CSDE Affiliate Stipica Mudrazija (Health Systems and Population Health) authored new research with colleagues in the Journal of Aging and Health, titled “Preclinical Dementia and Economic Well-Being Trajectories of Racially Diverse Older Adults“. This study examined the magnitude, changes, and racial/ethnic disparities in the economic costs of the 16-year preclinical phase of dementia—a period of cognitive decline without significant impact on daily activities. The study utilized two dementia algorithms to classify individuals with incident dementia in the Health and Retirement Study. These cases were compared to matched controls in terms of poverty status, labor force participation, and unsecured debts. Older adults classified with dementia were more likely to drop out of the labor force and become poor than similar older adults without dementia. Racial/ethnic disparities in poverty persisted during the preclinical period, with non-Hispanic Black older adults more likely to leave the labor force and Hispanic older adults more likely to have unsecured debt. Findings highlight the economic costs during prodromal phase of dementia, emphasizing need for early interventions to reduce financial strain across diverse older adults.
Casey and Co-authors Assess the Accuracy of Self-Reported Distance to Nearest Unconventional Oil and Gas Wells
CSDE Affiliate Joan A. Casey (Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences) co-authored new research in the Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology, titled “Accuracy of self-reported distance to nearest unconventional oil and gas well in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia residents and implications for exposure assessment“. The study was lead-authored by Cassandra J. Clark, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale. Self-reported distances to industrial sources have been used in epidemiology as proxies for exposure to environmental hazards and indicators of awareness and perception of sources. Unconventional oil and gas development (UOG) emits pollutants and has been associated with adverse health outcomes. We compared self-reported distance to the nearest UOG well to the geographic information system-calculated distance for 303 Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia residents using Cohen’s Weighted Kappa. Understanding differences between objective and subjective measures of UOG proximity could inform studies of perceived exposures or risks and may also be relevant to adverse health effects.
Swanson Co-authors Research Examining the U.S. Decline in the Non-Hispanic White Population
CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (Sociology, UC Riverside) co-authored new research in Social Science Quarterly, titled “The decline of the non-Hispanic white population in the United States of America“. The question of a declining non-Hispanic white (NHW) population has sparked debate in the United States. In examining this question, three bodies of research have emerged. One group reports that the decline is real, a second argues that it is an illusion, and the third provides evidence that the decline is concentrated within socio-economic segments of the NHW population. Authors use the third groups’ insight as the starting point for their research objective.
Research by Vaughan-Wynn and Jung Examines Uneven Food Geographies of Seattle in the Era of Amazon
CSDE Trainee Natalie Vaughan-Wynn (Geography) and CSDE Affiliate Jin-Kyu Jung (Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences) published an article in Environment and Planning F, titled “Digital food apartheid: The uneven food geographies of Seattle in the era of Amazon“. This article puts forward the concept of “digital food apartheid” to articulate differentiation in terms of one’s agency concerning their food that is mediated by, reified through, or materialized from data or digital infrastructure given the omnipresence of racial capitalism. They examine the digitization of public food assistance in the United States in conversation with Black digital geographies, food geographies, and critical GIS, paying particular attention to the US Department of Agriculture’s COVID-19-era Online Grocery Purchase Program (OPP), which gives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants access to online grocery shopping and delivery.
*New* Issue of Population Studies
Read Volume 78, Issue 1 here!
*New* Issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Read volume 50, issue 5 here!
Save the Date: Virtual Workshop on Climate Change and Human Migration (3/18 and 3/19/24)
Join the National Academies for a workshop exploring how an Earth systems science approach could be used to address climate change impacts and their influence on human migration, building on the 2021 report Next Generation Earth Systems Science at the National Science Foundation. To learn more about this workshop, visit the event webpage. The event will take place on March 18th from 10:00am-4pm (ET) and March 19th from 10am-1pm (ET). Register here!
Limited Submission Opportunity – NSF Call for General Social Survey Competition (LOI due 3/20/24)
There is a Limited Submission Opportunity (LSO) for UW researchers and collaborators to take up the leadership of the General Social Survey (GSS) and the International Social Survey Program (ISSP). The NSF solicitation can be found here. This major effort to continue and innovate the longstanding surveys with funding from the NSF requires only one submission from an institution. Within the UW, the Limited Submissions Office will select one competitive applicant.
The Limited Submission, Pre-Proposal Instructions:
Please submit:
- A one‐page letter of intent with a description of proposed aims and approach.
- If the final application requires a diversity statement or statement of broader impacts, please summarize your plans to address the specific requirements on an additional page.
- CV (not biosketch) of the PI including past grant funding.
Above materials should be submitted to limitedsubs@uw.edu by 5:00 PM Wednesday, March 20, 2024. If given the go‐ahead by the Limited Submissions review committee, a required LOI with AOR signature is due 6/3/2024, then the full application is due 8/15/2024. Other open limited submissions opportunities, as well as the limited submissions review committee review and selection process, are here:http://depts.washington.edu/research/funding/limited-submissions. Please feel free to email us at limitedsubs@uw.edu with questions or information on any limited submission opportunities that should be but are not already listed on that page.
The solicitation seeks a new team to take up the continuing effort of the General Social Survey and the International Social Survey Program, include team members that possess the theoretical, methodological, measurement and managerial skills, as well as organizational resources, to undertake large-scale survey data collection efforts. They are seeking proposals that will consider some or all of the following: continue surveying a nationally representative sample on a biennial cycle to monitor trends in attitudes and behaviors of the adult United States population; enhance the panel design whose baseline sample was initiated in the 2006 survey; maintain participation in the ISSP data collection program; involve the Scientific Advisory Board actively in selecting, evaluating and approving the content of both core and topical survey modules; support a “module” competition that would allow members of the Scientific Advisory Board and other social scientists to propose topics and questions for inclusion in the GSS; encourage experimentation and innovation in survey administration and techniques, embedding methodological and substantive experiments within the survey; retain and revitalize GSS core items, involving the user community and Board in the process; continue to explore ways to over-sample minority groups, improving the quality and precision of comparisons, and collect more “paradata” and “metadata” from the process and context of survey administration; experiment with digital recording of interviews to enable studies of social interaction that occurs during interviews, using the results both to improve data quality and to encourage the integration of qualitative and quantitative data; upgrade documentation and dissemination technologies to improve the speed, completeness and ease of use of data for research and teaching; improve the variety and flexibility of data available online, allowing potential users to produce customized data sets (for example, by year, topic, module or ethnic group) for analysis; continue collaboration with the American National Election Surveys (ANES).
Chen and Colleagues Introduce Remote Sensing Method to Identify Landslides
CSDE Affiliate Tzu-Hsin Karen Chen (Urban Design and Planning, Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences) released new research with colleagues in Science of the Total Environment, titled “Identifying recurrent and persistent landslides using satellite imagery and deep learning: A 30-year analysis of the Himalaya“. This paper presents a remote sensing-based method to efficiently generate multi-temporal landslide inventories and identify recurrent and persistent landslides. Authors used free data from Landsat, nighttime lights, digital elevation models, and a convolutional neural network model to develop the first multi-decadal inventory of landslides across the Himalaya, spanning from 1992 to 2021. The work reveals that most landslides in the Himalayas are not new, demonstrating how “landslides follow landslides.”