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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Call for Papers: IJPDS Focus Issue on People and the Criminal Justice System (10/30/26)

People who have contact with the criminal justice system experience disproportionate social and health disadvantage both prior to and following their justice involvement, compared to the broader community. Achieving equity in areas such as health, housing, and education among people with justice system involvement should be a global priority. Simultaneously, the need to reduce offending and recidivism is central to improving public safety, strengthening justice system legitimacy, and reducing future victimisation.

Across jurisdictions worldwide, criminal justice policy is frequently shaped by political considerations rather than rigorous empirical evidence. Growing availability of population-based administrative data sources (including linkages across sectors) allow researchers the opportunity to generate actionable evidence that can improve not only health, wellbeing, and social outcomes for people with justice system contact, but also justice-related outcomes including recidivism, victimisation patterns, and other crime and public safety measurements.

This Focus Issue will provide a platform for high-quality research with the broad aims to:

  1. Reduce social and health inequities, as well as improve outcomes, for people with current, past, or potential future justice system involvement including outcomes directly related to crime, victimisation and justice system performance.
  2. Improve community safety, reduce recidivism, and strengthen the fairness, effectiveness, and legitimacy of criminal justice responses.

All manuscripts that align with these aims and sit within the scope of the journal are welcome. We encourage empirical and methodological research as well as reviews. We are especially interested in manuscripts which use multi-sectoral data linkage (e.g. corrections, law enforcement, courts, probation/community corrections, health, housing, education, child protection, social services, employment) to address health and social inequalities as well as key crime and justice outcomes such as reoffending, desistance, victimisation, procedural justice, diversion effectiveness, supervision outcomes, or system-level decision making.

Ensuring we showcase a diversity of perspectives is critical to appropriately achieve the aims of this issue. To do so, we encourage submissions from researchers who:

  • Are, or work with, people with lived/living experience of the criminal justice system.
  • Represent a broad range of disciplines including criminology, public health, psychology, epidemiology, law, economics, and other social and health science disciplines.
  • Engage directly with criminal justice policy, reform, system performance, or interventions aimed at reducing crime and harm.
  • Are located in low- and middle-income countries.

Submission Deadline: 30th October 2026

To Submit Your Manuscript, Click Here

Population Structures and Dynamics, and Social Change: Studies in Honor of Antonio Golini (10/31/26)

This thematic series of Genus advances comparative population research by bringing together original contributions on demographic transitions, structural population change, and their social, economic, and policy implications across diverse world regions. In a context marked by persistent low fertility, population ageing, increased mobility, and widening inequalities, the series highlights the need for rigorous, internationally comparative research capable of linking national demographic trajectories to global processes.

The collection is conceived in honor of Professor Antonio Golini, a leading figure in Italian and international demography. Golini’s work consistently combined detailed empirical analysis with a strong comparative orientation, often using the Italian experience as a lens to interpret broader demographic dynamics. His legacy includes pivotal contributions to the institutional consolidation of demography in Italy, the diffusion of demographic knowledge, and the dialogue between scientific research and public policy.

Building on this intellectual tradition, the series provides a forward-looking forum for theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions that address contemporary demographic challenges while engaging with long-standing debates in population studies.

Topics of interest include:

  • Demographic transitions and structural population change
  • Fertility decline and recovery in low-fertility societies
  • Population ageing, welfare regimes, and intergenerational inequality
  • Mortality differentials and health inequalities
  • Internal and international migration and redistribution
  • Population mobility and labor market dynamics
  • Ageing and socio-economic sustainability across development contexts
  • Demographic change, economic development, and policy responses
  • Methodological advances in population analysis

Types of contributions: 

  • Original research articles
  • Conceptual and methodological papers
  • Invited essays reflecting on Golini’s scientific legacy and its relevance today

Guest edited by:

  • Prof. Graziella Caselli, Sapienza University of Rome
  • Prof. Viviana Egidi, Sapienza University of Rome

UW Royalty Research Fund Deadline is End of September 2026

As the spring quarter winds, here’s a reminder about the next Royalty Research Fund deadline at the end of September 2026. Submitting for that deadline will require work that overlaps with the summer quarter.  CSDE is happy to support the preparation and submission of your application.  Experienced faculty affiliates can help with reviewing the narrative of the proposal and our administrative team can prepare your budget. CSDE can also submit your RRF application for you.  Feel free to reach out to Sara Curran (scurran@uw.edu) or Steven Goodreau (goodreau@uw.edu) with questions or complete our proposal planning form with any details about your RRF application. Keep in mind, all PIs are required to adhere to the GIM 1 policy – Review and Submission Requirements for Proposals.  We will need to be able to route your final documents by September 22.

Sutton Shows Social Influencers Can Reduce Infection Burden and Modify Epidemic Lag in Group-Structured Populations

In a new article in Royal Society Open Science, CSDE External Affiliate Aja Sutton (Population Research Center at Portland State University) with co-authors Adam Z. Reynolds (University of New Mexico), Matthew A. Turner (Stanford University), and James Holland Jones (Stanford University) examine how (digital) social influencers can modify epidemics by affecting social learning of health-protective behaviors in group-structured populations. Using agent-based models that incorporate both small protective and anti-protective nudges from social influencers into an epidemic scenario, they test how—under varying conditions of group structure modified by homophily and out-group aversion—competing influence messages affect health-protective behavioral diffusion between two behaviorally naive groups, and by extension infection transmission dynamics and outcomes. In heterogeneous populations, social influencers were protective of the whole population by increasing behavioral diffusion—independent of homophily—and flattening the epidemic curve, even in the equal presence of anti-protective messaging. Stronger group structure—especially, homophily—produced behavioral segregation and modified infection growth rates by accelerating within-group behavioral diffusion, leading to a lag between groups’ epidemic peak intensity and total infection burden. This work suggests contexts through which public health messaging is shared—such as social media sites, which exhibit a high degree of homophily—can produce substantial differences in disease transmission dynamics and epidemic outcomes.

Anderson and EPAR Publish New Series on Data Choices with Consequences

CSDE Affiliate Leigh Anderson (Director of EPAR, Public Policy) and the Evans Policy Analysis and Research Group (EPAR) have launched a new series on “Choices with Consequences.”  The series of blogs and technical briefs illustrate the implications of alternative cleaning and variable construction decisions when constructing agricultural indicators, though applicable to other topics using household survey data. You can read the first brief on treating outliers, which also features a visualization tool to understand the implications of different identifying, trimming and replacing choices.  Key takeaways from this first “outlier” brief are:

  • Outliers, extremely high or low values of a continuous variable are common in survey data. They can be atypical but valid observations or the result of data collection or processing errors.
  • Appropriately handling outliers can reduce their distortion of summary statistics or analytical results, and transparency around methods can support reproducibility.
  • The outcome of an outlier treatment method depends on the type of measurement error that generated outlier observations, the overall sample size, the subgroups of interest, and the degree of variation across those subgroups.
  • We developed a simple tool to explore the consequences of different methods, using household survey data from the LSMS-ISA

The entire brief and tool can be found at: https://epar.evans.uw.edu/category/methods/choices-with-consequences/

And you can subscribe to EPAR’s newsletter and announcements on this series by visiting their website at: https://epar.evans.uw.edu/

Swanson Analyzes Racial Profiling in Washington State Patrol Traffic Stops

CSDE External Affiliate David Swanson (Distinguished Professor Emeritus, UC Riverside) authored a piece in NW Citizen analyzing racial disparities in Washington State Patrol (WSP) traffic stops from 2022–2024, using odds ratios applied to WSP Traffic Stop Demographic Report data. Black drivers faced roughly twice the odds of being stopped compared to White drivers in total traffic contacts across all three years, with considerably higher odds for criminal felony contacts and low-discretion searches. The pattern was consistent regardless of whether WSP or Office of Financial Management population data were used. Swanson argues the findings support legislative action to discourage pretext traffic stops as a means of reducing racial profiling.