With support from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) and funding from NICHD, CSDE has launched a six month program to forge and strengthen partnerships between public-serving organizations in Washington and UW researchers.  The initiative begins with a call for applications from public-serving organizations in Washington due February 15.  Please visit our landing page to learn more.  If you are a UW researcher who has connections to public-serving organizations, please let us know by filling out this form. 

• Why Americans Are Delaying Parenthood: Four studies offer new insights on the decision to have kids in a low birth rate era.

• Childhood Adversity Casts a Long Shadow on the Health of LGBTQ+ Youth: New data on adverse experiences and gender identity reveal troubling disparities among U.S. high schoolers

• Which Investment Offers a 60-Fold Return? Food Stamps: For the youngest Americans, $1 of SNAP payments generates $62+ in economic and health benefits.

• Families With Nonstandard Work Schedules Face ‘Pattern of Disadvantage’: Mothers with less education are more likely to work jobs that fall outside the typical 9-to-5 schedule. This can have negative effects on their children’s behavior and development.

• Homelessness Is Hard on Health. Unsheltered Homelessness Is Worse—and It’s on the Rise: More Americans are sleeping in places not meant for human habitation, putting them at risk for chronic disease, mental health and substance use issues, and early death.

• For Homeless Youth, Is Poor Health Just a Matter of Time?: A new study finds that the longer young adults spend unsheltered, the more likely they are to report poor health outcomes.

• Wildfires Devastated Their Communities. Will Californians Stay Put?: Recent research about migration patterns after the most destructive wildfires may help us predict what happens next.

• In the Battle for Time, Exercise Beats Sleep for American Adults: Parents get less sleep than nonparents but still squeeze in workouts, study suggests.

• Vaccination During Pregnancy May Reduce Whooping Cough in Infants: Study finds drop in infant cases after experts promote vaccination for pregnant women.

CSDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) and co-authors recently published an article in the Journal of Adolescent Research, titled “Exploring Facilitators and Disruptors of Polarization During Adolescence Within Contested Settings: A Case Study of Catholic and Protestant Youth in Northern Ireland.” Xu and her collaborators draw on interview data to identify key socializing actors and settings within established theoretical frameworks: Ecological Systems Theory, Social Identity, and Intergroup Contact. Findings reveal the importance of family, friends, school, and media as intersecting socializing actors for adolescents. Intergroup contact among peers from different ethno-religious backgrounds disrupted adolescents’ engagement in polarizing and divisive rhetoric. Lastly, adolescents perceived educational actors and settings as less influential than their personal connections to peers and family.

The University of Washington Department of Sociology is pleased to host Jack Goldstone, the Virginia E and John T. Hazel Jr. Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University and a Senior Fellow of the Mercatus Center, to join us for a SocSEM event on Thursday, February 12, 2026 at 12:30 pm, in Savery Hall room 409.

Goldstone will focus on the seriousness of an aging population. Europe, the Americas and Asia will soon have the oldest populations known to humanity. Can we cope? He will lead a discussion on the changes that will be needed in the future to avoid disaster, including ways we thing about youth, women, immigration, and globalization.

He will also discuss his new book 10 Billion: How Aging, Immigration, Women and Youth will Change the World in the 21st Century which will be published by Oxford University Press.

Jack A. Goldstone (PhD Harvard) has received the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association, the Arnoldo Momigliano Prize, the Barrington Moore Jr. Award, the Myron Weiner Award, the Ibn Khaldun Award, and fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation, the JS Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the Mellow Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace.

SocSEM events are sponsored by the Earl & Edna Stice Memorial Lecture and Book Series in Social Science.

Join the Ohio Population Consortium on February 12 at 12 pm EST for the second of three webinars in a series on “Fertility Goals: Conceptualization, Measurement, and Implications for Science and Policy“. CSDE External Affiliate Jamaica Corker (BMGF) is one of four panelist speaking on new indicators of sexual and reproductive health. Register for Zoom link.

There has been a recent surge of efforts to develop new indicators of sexual and reproductive health, indicators intended to supplant the constructs “unmet need for contraception” and “demand satisfied” that have served as featured indicators during the past two decades. The proposed indicators reflect an effort to achieve a more woman-centered approach to both SRH science and policy. Fertility goals were essential ingredients of the past indicators. Where do they fit in now? Have they been sidelined (deliberately or unintentionally)? If so, is this defensible and desirable, from both a scientific and policy perspective? The aim of this webinar is to have an energetic exchange about these (and related) questions.

Presenters

• John Casterline, Institute for Population Research, The Ohio State University
• Nurudeen Alhassan, AFIDEP, Lilongwe, Malawi
• Jamaica Corker, External Research Affiliate, Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology, University of Washington
• Leigh Senderowicz, Department of Gender & Women’s Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison