*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG): Dennis Feehan (01/21/26)
Posted: 1/15/2026 (CSDE Workshop)
When: January 21, 2026 from 10 – 11 am
Where: Raitt 223 and on Zoom
Title: What do we lose if we lose the DHS? Quantifying research impact with digital trace data (Dennis Feehan)
The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program has been a cornerstone of global health and demographic research for four decades, providing essential data in contexts where official statistics are sparse or unavailable. Following the unexpected termination of USAID funding in 2025, the future of the DHS is in flux. This study investigates what the global research community stands to lose if the DHS permanently ceases. We assembled a corpus of scholarly works that analyze or refer to DHS data, sourced from OpenAlex. We augment our corpus using methods taken from natural language processing and network analysis, and validate the results. We find that DHS data has had a large and sustained impact on scholarly research: we found over 70,000 research works spanning a wide range of social science and health disciplines. We also find that DHS papers have contributed disproportionately to UN Sustainable Development Goals and that they focus on understudied topics and regions. Our preliminary analysis offers just a glimpse of the insights made possible by this rich digital dataset. As this paper moves forward, we aim to more clearly demonstrate what makes the DHS uniquely valuable and what would be lost if it disappears.
Dennis Feehan is a demographer and a quantitative social scientists. My research interests lie at the intersection of networks, demography, and quantitative methodology. I’m an Associate Professor of Demography at UC Berkeley, and also the Director of Berkeley’s Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab).
The Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) at the University of Washington meets weekly to provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussions of digital and computational approaches to demographic research. The workshop features a range of paper presentations, methods demonstrations, software tutorials and professional development. The CDWG is sponsored by the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE), the eScience Institute and OBSSR T32 Grant #1T32HD101442-01. We welcome anyone with interest in computational demography (broadly defined).
Date: 01/21/2026
Time: 10-11 AM
Location: Raitt 223