CSDE Affiliate Kristian Jones (Social Work) published an article in Cureus with colleagues, titled “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Time to Completion of Academic Enrichment Program Applications“. Diversity in healthcare and research is integral to serving our increasingly diverse population. Access to academic enrichment programs, an important pathway to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) careers promotes educational attainment through academic preparation and increased interest, useful strategies for improving diverse representation in higher learning. Given this important pathway to STEM fields, attention to equity in enrichment programs admissions is as important as the increasing focus on mitigating racial/ethnic disparities in undergraduate and graduate admissions. In a retrospective cohort study at the University of Washington, authors compare a hybrid competitive summer application program with stipend with an asynchronous first-come, first-served enrollment program in injury and violence prevention research. The main findings illustrate that academic programs with stipend programs result in more Black applicants. And free enrollment programs did not result in any Native American participants. This project was funded NICHD and also included UW Medicine’s Dr. Marie Angele Theard as the senior author.

CSDE Affiliate Claire Rothschild (Population Services International) released an article with co-authors in BMJ Global Health, titled “Preference-aligned fertility management among married adolescent girls in Northern Nigeria: assessing a new measure of contraceptive autonomy“. Universal access to sexual and reproductive healthcare—including family planning (FP)—is a global priority, yet there is no standard outcome measure to evaluate rights-based FP program performance at the regional, national or global levels. Authors collected a modified version of preference-aligned fertility management (PFM), a newly proposed rights-based FP outcome measure which they operationalized as concordance between an individual’s desired and actual current contraceptive use, within a cohort of married adolescent girls in Northern Nigeria. The study found that PFM captured meaningful discordance between contraceptive use desires and behaviours in this cohort. Observed discordance provides actionable insights for program intervention to better support people to achieve their self-identified contraceptive preferences.

CSDE Affiliate David Swanson (Sociology, UC Riverside) co-authored new research in Papers in Applied Geography, titled “Using cluster analysis to identify communities of interest for purposes of legislative redistricting: A case study of parishes in Louisiana“. The use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology has been found to limit the kinds of communities that can in principle achieve political representation through redistricting because the process excludes “communities of interest” (COIs) that cannot be mapped. Authors argue that these limits can be overcome using empirically based variables to define a COI in conjunction with an empirically based classification system, cluster analysis.

CSDE Affiliate Rachel Heath (Economics) co-authored a policy research working paper with the World Bank, titled “Gender, Social Support, and Political Speech: Evidence from Twitter“. Despite evidence that women’s political preferences differ from those of men, women are less likely to participate in political and social discussions on Twitter and other social media. Following recent evidence that in-person social support matters for women’s political participation, women are hypothesized to form similarly supportive communities online. This paper tests this hypothesis using data from Twitter.

The collected data comprises 451 hashtags on a broad range of (non-mutually exclusive) topics: social, gender, racial, LGBTQ, religion, youth, education, economic, health, COVID, climate, political, security, entertainment and lifestyle, and the Middle East and Northern Africa. The empirical results indicate that women are more likely to participate when the debate(s) feature female influential voices. This finding supports the potential role of mutual support in bolstering women’s participation in important debates.