CSDE Trainee Hana Brown (Sociology) and CSDE Affiliate Patricia Louie (Sociology) recently published an article in Sleep Health that analyzed the relationship between skin color and on self-reported sleep duration. Brown and Louie used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, a nationally representative sample of adults residing in the US in 2016-2018. Individuals with dark and to a lesser extent medium skin are at higher odds of short sleep (≤6 hours) than those with light skin. Individuals with medium and dark skin are also at higher odds of long sleep  (≥9 hours) than those with light skin. However, evidential support for racial/ethnic moderation of skin tone effects was weak.

CSDE External Affiliate and Trainee Alum Amy Spring (Georgia State University) recently published an article titled “Internal migration following local environmental disasters: the intersection of race, socioeconomic status, and local family ties” in Population and Environment. Spring integrated longitudinal household and family network data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics with county-level disaster data from the Spatial Hazards Events and Losses Database for the United States. The findings reveal that regardless of socioeconomic status, Black households are less likely to out-migrate from disaster areas than White households, and that group differences in local family ties explain much of this racial disparity. These results highlight the importance of considering both economic resources and social embeddedness in designing equitable disaster recovery and climate resettlement policies.

In a recent article published in American Psychologist, CSDE External Affiliate Rachel Wilbur (Washington State University) argues that addressing American Indians and Alaska Natives (AI/ANs) behavioral health inequity must center Indigenous ways of knowing, emphasizing continued presence achieved through active resistance. Wilbur and her co-author contend that the concept of health survivance better meets the needs of AI/AN communities than the Eurocentric construct of resilience. The authors propose that health survivance differs from conventional resilience in four key ways: (a) resistance to unjust societal arrangements versus adaptation to the status quo; (b) recognition of a temporal arc inclusive of the past, present, and future versus focusing on individual lifespan; (c) persistence of community and culture versus personal adaptation and well-being; and (d) refusal of identities of victimization versus accentuating adversity and trauma.

CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery (Statistics & Sociology) just published an article in Demography titled, “Bayesian Projection of Extant Refugee and Asylum Seeker Populations.” Raftery and his co-author propose a modeling pipeline based on Bayesian hierarchical time-series modeling for projecting refugee population official statistics by country of origin using data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Growth and decline phases, separated by a peak, are modeled by logistic growth and decline through an interrupted logistic process model. The authors evaluate their method through a set of validation exercises that show it has good performance for forecasts at 1-, 5-, and 10-year horizons, and present projections for 35 countries of origin of large refugee and asylum seeker populations.