CSDE External Affiliate Laura Lindberg (Rutgers) recently published an article in JAMA Network Open on adolescents’ and young adults’ receipt of person-centered contraceptive counseling (PCCC). Lindberg and co-authors drew on US population-based data on self-identified female respondents from the 2022 to 2023 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG). PCCC was low across all age groups. Adolescents (aged 15 to 19 years) were less likely to receive PCCC than adults aged 25 years and older, but adolescents who did receive PCCC reported higher rates of preferred method use. They also addressed limits in this newest NSFG data, which can not be pooled with prior cycles of the survey.

When: January 21, 2026 from 10 – 11 am

Where: Raitt 223 and on Zoom

Title: What do we lose if we lose the DHS? Quantifying research impact with digital trace data (Dennis Feehan)

The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program has been a cornerstone of global health and demographic research for four decades, providing essential data in contexts where official statistics are sparse or unavailable. Following the unexpected termination of USAID funding in 2025, the future of the DHS is in flux. This study investigates what the global research community stands to lose if the DHS permanently ceases. We assembled a corpus of scholarly works that analyze or refer to DHS data, sourced from OpenAlex. We augment our corpus using methods taken from natural language processing and network analysis, and validate the results. We find that DHS data has had a large and sustained impact on scholarly research: we found over 70,000 research works spanning a wide range of social science and health disciplines. We also find that DHS papers have contributed disproportionately to UN Sustainable Development Goals and that they focus on understudied topics and regions. Our preliminary analysis offers just a glimpse of the insights made possible by this rich digital dataset. As this paper moves forward, we aim to more clearly demonstrate what makes the DHS uniquely valuable and what would be lost if it disappears.

Dennis Feehan is a demographer and a quantitative social scientists. My research interests lie at the intersection of networks, demography, and quantitative methodology. I’m an Associate Professor of Demography at UC Berkeley, and also the Director of Berkeley’s Social Science Data Lab (D-Lab).

The Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG) at the University of Washington meets weekly to provide an interdisciplinary forum for discussions of digital and computational approaches to demographic research. The workshop features a range of paper presentations, methods demonstrations, software tutorials and professional development. The CDWG is sponsored by the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE), the eScience Institute and OBSSR T32 Grant #1T32HD101442-01. We welcome anyone with interest in computational demography (broadly defined).

NextGenPop is an undergraduate program in population research that trains and nurtures the next generation of population scientists. The program includes a 2-week, in-person, on-campus summer experience and subsequent virtual components focused on research and professional development. The University of Minnesota is hosting the summer 2026 program in Minneapolis, MN, from June 7 – 19. Participants receive a $1,000 stipend as well as funds to cover travel and living expenses. Classroom instruction and hands-on applications address contemporary social and policy issues in population research, including health disparities, family change, immigration, and social mobility. For more information, please visit the website and application page.

In this paper Komisarow estimates the impact of specialized instructional support personnel—school nurses and social workers—on student outcomes using quasi-experimental variation from North Carolina’s Child and Family Support Teams (CFST) program. The CFST program created two sources of natural variation: directly treated schools received substantial state-funded staffing increases in the form of highly trained two-person teams composed of a school nurse and a school social worker. At the same time, other schools in the same districts experienced more modest staffing increases indirectly through reallocations of existing personnel and district-led compensatory equalization. Using event-study and difference-in-differences designs, Komisarow shows that expanded access to support personnel reduced student absences and chronic absenteeism. In directly treated schools, annual absences decreased by 0.4 days (6%) and chronic absenteeism declined by 0.9 percentage points (12%) among high-risk students. In indirectly treated schools, absences fell by 0.2 days annually (3%) among all students, though effects on chronic absenteeism were not statistically significant. Thus, while large, specialized staffing increases generated substantial improvements for the highest-risk students, smaller and less specialized increases produced modest but broader benefits across all students. These findings demonstrate that school support staff play a critical role in addressing barriers to student learning.

Sarah Komisarow is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics in the Sanford School of Public Policy, a Faculty Affiliate of the Center for Child & Family Policy, and a Faculty Scholar at the Duke University Population Research Institute. She is an applied microeconomist with research interests in the economics of education and K-12 education policy. She graduated from Duke University with a B.A. in Public Policy Studies in 2008 and from the University of Chicago with a M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics in 2012 and 2016, respectively. Her personal website can be accessed here: https://sites.google.com/site/sarahkomisarow/home