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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Oliva, Guttmanova, Hajat, & Co-authors Publish Paper in Child & Youth Care Forum: Journal of Research and Practice in Children’s Services

CSDE Affiliates Katarina Guttmanova (Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) and Anjum Hajat (Epidemiology) recently published a paper with lead author Andrea Oliva (Seattle Children’s Research Institute) in Child & Youth Care Forum: Journal of Research and Practice in Children’s Services titled, “Depressive Symptoms Over the Course of Adolescence Among Latinx Children of Immigrants and White Youth From Small Towns in the United States.” Hispanic/Latinx make up 19% of the total population of the United States and are one of the fastest growing groups in the country. This growth has been notable among youth from rural and small-town communities and understanding mental health during adolescence in this population can have a significant impact on public health. In this paper, Oliva, Dr. Guttmanova, Dr. Hajat, and co-authors compare depressive symptoms during adolescence among Latinx Children of Immigrants, Latinx Children of Non-Immigrants, and non-Latinx White Children of Non-Immigrants from small towns in the United States. To learn more about this research and read the full paper, visit this link.

County Health Rankings & Roadmaps 2025 Data Viz Challenge (08/01/25)

County Health Rankings & Roadmaps (CHR&R) is inviting original visualizations using CHR&R data to communicate the structural determinants of health, or the laws, policies, and power structures that drive health outcomes. We want to see how you use CHR&R (and other public data) to tell stories that make the forces that shape health visible.

We believe that working together amplifies impact. In this open call for data visualizations, we’re honoring the power of our connectedness — the reality that your eyes and experience create a unique perspective on the health story we share. Recognizing how our fates are intertwined is central to transforming the structural forces that shape opportunities for health.

Who should submit:

Students, researchers, analysts, public health professionals, advocates and community members are encouraged to participate. Submissions are welcome from individuals and teams. Multiple entries are allowed through August 1, 2025. Winners will be announced August 8, 2025.

What to submit:

  • A static or interactive visualization which utilizes at least one CHR&R measure. Examples include maps, plots, dashboards and infographics. Any U.S. geography and timeframe is acceptable.
  • A description between 250–500 words that explains:
    • which structural determinant(s) are visualized;
    • why these determinants are important to community health; and,
    • what inspired your choice of measures and visual format.
  • Selected submissions will be recognized on the CHR&R website and highlighted in our newsletter and social media. Winners may be invited to collaborate with CHR&R experts on future data features or presentations.

Submissions will be judged by CHR&R staff based on their:

  • relevance to the structural determinants of health
  • clarity of message
  • design and technical execution
  • creativity

Where to find data:

At CHR&R, we believe that we all do better when we all do better — which is why we’re committed to building and contributing to data democratization. This initiative reflects our belief that shared knowledge and innovation can drive meaningful change.

Submit your entry using the form linked here.

Mudrazija and Co-Authors Publish Research in European Journal of Ageing

CSDE Affiliate Stipica Mudrazija (Health Systems and Population Health) and co-authors recently published a research article in the European Journal of Ageing titled, “The Hidden Crisis: Classifying unmet Healthcare Needs in European Older Adults during COVID-19.” In this study, Dr. Mudrazija and co-authors investigate the unmet healthcare needs of older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic, leveraging data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the two waves of the SHARE Corona Survey (SCS) conducted in 2020 and 2021. To learn more about this research and read the full article, visit this link.

*New* CSSCR Workshop: Efficient R Programming: Working with Many Columns, Functions, and Models (08/06/25)

Description: A good rule of thumb in data wrangling and programming is: if you find yourself copying and pasting a block of code more than twice, it’s time to stop and think about a more efficient approach. This course will introduce functional programming and other techniques to reduce redundancy and enhance the computational efficiency of your R code. We will cover practical skills frequently used in data projects, such as manipulating multiple columns, writing anonymous functions, using map(), nesting dataframes within tibbles, and running multiple regressions and comparing them results simultaneously. Attendees are expected to have basic familiarity with data wrangling using dplyr in R.

  • Instructor: Brian Leung, CSSCR Consultant
  • Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2025
  • Time: 11:00am – 12:20pm
  • Location: Savery 121 (Small Lab)
  • Register here.

Hiramori Publishes Book Chapter in Second International Handbook on the Demography of Sexuality

CSDE External Affiliate Daiki Hiramori (Hosei University) recently published a book chapter in the Second International Handbook on the Demography of Sexuality titled, “Understanding Sexual Orientation Identity, Sexual/Romantic Attraction, and Sexual Behavior beyond Western Societies: The Case of Japan.” Dr. Hiramori discusses how important it is to examine the complex intersections of sexual orientation identity, sexual/romance attraction, and sexual behavior, however, most of the studies on these topics use data from Western countries that have particular histories of sexuality that limit the generalizability of the findings beyond Western societies. In this chapter, Dr. Hiramori and his co-author Dr. Saori Kamano describe the dimensions of sexuality in Japan, where historically no religious authority has condemned same-sex behavior and legal prohibitions against same-sex relations existed for only a decade in the late nineteenth century. To learn more about this study and read the full chapter, visit this link.

*New* CSSCR Workshop: Introduction to Thematic Analysis in Atlas.ti (08/06/25)

Description: This workshop provides a brief, practical introduction to working in ATLAS.ti, by marrying the functionality of the program with the fundamentals of the qualitative methodology. This will include importing text documents, creating codes, memos and comments, and exploring thematic relationships through analysis. The course assumes no familiarity with Atlas.ti

  • Instructor:  Baishakhi Basu, CSSCR Consultant
  • Date: Wednesday, August 6, 2025
  • Time: 3:00pm – 4:20pm
  • Location: Savery 121 (Small Lab)
  • Register here.

CSDE Welcomes 3 New Research Affiliates

CSDE is pleased to introduce three of our new UW Research Affiliates! Jessica Acolin (Postdoctoral Fellow, Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences) focuses her work on understanding how systemic, social, and environmental factors shape mental and behavioral health outcomes, with a particular interest in climate change impacts on youth and young adults. Kamryn Morris’s (Assistant Professor, School of Social Work) research seeks to promote thriving among Black youth through supporting school belonging and improving school climate. Yanfang Su’s (Assistant Professor, Global Health) research focuses on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures. Learn more about each affiliate in the full story!

 

  • Jessica Acolin – Jessica Acolin’s work centers on understanding how systemic, social, and environmental factors shape mental and behavioral health outcomes, with a particular interest in climate change impacts on youth and young adults. Dr. Acolin holds a PhD in Public Health (Health Services), postdoctoral training in psychiatry, and has over a decade of professional experience in mental health research and practice. She holds advanced expertise in quantitative epidemiologic methods appropriate for population health research (e.g., geospatial data analysis, multilevel models) and is developing skills in qualitative and mixed methods. Further, she strongly values interdisciplinary collaborations and is actively engaged with social scientists, clinicians, and climate scientists, among others. Her practice-oriented partnerships with local health jurisdictions are motivated by her commitment to ensuring her research results in real-world impact. She has 13 peer-reviewed manuscripts published or under review (7 first author), including in leading journals such as Social Science & Medicine and Prevention Science. Her current research focuses on climate change as an environmental stressor. To date, this work has resulted in 6 conference presentations (2 additional under review), 1 research manuscript under peer review, and 2 research manuscripts in preparation. She has served as Principal Investigator on multiple projects and has secured competitive funding, with over $70,000 awarded to date. She has experience with statistical methods appropriate for hierarchical or longitudinal data. She has worked with geocoded data, merged multi-level datasets, utilized generalized linear models, mixture models, and time-varying effects models, and Monte Carlo simulation models.
  •  Kamryn Morris – Kamryn S. Morris (she/her) is an Assistant Professor with the School of Social Work at the University of Washington. Dr. Morris earned her Ph.D. in Family and Human Development, where she was a National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) T32 Predoctoral Fellow with training in prevention, dissemination, and implementation science. Her research seeks to promote thriving among Black youth through supporting school belonging and improving school climate. Using qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods, her program of research examines social (e.g., teacher-student relationships) and contextual (e.g., school racial segregation) factors that promote and/or prohibit Black youths’ development of school belonging and subsequent wellbeing. As part of this research, she learns from and amplifies the voices of educators and Black youth to cultivate pathways towards mitigating the pervasive effects of racism (e.g., interpersonal, structural) in schools and communities.
  • Yanfang Su – Dr. Yanfang Su is a health economist with more than ten years of work experience in health systems and policy. Dr. Su holds an ScD in Global Health and Population within Health Systems track from Harvard University. During her postdoctoral training at the University of Washington, Dr. Su applied econometric methods to health financing and published papers in The Lancet as co-first author and The Lancet Infectious Diseases as first author. Her publications focus on three areas: 1) economic evaluation of healthcare systems, including analysis of equity, supply, demand, costs, and quality; 2) public policy evaluation; and 3) global health and population measures. Dr. Su has been designing a new course on Comparative Health Systems and mentoring 20 trainees, including 18 from underrepresented groups. Dr. Su is the founder and Board Chair of a non-profit organization, the East West Alliance for Education and Health, which delivered equitable community services and conducted digital health randomized controlled trials in low-resource settings. Dr. Su worked at Tsinghua University and the Hong Kong Policy and Research Institute in China. Dr. Su has consulted for the World Bank, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and Results for Development on primary health care systems strengthening. Dr. Su is a guest editor for a special issue on policy implementation science in Frontiers in Health Services. Dr. Su is an IS-2 scholar and her career goal is to become a leading scientist in policy implementation, with a focus on cardiovascular disease prevention.