborate on any incoming inquiries.)

All potential applicants, including those who have prepared specific aims, should send responses to the following items and attach to the email inquiry:

The NICHD has listed many grant opportunities that should be of interest to CSDE affiliates. Check out the list here. If you are interested, CSDE can help you with providing ‘eyes’ for feedback on the narrative, contacting a program officer, more formalized mock review panel of experts to provide feedback on a penultimate draft, a summer grant writing program, or scientific methods consultations. We’re happy to support your science! Just ask!

Population Research Planning Grants (PRPGs) are designed to provide in-kind support and/or funds of up to $25k* to support a wide array of activity types throughout the development of a research project. As part of our mission to complement rather than duplicate other campus opportunities such as the Population Health Initiative seed grants, we will consider funding a variety of activities. See a list of example activities in the full story!

CSDE Matching Support includes in-kind or monetary support to accompany a submission to other on-campus funding mechanism, such as PHI, EarthLab, or Urban@UW. All projects must have a CSDE affiliate who is UW faculty and is listed as a PI or co-PI, with any number of other collaborators. Note that we require (PRPGs) or strongly suggest (matching funds) contacting either Development Core Director (Steven Goodreau) or CSDE Director (Sara Curran) to discuss possibilities for your specific proposal before submission.