This week, CSDE Fellow and UW Sociology Ph.D. Candidate Ian Kennedy will present their research on the relationship between race representation and perceived neighborhood quality as described in online housing ads. Kennedy's research uses computational text analysis on Craigslist housing advertisements to identify differences in neighborhood descriptions within 16 different metro areas. They find that present perceptions of neighborhood quality are representative of historical racialization of neighborhoods.

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

This seminar is co-sponsored with the Population Health Initiative.

In July, CSDE sent out a call to affiliates encouraging submissions to the NICHD Decoding Maternal Morbidity Data Challenge.  CSDE offered to all teams scientific and technical support, as well as the chance to earn $5,000 in research support from CSDE. On October 15, 2021, CSDE Affiliate and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Melanie Martin and postdoctoral scholar Monica Keith submitted their entry to NICHD. CSDE Affiliates Steven Goodreau, Jerry Herting, and Tyler McCormick provided feedback to Melanie and Monica and we are happy to announce that Melanie and Monica will receive the $5,000 CSDE award! Congratulations to the team and we wish them the best as their entry goes in for review for one of NICHD’s seven $50,000 prizes!

In early October, CSDE Affiliate Carey Farquhar and colleagues published a study Medicine on the relationship between obesity and the risk of chronic disease using a population-based, national survey conducted in Kenya. The paper, available in full HERE, finds high levels of obesity prevalence, which is associated with hypertension and dyslipidemia, but not associated with diabetes.  Consequently, they argue for urgent public health measures to address obesity and its co-morbidities.

Two companion articles by CSDE Affiliate Mark Ellis and colleagues have recently become publicly available. The first, published in Sociology of Race and Ethnicity (available in full HERE), explores the stability of neighborhood composition in highly diverse US census tracks from 1990 to 2010. In this context, tracts transitioning to higher diversity had previously been predominantly white, while tracts transitioning from high to low diversity were most commonly majority Latino. The second article, published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (available in full HERE) finds that multi-ethnic UK neighbhorhoods show evolving stability. These findings stand in stark contrast with the US companion study. In the English context, using Census data from 1991 to 2011, the authors find that 88% of neighborhoods which were highly diverse in 1991 remained highly diverse in 2001, and 95% of diverse neighborhoods in 2001 remained so in 2011.

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson offered an opinion in Northwest Citizen that observes a populations undercount on a population undercount on the Lummi and Hopi reservations and how the geographic isolation and lack of broadband might have exacerbated this result. In his presentation, Swanson investigates whether differences in access to broadband across the Hopi and Lummi Reservations might explain differences in population count relative to the 2015-19 ACS population estimates. The Census relied extensively on the web-based platforms for gathering census data and the COVID-19 pandemic limited census takers in-person accessibility. Census response rates were notably higher in the Lummi Reservation relative to the more-isolated Hopi Reservation. Read the full piece HERE.

The National Science Foundation has issued an updated Proposal and Award Policies and Procedures Guide (PAPPG), effective October 4th, which includes changes to the NSF biosketch and current & pending support documents. Both can be prepared using SciENcv, or by completing an NSF-fillable PDF form.

Tip: If you prefer the PDF forms, download the documents to your computer and complete them in Adobe. If you populate the form directly in a web browser (e.g., Chrome, Firefox) and select the "Save to PDF" or "Print to PDF" function, this can corrupt the data, resulting in validation errors when uploading the PDF document to NSF systems.

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• What: This is a wonderful, low-stakes opportunity for anyone who has incorporated demographic themes into their research to practice presentation skills and grow their network.
• How: Submit a brief abstract and information about yourself and your collaborators on the project. Submit your application HERE. We will select up to 7 participants.
• Where: the lightning talks will take place via Zoom!
• When...Dates and deadlines:
  • COB Friday, October 22: deadline to submit an abstract
  • COB Friday, October 29: you will be notified if you have been selected
  • COB Friday, November 19: deadline to email presentation slides to Courtney Allen (ckallen@uw.edu)
  • Friday, December 10: CSDE Lightning Talks and Poster Session from 12:30-1:30pm. Zoom link TBA.

Please email ckallen@uw.edu if you have any questions. We look forward to seeing your submissions.