Archives: Affiliates

Melissa Martinson’s research interests are broadly focused on inequities in health and wellbeing throughout the life span in the United States and internationally. Much of her work examines health disparities by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, with a particular focus on children. Her current research also looks at the health and wellbeing of immigrants and their children and how factors such as acculturation and socioeconomic status influence health after arrival.

Mark Long is the Dean of the School of Public Policy at the University of California, Riverside.  Dr. Long’s research over the past decade has mostly been devoted to understanding the process by which student’s transition between high school and college, how public policies affect educational attainment, and the effects of education on adult outcomes. In the last decade he has published on these topics in the following journals: Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Econometrics, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Public Administration Review, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, Economics of Education Review, Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Social Science Research, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and The B.E. Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy. Recently, with funding provided by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences (IES), Long has been working with colleagues Dylan Conger (George Washington University) and Patrice Iatarola to explain what motivates high schools to offer rigorous courses, what explains racial, poverty, and gender gaps in coursetaking, and what gaps in coursetaking mean for future educational attainment. Additionally, with funding from the Smith Richardson foundation, Long has been working on understanding why boys are less likely to attend college and less likely to graduate if they do attend.

Taryn Lindhorst’s research over the past decade has focused on policy implementation processes and health, particularly the effects of victimization for vulnerable women and sexual minorities. She has authored publications that have appeared in American Journal of Public Health, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Violence against Women, Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Journal of Orthopsychiatry. She has co-authored a book with CSDE affiliate Gunnar Almgren entitled The Safety Net Health Care System: Practice at the Margins which will be published in Fall 2011. This book is designed to assist doctors, nurses, social workers and others who work in hospitals and health clinics with a high proportion of impoverished patients to understand the special history and needs of clients in these institutions. In 2010 and 2011, she and Jeffrey Edleson (Co-PI, NIJ) were invited to present their research on policy issues related to international child custody and domestic violence at the U.S. Department of Justice and to the Hague Bureau on Private International Law at The Hague, The Netherlands. Current Projects: Dr. Lindhorst is completing a manuscript on policy issues related to international child abduction with her co-PI; this book is under contract with Northeastern Press. Currently, Lindhorst is involved in two data collection processes – through an NINR grant, she is collecting ethnographic data as part of an intervention team at a local Children’s Hospital to understand how clinicians implement policies and practices related to palliative and end-of-life care in an intensive care setting. Her second project consists of interviews with key Washington state stakeholders involved in the implementation of research-based findings related to Adverse Childhood Experiences (funded by William T. Grant Foundation, David Takeuchi and Jerry Hertling, CSDE affiliates, Co-PI’s).

William Lavely’s research interests include fertility, Chinese society, marriage and the family, household structure, and family change in context. He has written on Chinese historical demography, rising sex ratios, and Chinese censuses. His historical work, which concerns the proximate determinants of China prior to demographic transition, highlights the role of breastfeeding duration and coital frequency in explaining low levels of marital fertility in late imperial China as compared to early modern Europe, and argues, against the conventional wisdom, that China’s historical fertility regime was fairly typical of pre-transition agrarian societies. With Cai Yong, a former CSDE Fellow now at University of North Carolina Population Center, Lavely described and analyzed spatial variation in child sex ratios using 2000 Chinese census data at the county level and GIS techniques. Lavely recently completed a chapter on social values and lifestyles in East Asia for a collection entitled Public Health in East Asia (forthcoming, UC Press).

Melissa Knox’s research focuses on the economic and health impacts of increased access to health care services and health-promoting technologies, including pharmaceuticals. She is also interested in the role that health and health care access play in the structure and function of the family, especially with regards to fertility and childhood investment decisions. Recently, she has investigated the impacts of Mexico’s universal health insurance program, Seguro Popular, on health, education, and labor market participation. She is also currently working on a model of the impact of sex ratio imbalances on the marriage market in China.

Danuta Kasprzyk is a Research Professor at the Department of Child, Family, and Population Health Nursing. She spent the first six years of her career on the faculty at the University of Washington, in the Department of Community Health Care Systems, in the School of Nursing. She then moved to Battelle and was a research scientist for over 20 years in the Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation. Her research interests include psychology, public health, preventive and behavioral medicine, health psychology, evaluation of health education, and prevention programs. The primary driver in her research has been to determine what motivates behavior, so programs can be built to encourage healthy behaviors, whether via primary or secondary prevention. She co-developed the Integrated Behavioral Model and has used it extensively to predict and change behavior. Kasprzyk has had research experience in many communities in the US as well as in Africa. She has also been Principal Investigator on two community-based intervention trials (one focused on HIV prevention, and one on building resilience among families living with HIV) and a co-investigator on two male circumcision studies in Zimbabwe, one determining the factors affecting uptake, and one (currently being conducted) determining whether risk compensation occurs among men who get circumcised.

Donna Johnson’s research at the UW has been devoted to bringing the rigors of academic thinking to the practice of public health nutrition. Her research interests include pediatric nutrition, efficacy of public health nutrition interventions, and public health approaches to obesity, and she seeks to advance understandings about the process of public health practice in the core functions of assessment, assurance, and policy development. In the past decade she has published results of studies on the impact of nutrition and physical activity policies in school and child care settings, collaborative and community-based processes to assure access to healthy foods, and interventions to assure that families can provide health enhancing environments for their children. Publications have appeared in Public Health Nutrition, Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Preventing Chronic Disease, and the American Journal of Health Promotion. She has several projects underway at the moment that build on methods and understandings that she and her team have developed about the process of nutrition policy development and community-based research. These include studies of the population health impacts of nutrition labeling, rural food access, access to drinking water in schools, and adoption of nutritional quality guidelines in governmental purchasing.

Darryl Holman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology (Biocultural program), and an affiliate of CSDE and the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences. His research lies at the intersection of biological anthropology and population studies, integrating traditional microdemographic methods with biomarker and statistical models of biocultural processes (Holman 2000b). His research on age-specific total fecundability and total fetal loss in Bangladeshi women (Holman et al. 1998, 2000; Holman and Wood in press) establish that total fecundability is constant across most of the reproductive lifespan, and that the observed age-related decline in apparent fecundability results from an increase in early pregnancy loss. Holman developed a biostatistical model of follicular depletion, which has been used for understanding female reproductive senescence (O’Connor et al. 1998; Holman et al. in press a), the biology of the menopause, the perimenopausal transition (O’Connor et al. 2001a), and the evolution of reproductive senescence (Wood et al. in press b). Holman has been studying aspects of child health in non-industrial settings, including determinants of the timing to breastfeeding (Holman and Grimes 2001) and the growth and development of children (Holman and Jones 1998; Konigsberg and Holman 1999). His research in historical demography and paleodemography is aimed at understanding health and mortality in past populations. He has developed new statistical methods for estimating age-at-death distributions from imperfect age indicators (Holman et al. in press b; Konigsberg and Holman 1999), and recovering population growth rates from paleodemographic observations (Wood et al. in press a).

Charles Hirschman’s current research priorities focus on immigration to the United States, race and ethnic disparities in educational attainment, and the formation of race and ethnic identities. He also studies demographic change in Southeast Asia, fertility and the family, and ethnic stratification. Over the last decade, his research has been supported by grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Over the last decade, his research has been published in Population and Development Review, Demography, Sociological Methodology, Social Science Research, Sociology of Education, Research on Social Stratification and Mobility, Journal of Marriage and the Family, Population Studies, and International Migration Review. He was the lead editor of the authoritative Handbook of International Migration and is a frequent contributor to major encyclopedia in demography, sociology, and the social sciences. He currently directs the University of Washington-Beyond High School (UW-BHS) project, a longitudinal study of educational attainment and the early life course of young adults. The UW-BHS project interviewed almost 10,000 high school seniors in 12 high schools in three school districts in Western Washington from 2000 to 2005. The UW-BHS sample was followed one year after high school graduation with a 90% re-interview rate. A pilot ten-year follow-up survey of the Class of 2000 was recently completed with a completion rate of 75%. The UW-BHS data have been analyzed by Hirschman and collaborators to addressed two major research questions: What accounts for the persistence of race and ethnic disparities in college enrollment and college graduation?; How to conceptualize and measure the complexity or responses to questions about race and ethnic identities. On the latter question, Hirschman and Tony Perez have suggested that a new survey question on “Primary Race or Ethnicity” can help to resolve much of the uncertainty created by census and survey respondents who write in Some Other Race, and checking multiple races. In recent work, they are examining the relationship between subjective race and ethnic identities (reported by respondents) and “observed race”—the race and ethnic assignments of the same persons made by anonymous coders of pictures of the survey respondents.