Archives: Affiliates

Sara Curran is director of the UW’s Center for Studies in Demography & Ecology.  Recently, Sara was selected to join the Executive Council of UW President Ana Mari Cauce’s new Population Health Initiative.  This exciting endeavor provides an outstanding opportunity to amplify UW’s substantial health research, training, and applications across the entire campus on behalf of local and global healthy outcomes. She investigates how social contexts, social categories and social structures of power and hierarchies shape human behavior and how human behavior and human interactions reshape social contexts, social categories and social structures.  Sara focus these general investigations around migration, gender, family, demographics and ecological well-being in developing country settings, primarily in Southeast Asia and the U.S.  Her methodological approaches include quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods, and program evaluation.

Stewart Tolnay’s recent research has focused on two broad topics: (1) the Great Migration of U.S. southerners to the North and West and (2) the history of racial violence in the American South. His work on the Great Migration was supported by grants from NICHD and NSF and has been published in highly regarded journals such as the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Social Science Research, and American Journal of Sociology, as well as in his book The Bottom Rung: African American Family Life on Southern Farms (University of Illinois Press, 1999) which received the Otis Dudley Duncan Book Award from the Population Section of the American Sociological Association. Tolnay’s research on the Great Migration has led to important new findings, some of which contradicted conventional wisdom regarding the phenomenon. For example, his research (along with collaborators Trent Alexander, Suzanne Eichenlaub, Katie Genadek, Christine Leibbrand, and Catherine Massey) reveals minimal economic returns to first- and second-generation migrants. Tolnay’s second area of recent research extended his earlier collaboration with E.M. Beck on the environmental correlates of the intensity of southern lynching by exploiting Beck’s new confirmed inventory of threatened lynchings. The findings from that line of work have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology and Social Science History. In a closely related project, and with support from the National Science Foundation, Tolnay and Amy Kate Bailey successfully linked roughly 1,000 lynch victims (approximately 45% of all named victims) to their records in the original enumerators’ manuscripts from the census that immediately preceded their deaths. This linkage allowed the first description of the personal characteristics of a large sample of lynch victims. This new, linked dataset served as the empirical basis for Bailey’s and Tolnay’s award winning book, Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence (University of North Carolina Press, 2015) as well as for articles in the American Sociological Review and Historical Methods. Very recently, Tolnay has drawn from his academic research on these general topics to write his first novel, Less Than Righteous (Kindle Direct Publishing, 2020: https://www.amazon.com/author/stewarttolnay

Kyle Crowder’s research focuses on the dynamics and consequences of residential stratification. Under this broad umbrella, a central focus of his most recent work has been on the micro-level residential processes shaping persistent patterns of residential segregation and environmental inequality. His research provides insights into racial and ethnic differences in the likelihood of moving out of, and into, neighborhoods characterized by varying levels of population diversity, socioeconomic disadvantage, and physical pollution; the ways in which these disparate mobility processes are shaped by differences in individual- and family-level characteristics, as well as the broader economic, social, and demographic context of residential markets; and the repercussions of these mobility patterns for group differences in access to residential resources. His work also assesses the effects of these neighborhood conditions on individual outcomes, including educational attainment and adolescent development. In the last ten years he has published work on these topics in a number of top outlets, including the American Sociological Review, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Science Research, Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Marriage and the Family, and Population Research and Policy Review. Crowder is currently involved in several ongoing projects related to these themes. With Liam Downey (University of Colorado), he is utilizing data from a variety of sources and rapidly advancing techniques of spatial analysis to provide the first multi-level analyses of environmental inequality, examining the relative influences of racially-differentiated migration patterns and decisions related to the siting of pollution points on racial and ethnic differences in exposure to environmental hazards. This project has received support from NICHD. With Matt Hall (University of Illinois – Chicago) and Stewart Tolnay (University of Washington), Crowder is also assessing how emerging patterns of immigrant settlement have reshaped processes of residential mobility for native-born householders, and how these patterns of mobility vary across traditional and newer immigrant destinations. An important aspect of this and other work by Crowder is the move beyond the tendency in past research to treat neighborhoods as isolated geographic islands, detached from the broader spatial structures in which they are located, to examine the influence of conditions in surrounding neighborhoods on individual outcomes. In a related project, also funded by NICHD, Crowder and Scott South (SUNY-Albany) are examining the effects of metropolitan social, political, and economic conditions on patterns of mobility between increasingly diverse neighborhoods.

Steven Goodreau’s research has two related themes: how does the complex biobehavioral ecology of HIV produce disparities in disease burden within and between populations; and how can we make more statistically sound use of social network data to understand the structure of populations and the flow of infections or other entities within them? Since joining the UW faculty seven years ago, he has published on these topics in Demography, AIDS, the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Genetics, Social Networks, the Journal of Infectious Disease, AIDS and Behavior, and eight others. Goodreau currently has five ongoing projects. The first, part of NIH’s Modeling Prevention Packages Program (MP3), aims to identify ways to better package and target HIV prevention interventions for men who have sex with men (MSM) in the Americas. Within this large multidisciplinary team, Goodreau is director of the modeling group, which is analyzing data on sexual behavior, demography, testing, and treatment among MSM in the US, Peru and Brazil; and using these data to parameterize dynamic HIV transmission network models to explore the potential impact of a host of biological and behavioral intervention packages. The second project, funded by the Gates Foundation, entails extending this analysis to MSM in India and Kenya, to begin developing a more refined comparative understanding of the nature of MSM HIV epidemics globally. The third project, Metromates, integrates behavioral data on post-HIV-diagnosis behavior change among MSM with virological data on acute infection into network models to explore the potential impact of different HIV testing strategies on reduction in risk behavior at the point when men are most infectious. The fourth project, just beginning, extends the work that the Social Network Modeling Group (also including Martina Morris at UW; Mark Handcock at UCLA, Carter Butts at UC-Irvine, and Dave Hunter at Penn State) have done over the past decade on developing user-friendly statistically grounded models and tools for social network analysis. The group’s current R packages (www.statnetproject.org) will be expanded to incorporate additional dynamics, forms of missing data, and epidemic modeling tools; the project also has a strong emphasis on providing training in these tools. The final project, A Kenya Free of AIDS (Martina Morris, PI), is a capacity-building grant for HIV prevention in Kenya; Goodreau’s role is to train African scholars in epidemic modeling so as to be better consumers of the literature that plays a major role in determining prevention and care priorities in sub-Saharan Africa, using a variety of novel pedagogical approaches that he and Dr. Morris have developed.

Robert Plotnick has pursued a broad line of research on issues at the intersection of family demography and U.S. poverty. One set of studies examined the determinants of non-marital childbearing and it relationship to child support enforcement, young women’s human capital, and adolescent expectations and desires about marriage and parenthood. These studies appeared in the Journal of Labor Economics, American Sociological Review, Journal of Family Issues, Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Family Planning Perspectives, the Journal of Adolescence and Journal of Marriage and the Family. His analysis of the trends and causes of poverty and the effects of antipoverty policies appeared in Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Poverty. Related earlier work appeared in Progress Against Poverty: A Review of the 1964-1974 Decade, Journal of Economic Literature, Social Service Review, Public Policy, Policy Studies Journal and The Child Welfare Challenge: Policy, Practice and Research, a textbook for courses in child welfare. His study of whether children from welfare families obtain less schooling appeared in Demography. His study (with Jennifer Romich and Matthew Dunbar) of highway tolls’ financial impact on low-income families appeared in the Journal of Urban Affairs. Plotnick was the lead editor of Old Assumptions, New Realities: Ensuring Economic Security for Working Families in the 21st Century, published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2011. The book argues that the demographic and economic assumptions that underlay the core U.S. welfare state programs adopted 40 to 75 years ago do not mirror the current realities of the labor market, family structure, and family behavior that today’s working families face. The chapters draw on this premise to re-evaluate existing social welfare programs and consider new policies that could better promote economic security for today’s working families. His most recent research, in collaboration with members of the Seattle Minimum Wage Study, examines the effect of Seattle’s minimum wage ordinance on labor market outcomes.

Jennie Romich is a Professor of Social Welfare at the UW School of Social Work and faculty director of the West Coast Poverty Center. She studies resources and economic well-being in families with an emphasis on low-income workers, household budgets, and families’ interactions with public policy. Her recent projects include research into effective marginal tax rates created by means-tested benefit schedules and the tax system; an investigation of income of families involved with the child welfare system; and mixed-method evaluations of the Seattle Paid Safe and Sick Time Ordinance and $15 minimum wage.  She co-leads the national effort on “Reducing Extreme Economic Inequality” for the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare’s Grand Challenges Initiative and co-chairs a national research network on “Poverty, Employment, and Self-Sufficiency” through the Collaborative of U.S. Poverty Centers.

Throughout her career, Bettina Shell-Duncan has been conducting mixed method biocultural research on maternal and child health in sub-Saharan Africa. Her earlier research focus was on nutrition, immunity and morbidity among nomadic children in Kenya, the health effects of settlement of former nomads. More recently, her research has focuses on the study of female genital cutting (FGC). She has examined the cultural context and health consequences of FGC among Rendille women in northern Kenya, as well as debates over medicalization of the practice. Through her work with WHO and UNICEF, Bettina has examined the politics of the international campaign to end FGC, and the implication of adopting a health and human rights framework. She has recently been conducting mixed method research on the theoretical and empirical dimensions of the dynamics of behavior change with respect to FGC in Senegal and The Gambia. This work examines the outcome of various strategies aimed at ending FGC, such as legislation and various community-based interventions, and evaluates their correspondence with leading theories of behavior change. She has recently become involved in an international research consortium, funded for 5 years by the U.K.’s Department of International Development, that will investigate factors influencing decision-making regarding FGC and intervention strategies in 6 African countries.

Aimée Dechter’s research interests span demography, sociology of the life course and the family, inequality, and methods and statistics. Her work generally focuses on the interrelationships of family, gender, work and income, and the methodological problems that arise when analyzing non-experimental data.

Aimée is also an Affiliate of the West Coast Poverty Center.

James Anderson’s research focuses on models of ecological and biological processes from a mechanistic perspective, specifically: (1) migration of organisms, (2) decision processes, and mortality processes. For three decades he has studied the effects of hydrosystems and water resource allocations on salmon and other fish species. He has developed computer models of the migration of juvenile and adult salmon through hydrosystems and heads the DART website, an internet database serving real-time environmental and fisheries data on the Columbia River. His other research interests include mathematical studies in ecosystems, biodemography, decision processes and animal behavior. He has served on a number of regional and national panels and has testified numerous times before Congress on the impacts of hydrosystems on fisheries resources. Anderson contributions to CSDE involve the development of models of mortality based on the loss of vitality through intrinsic ageing and extrinsic environmental challenges. Key works are published in Theoretical Population Biology, American Naturalist, Ecological Monographs,  Demography and Population Studies.

Prior to arriving at the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington, Seattle, Scott Allard was an affiliate of the Population Research Center at the University of Chicago. His expertise in social policy bridges a wide range of topic areas, with particular emphasis on issues of poverty, place, and safety net policy in America. Scott received his PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan in 1999 with concentration in American politics, public policy, the American welfare state, and quantitative methods. Throughout his career, he has been embedded in multi-disciplinary research centers, which has allowed him to develop a broad conceptual and methodological toolkit to interrogate relationships between place, poverty, and safety net assistance in the American context.