Jennifer Karas Montez, Professor of Sociology at the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University, will discuss the importance of macro-level explanations, particularly U.S. state policies, to understand how life expectancy in the United States is increasingly being shaped by where we live and how much schooling we have completed. Most speculation has focused on “micro-level” explanations, such as individuals’ personal choices and lifestyle behaviors.

This Seminar is co-sponsored with the West Coast Poverty Center. Please visit the seminar page to reserve time to meet with Professor Karas Montez.

News website Vox has created an interactive map of the racial makeup of U.S. neighborhoods during the workday and at night using data from a recent article by Matt Hall, CSDE’s Science Core Director, and co-authors John Iceland and Youngmin Yi. The article titled “Racial Separation at Home and Work: Segregation in Residential and Workplace Settings” was published this January in the Population Research and Policy Review. 

Hall found that when white people go to work, they are around only slightly more people of color than when they’re in their home neighborhoods. Yet, for everyone else, going to work means being exposed to more white people and fewer people of their own race.

CSDE Affiliate James Young, Director of the Washington Center for Real Estate Research, was recently quoted in two different news stories. With Oregon set to pass rent control legislation, Q13 FOX News featured Young's response to hopes that a similar measure comes to Washington. According to him, rent control is not the answer since it creates more issues than it fixes, including fewer housing options and poor renter-landlord relationships.

Young was also interview by KUOW in response to real estate firm Redfin’s assessment that the recent cooldown of Seattle’s real estate market may already be over.

Our final Computational Demography meeting of the quarter is this week! Ian Kennedy, Sociology graduate student, will draw on a few of his research projects to demo and discuss the relationship between text data and demography. The CDWG will meet 12:00-1:30 PM on Thursday, 3/7/2019, in Raitt 114. Food will be provided, and all are welcome! The CDWG is co-sponsored by CSDE and the eScience Institute. For more information about the working group, check out our spiffy new website.

The next CSDE Biomarker Working Group meeting will be on Wednesday, 3/6/2019, 2:30-3:30 PM, in 114 Raitt Hall. We’ll discuss a recent review article relevant to recurring topics of discussion for our group: stress and allostatic load. This discussion was originally scheduled for 2/13/2019, but was postponed due to snow.

The purpose of the CSDE Biomarker Working Group is to provide a forum for discussions of practical and theoretical issues associated with collecting and using biomarker data in social and behavioral science research.