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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Aspen Institute Names India Ornelas as a 2023 Ascend Fellow!

CSDE Affiliate India Ornelas (Health Services) is named one of the Aspen Institute’s 2023 Ascend Fellows! The 2023 cohort includes  20 leaders from across the United States who are transforming systems so that all children and families can thrive. With Ascend and their cohort, Ascend Fellows will develop an action plan that aligns with their organizational goals and individual leadership journeys to advance the north star of intergenerational economic mobility and well-being for children and families. Learn more about the fellows here.

Data Alert: IPUMS MEPS Now Includes 2021 Data

IPUMS MEPS now includes over 900 variables from the 2021 file. Variables new to this year include COVID variables (CVDBOOSTER and CVDVAX) and variables from the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) supplement (see description of SATISFIED for more information and a full list of SDOH variables). Also check  updated documentation on the MEPS prescribed medicines data, including guidance on linking information for the same person across condition, event, and prescribed medicine records!

Rowhani-Rahbar Elected to the National Academy of Medicine!

CSDE Affiliate Ali Rowhani-Rahbar (Epidemiology and Pediatrics) and two other UW professors were elected to the National Academy of Medicine in recognition of excellence in the fields of health and medicine, along with a commitment to volunteer service. Election to the Academy is considered one of the most prestigious honors in health and medicine. Dr. Rowhani-Rahbar was recognized for his research on gun violence, which the Academy said has “deepened our understanding of the risk and consequences of firearm-related harm.” His work integrates data from health care and criminal justice systems to better understand risk factors related to gun violence and injury. That research has informed policies and programs aimed at reducing the risk of firearm-related harm, particularly in underserved and overlooked communities. He is the Bartley Dobb Professor for the Prevention of Violence and interim director of the Firearm Injury & Policy Research Program in the UW School of Medicine.

Call for Applications to Attend the Climate Pipeline Project Meeting at Harvard (Deadline 10/13/23)

The Climate Pipeline Project at Harvard University invites applications to attend a meeting at Harvard University on Thursday, December 14th, 2023. The Climate Pipeline Project seeks to foster the work of younger scholars, from graduate students to untenured professors. By spotlighting their work, and helping them develop connections with senior scholars, the project hope to encourage rapid growth in attention to the sociology of climate change and to create connections among people working in this area within sociology. Graduate students, post-docs, and non-tenured faculty are invited to submit applications consisting of a paper title and an abstract. We are interested in papers on any aspect of the sociology of climate change, including: environmental justice, social movements, the study of disasters and their aftermath, and energy transitions. Accepted proposals will receive travel and lodging assistance. Apply here by October 13th!

CSDE and PHI Applied Research Fellows Deliver New Data Tool and Analyses to King County

The 2023 University of Washington Population Health Initiative Applied Research Fellowship program recently concluded their research assessing migration and displacement trends in King County through the use of novel data sources. Their findings offer useful insights for King County policymakers regarding future resource allocations. This year’s five student fellows were a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, including Tiffany Childs (Public Health – Global Health major), Lily Bates, Public Health – Global Health major), Pamela Lin (Master of Urban Planning and Public Health candidate), Zhaowen Guo, PhD candidate in Political Science, and Rachel Song (PhD candidate in Psychology).

The fellows began their work with what they knew about migration in King County — that in-migration to King County has increased rapidly over the past two decades, resulting in increased internal migration within the county. More specifically, expansion of high-paying jobs in the tech sector and pressure on existing housing supply has resulted in the displacement of low income households, especially in the South Seattle and South King County area.

The cohort’s research questions were partly informed by Data Axle, a data delivery platform; the team investigated what could be learned about migration from different datasets, where people are moving within Seattle/South King County, and the socioeconomic conditions of people’s origins and destinations. Along with Data Axle, the team utilized data from Scraped Online Rental Listings (SORL), American Community Survey (ACS) and other public data sources like the King County Assessor’s Office, King County Metro, Sound Transit, school sites and school districts and data on environmental exposure from the Washington Department of Health Environmental Health Disparities Data.

To gain a more complete picture of migration, the fellows looked at data at both the county level and area level. On a county level, the team analyzed and compared data on age-specific migration, migration by tenure, median rent by number of bedrooms and studio rent distribution. The area-level analysis included looking at migration flows across Health Reporting Area (HRA) groupings to determine in- and out- migration rates. Three specific case examples highlighted were Auburn-North, Tukwila and Rainier Valley-Rainier Beach, all under the South King County/South Seattle umbrella and areas with highest rates of migration flow.

Insights from the 10-week program included acknowledging that Data Axle can reveal the relative order of migration magnitudes and rates, that most observed internal migration is hyperlocal, a vast majority of HRAs see net migration gains, popular observed origin-destination HRA pairs are often consistent across time, and that rising rents do not seem to precede observed out-migration.

Looking ahead, the cohort recommended a calibration of distributions of household from Data Axle to ACS by tenure and/or age, an estimate of area-level migration measures by household tenure, an estimate of migration between King, Pierce and Snohomish County, and to incorporate area-level migration measures into the Exploring King County tool created by and improved on by previous teams of fellows.

This data visualization tool already includes variables on population, education level, median income, household size, methods of transportation to work and median gross rent. The 2023 summer cohort added their data on SORL to the tool as a way to deepen King County, policy makers and community members’ understanding of geographic areas and specific populations more likely to be exposed to economic risk and displacement in King County.

The Applied Research Fellowship program was launched in 2019 to equip students with data analysis, critical thinking and team science skills to enable them to effectively tackle complex population health challenges and become future leaders in the field. The program is run by the Population Health Initiative in partnership with the University of Washington’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology, and this year’s project was developed in partnership with the King County Demographer and Public Health – Seattle & King County’s Assessment, Policy Development and Evaluation Unit.

The application period for the summer 2024 Applied Research Fellowship program will open in winter quarter 2024. Learn more about this fellowship program by visiting its web page.

Spiro, West, and Co-authors Publish on Science Communication During the COVID-19 Pandemic

CSDE Affiliates Emma Spiro and Jevin West from the Information School recently published their research with co-authors, “Selective and deceptive citation in the construction of dueling consensuses” in the Science Advances. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a unique opportunity to study science communication and, in particular, the transmission of consensus. In this study, authors show how “science communicators,” writ large to include both mainstream science journalists and practiced conspiracy theorists, transform scientific evidence into two dueling consensuses using the effectiveness of masks as a case study. They do this by compiling one of the largest, hand-coded citation datasets of cross-medium science communication, derived from 5 million Twitter posts of people discussing masks. They find that science communicators selectively uplift certain published works while denigrating others to create bodies of evidence that support and oppose masks, respectively. Anti-mask communicators in particular often use selective and deceptive quotation of scientific work and criticize opposing science more than pro-mask communicators. Their findings have implications for scientists, science communicators, and scientific publishers, whose systems of sharing (and correcting) knowledge are highly vulnerable to what we term adversarial science communication.

*This CSDE news story is a corrected repost of a story that ran in the Oct. 2nd newsletter. CSDE Affiliate Emma Spiro is an author on the featured article.