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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Low Birthweight and Maternal Education is the Subject of New Study by Martinson and Co-authors

CSDE Affiliate Melissa L. Martinson (Social Work) released an article with co-authors in SSM – Population Health, entitled “Gradients in low birthweight by maternal education: a comparative perspective“. Longstanding research has shown strong inequalities in low birthweight by household income. However, most such research has focused on Anglophone countries, while evidence emerging from other developed countries suggest a stronger role of education rather than incomes in creating inequalities at birth. This paper compares gradients in low birthweight by maternal education, as well as explores underlying mechanisms contributing to these gradients, in France, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Using decomposition analysis we found that while inequalities in low birth weight across maternal education groups were relatively similar in the United States, the United Kingdom and France, the individual-level mechanisms producing such inequalities varied substantially across the three countries, with income being most important in the US, pregnancy smoking being most evident in France, and the UK occupying an intermediate position. Essentially, maternal education appears to produce inequalities in low birth weight in the US through income differences, but this is not the case in the other countries examined.

*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) Hosts June Yang on Supervised Topic Modeling with GPT-Assisted Text Annotations: A Study of Ideas around Cohabitation (5/8/2024)

On Wednesday 5/08 from 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM, CDWG will host June Yang to present her research. June Yang is a Ph.D. candidate at UW’s Department of Sociology, a CSDE T32 fellow in Demography and Data Science, and recently joined UW CSDE and eScience Institute as a research scientist. Her current research projects include 1) using social media text data to study attitudes around alternative forms of union formation and childbearing choices, and 2) using complex survey data to study the homeless population in King County, WA. The event will occur in 223 Raitt (the Demography Lab) and on Zoom (register here). Learn more about the talk in the full story.

Title: Supervised Topic Modeling with GPT-assisted Text Annotations: A Study of Ideas around Cohabitation

This study examines values and ideas around cohabitation using text data from the Chinese social media website Zhihu. Scholars have heavily cited the Second Demographic Transition theory to account for rising trends of cohabitation in different countries. The theory argues for the prominent role played by ideational changes such as individualism and the quest for self-actualization in leading to diffused patterns of union formation. China has witnessed a rising cohabitation but paradoxically, according to existing research, marriage is still largely seen as the only cultural ideal in the society. Using text data, this study aims to reveal the complexities of the choice of cohabitation in a patriarchal context. Methodologically, this study utilizes GPT-4 to generate a label from the text data that measures a liberal/non-liberal attitude about cohabitation and further adopts supervised topic modeling to generate latent topics from the text that predict the label.

Grant Writing Summer Program (GWSP) (Due 5/10/24)

Applications are now open for this program, which assists scholars in preparing applications to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). More info here, and application page here. Past participants report great success, and lots of support and even fun along the way. Applying to the GWSP is open to CSDE affiliates (UW and external) as well as to local post-docs writing K awards with one or more CSDE affiliates on their mentoring team. If accepted, the program is free for applicants in these groups. Other researchers in the Seattle area are also eligible to apply and may be accepted if space is available.  The program fee is $7,500 for these applicants. (Current graduate students are not eligible to apply, sorry). Applications are due May 10th.

Questions?  See the info page, or contact Steven Goodreau (goodreau@uw.edu).

Xu and Colleagues Study Children’s Moral Development in Postwar Taiwan

CSDE Affiliate Jing Xu (Anthropology) co-authored an article in Scientific Reports, entitled “Modeling children’s moral development in postwar Taiwan through naturalistic observations preserved in historical texts“. A core issue in the interdisciplinary study of human morality is its ontogeny in diverse cultures, but systematic, naturalistic data in specific cultural contexts are rare to find. This study conducts a novel analysis of 213 children’s socio-moral behavior in a historical, non-Western, rural setting, based on a unique dataset of naturalistic observations from the first field research on Han Chinese children.