Please join us for our CSDE seminar this week to hear about applied demography from the perspective of Washington state government researchers.
This week’s seminar features two external affiliates Dr. Taylor Danielson and Dr. Deleena Patton who practice applied demography via their work in the Research and Data Analysis (RDA) division at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS). RDA provides data, analytics, and decision support tools to DSHS in order to improve the delivery of services that meet DSHS’s mission of transforming lives.
This panel will be moderated by CSDE Affiliate Jennifer Romich from the School of Social Work and Faculty Director of the West Coast Poverty Center here at UW. She has worked with DSHS-RDA to assemble and use administrative data from Washington State. This is sure to be a can’t miss opportunity!
Panel Bios
Dr. Deleena Patton is a research manager at the Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Research and Data Analysis Division. Her applied research focuses on child and family well-being, with connections to policy areas including economic services, early childhood programs, infant and maternal health and well-being, and child welfare. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Washington.
Dr. Taylor Danielson is a Research Manager in the Department of Social and Health Services at DSHS’s Research and Data Analysis Division. Taylor is a social scientist with expertise in quantitative research and secondary data analysis, and he also has past experience in survey development. His substantive interests include public opinion, social services, poverty alleviation, and social policy. He earned a PhD in Sociology from the University of Arizona. Taylor joined CSDE as an affiliate in 2022.
Next week, mark your calendars for our Applied Demographers Panel on November 18. Dr. Taylor Danielson and Dr. Deleena Patton will be speaking on the vital role of demographic data and analyses in their work at Washington State’s Department of Social and Health Services. Professor Jennie Romich will be moderating the discussion and this is an opportunity to understand better the challenges and opportunities for demographers and demographic data to contribute towards improving policy and population health and well being for Washington residents.
CSDE Affiliate Rawan Arar and David Fitzgerald’s new book is out! The Refugee System: A Sociological Approach (published by Taylor and Francis) is a sweeping empirical and theoretical tour de force – drawing connections between systems-thinking in migration and demography, along with sociological perspectives on institutions. This is a project that’s been needed for at least a decade and Arar and Fitzgerald took up the challenge to great effect and impact. We look forward to welcoming the authors to the CSDE stage with an ‘authors meet critic’ opportunity! Stay tuned! Meanwhile, congratulations Rawan and David and thank you for taking on this much needed knowledge building project!
The Institute for Research on Poverty at UW-Madison welcomes applications from dissertators exploring issues of poverty, economic mobility, equity, inclusion, diversity, and access in human services. Applicants will be asked to describe how they meet the National Institutes of Health definition of underrepresented in their field of study. The fellowship provides $25,000 awarded to a dissertator’s home institution to be spent by September 29, 2024. The application deadline is January 25, 2023, 11:59pm CT and there is an informational webinar on Tuesday, November 29, 2022, at 2pm CT.
The Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies is proud to announce the third annual Building A Movement (BAM) Labor Internship for undergraduates. This paid internship program that connects undergraduate students at the University of Washington with the local labor movement. Students who are invested in labor and social justice advocacy are given the opportunity to explore how organizations work to make systemic and community-level changes for the benefit of working people. The ten-week program runs concurrently with winter quarter 2023.
Hosting organizations in winter quarter 2023 include:
- Massage Parlor Outreach Program (MPOP)
- UFCW Local 3000
- Fair Work Center / Working Washington
- United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4121
- Washington State Labor Council (WSLC)
- Rainbow Center (for UW Tacoma students only)
Weekly hours vary depending on internship position, and include a 1.5 hour weekly meeting with other interns and the staff of the Harry Bridges Center.
Students are compensated at a rate of $19/hour. Academic credit may also be available. Read more about this internship opportunity!
Professor Rebecca Thornton from Baylor University will be presenting at the Joint Seminar in Development Economics. Don’t miss Dr. Thornton’s talk “Scaling-Up an Education Intervention: Experimental Evidence on Program Effectiveness, Exposure, and Sustainability” on Monday, November 7th starting at 11:00 AM in Savery 410!
Brief Description of the Paper:
Conventional wisdom suggests a tradeoff between program effectiveness and scale: programs implemented at larger scales utilize lower-quality inputs and tend to achieve smaller impacts. This paper isolates the effects of increased scale per se by disentangling scale-up from changes in input quality. We use data from an RCT that compares a literacy program to both a control group and a reduced-cost variant designed to emulate how education programs are typically scaled up. The reduced-cost version cuts back on the quality and quantity of teacher training, which is one of the most-important and most-expensive inputs provided by the program. We contrast this reduced-cost version with how the program’s impacts change when it was actually scaled up by 230%. Cutting back on the quality and quantity of training causes large declines in the effectiveness of the program, but scaling up the program has little impact on its effectiveness. We also compare sustainability of the program and can compare how multiple student exposure affects long-run effects with how program effectiveness fades for teachers.
CSDE Affiliate Nora Kenworthy and co-authors have published the paper “Struggling, helping and adapting: Crowdfunding motivations and outcomes during the early COVID-19 pandemic” in Sociology of Health and Illness. The study utilizes mixed methods research to analyze data of 919 US GoFundMe campaigns over the first 7 months of the pandemic. What an incredibly interesting paper! Congrats Nora, a must read!
CSDE Affiliate Isabelle Cohen recently discussed her recent work on improving tax compliance in a low-capacity environment with the Uganda Revenue Authority at a webinar hosted by Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Mindlab, Pakistan’s first behavioural insights unit on Thursday, Nov 3rd at 6:30 AM. Check out the link here for a Facebook replay of her talk. Exciting to see Isabelle bringing her work to new audiences around the globe!
CSDE Affiliate Mary Kay Gugerty and co-authors Lehn Benjamin and Alnoor Ebfrahim recently published an article in Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly (NVSQ), “Nonprofit Organizations and the Evaluation of Social Impact: A Research Program to Advance Theory and Practice.” The article connects the fields of nonprofit studies and evaluation to develop a research program intended to support nonprofit leaders to productively engage in evaluation as well as to advance a meso-level theory of nonprofit evaluation that recognizes the diverse ways nonprofits contribute to social change. Great job Mary Kay and team!
Congrats to CSDE Affiliate Rachel Fyall and co-authors on their new piece in Nonprofit Voluntary Sector Quarterly(NVSQ), “Exploring Nonprofit Advocacy Research Methods and Design: A Systematic Review of the Literature.” It is a really smart piece and is a wonderful example of collaboration across our school’s community.