CSDE is thrilled to announce the Charles and Josephine Hirschman Award for student research. CSDE students may apply for up to $2,000 in funds to directly support a research project. Funds may support activities such as the cost of conducting fieldwork, data purchases, the hiring of a translator or transcriber, or participant rewards in surveys. Be creative! All funds must be spent during the 2026-27 academic year and may not be used to pay tuition or your own salary.

CSDE Affiliates Kamryn Morris (Social Work) and Kristian Jones (Social Work) published a new study exploring how teachers support racial and/or cultural minority students’ sense of mattering through extracurricular participation. In semi-structured interviews, teachers described a wide range of activity offerings (e.g. sports, cultural clubs) and characterized their own involvement as ranging from supportive to active participation. Teachers emphasized that extracurriculars enhance students’ sense of mattering by fostering belonging and promoting long-term skills,

In a new publication in Demography, CSDE Research Scientist Hana Ševčíková, CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery (Statistics and Sociology), and Nathan Welch develop a method for forecasting international migration that takes a country’s age structure into account. Drawing on migration data from 1990 to 2020 across the 200 most populous countries, the authors build a statistical model that projects migration rates through 2100. To develop their forecast,

CSDE is a member of the Association of Population Centers (APC). Each year the APC publishes a resource guide about all member centers. You might check it out and see what is happening elsewhere!

In a new article in Quaternary Environments and Humans, CSDE Affiliate Jade d’Alpoim Guedes (Anthropology) investigates the spread of Sino-Tibetan languages to the eastern Tibetan Plateau, combining evidence from multiple scientific disciplines, applying data from linguistics, palaeoclimate and archaeology. The study focuses on the interaction among different groups of people, zooming into the contact and cultural dynamics of the eastern plateau between ca. 3300 BC to 846 AD.

NIUSSP, the News Magazine of IUSSP, featured research by CSDE Affiliate Hyungmin Cha (Sociology) on the link between education and dementia risk. In the US, each additional year of education is linked to a lower risk of dementia in later life. The decline is steady across the education spectrum, not limited to earning a degree. However, high school diplomas confer extra protection mainly for men and White Americans, revealing important inequality patterns.

CSDE Affiliate Katarina Guttmannova (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) and co-authors recently published two articles in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine examining cannabis-related risks across age groups. The first study drew on cross-sectional survey data from more than 200,000 high school students in Washington and Oregon between 2016 and 2023, and found that proximity to cannabis retail outlets, particularly within one mile of a school, was associated with increased cannabis use,

CSDE Affiliate Taylor Riley (UNC Chapel Hill) and co-authors recently published an article in Women’s Health Issues examining whether county-level pregnancy-related arrest rates were associated with prenatal care access among births in Alabama, which is the leading state in the country for criminalizing pregnancy outcomes and conduct. The study found that individuals living in higher-criminalization counties were more likely to delay prenatal care initiation and to receive inadequate prenatal care.

CSDE Affiliate Vedavati Patwardhan (EPAR) and co-authors recently published an article in Studies in Family Planning, examining the relationship between Indian women’s contact with a community health worker (CHW) and discussion of family planning (FP) with their contraceptive use. Drawing on data from over 306,000 women in India’s 2019–2021 National Family Health Survey, the authors found that traditional contraception use is high, particularly among married nonpregnant, non-sterilized women ages 15–49 years,

CSDE External Affiliate Holly Hummer (University of British Columbia) recently published an article in Social Forces comparing how women in the United States and Japan experience and evaluate childlessness. Drawing on 157 interviews with non-mothers across the two countries, Hummer finds that Japanese women were more likely to frame childlessness as increasingly normalized and attributable to entrenched gender inequalities, while American women more often described it as socially isolating and publicly contested,