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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Jones and Rowhani-Rahbar Publishes Research on Mentoring Interventions to Prevent Firearm Violence

CSDE Affiliates Kristian Jones  (Social Work) and Ali Rowhani-Rahbar (Epidemiology) recently published a study in Prevention Science that examined the components of mentorship interventions in community violence intervention (CVI) programs used to prevent firearm violence among vulnerable young people, particularly Black youth who are at high risk for firearm homicide in the USA. The research team conducted interviews with mentors and program administrators of CVI programs in Washington State to examine their insights on the components of mentoring interventions that could work towards preventing firearm violence. Jones, Rowhani-Rahbar and co-authors then used constructivist grounded theory to develop a framework to capture these components.

Shah Highlights Four Water Insecurity Concerns about Datacenters Driving the AI Revolution

CSDE Affiliate Sameer Shah (Environmental and Forest Sciences) just published an article in PLOS Water that identifies four water insecurity concerns in the U.S and proposes areas for future research. Shah synthesized public reporting and legal filings involving non-governmental organizations, citizen coalition groups, investigative reporters, and individual citizens. These concerns include how datacenters’ development and operation can (i) undermine the democratization of water governance; (ii) contribute to unsustainable water use and rising utility costs; (iii) reduce the flexibility and resilience of water use decision-making; and (iv) increase water use across scales as a result of rising electricity demand.

Lindberg Publishes Article on Adolescents’ and Young Adults’ Receipt of Person-centered Contraceptive Counseling

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.

*New* Submit Public Comments by January 20: Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS)

PAA encourages you to submit public comments here by January 20, 2026 to advocate for the continuation of the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring Systems (PRAMS) and co-sponsored a briefing to show its support. PRAMS data collection is set to expire in March 2026. A federal public comment period is currently open.  The CDC must review public input to ensure that extending the program is useful, necessary, and not a burden on the government or public. If you would like ideas for how to structure your comment, check out this template from the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee.

 

*New* CSDE Computational Demography Working Group (CDWG): Dennis Feehan (01/21/26)

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).

 

 

*New* CSSS Seminar: Estimating Place-Based and Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Life Expectancy and Cause-Specific Mortality in the US – Laura Lindberg (01/21/26)

CSDE Affiliate Laura Dwyer-Lindgren (Health Metrics Sciences) will deliver this week’s CSSS Seminar in Savery 409 on Wednesday, January 21 from 12:30-1:30 pm. Seminars are available to anyone interested and are presented in a hybrid format. To attend a seminar virtually, please join here.
 An email with login information will be sent to you upon registration.

Mortality rates differ widely across racial and ethnic populations and locations, and these patterns vary by cause of death and over time. To better understand these patterns in the US, we estimated life expectancy and cause-specific mortality for approximately 175 causes of death by county, race and ethnicity, and year (2000–2023). This seminar will focus on the methods used for this analysis and present preliminary findings.

Laura Dwyer-Lindgren, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Health Metric Sciences at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on quantifying and describing geographic patterns and disparities in health outcomes, and how other types of health disparities are patterned spatially and intersect with place-based disparities. At IHME, Dr. Dwyer-Lindgren leads the US Health Disparities team which focuses on describing levels and trends in burden of disease in the US by county, racial and ethnic group, and socioeconomic status.