We’re excited to announce that CSDE Affiliates Anjum Hajat, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Crystal Hill, Professor at the Evans School, and Marieka Klawitter, Professor at the Evans School, are the recipients of a Royalty Research Fund Award. Their pilot study will explore the connections between family finances, stress, and health for low wage workers.
Hall, Hajat, and Klawitter will implement financial coaching in a low wage workplace to assess its feasibility and the workers’ take up and satisfaction with the intervention. They also plan to will assess family finances and general and financial stress for workers through pre and post surveys. In future work, they will use multiple worksites and measure the impact of coaching on household finances and levels of stress, including physiological measures. Once fully realized, the study will strengthen the evidence about the links between financial stress and health and the importance of the social determinants of health.
Ultimately, Hall, Hajat, and Klawitter plan to build on this work, along with Karin Martin, to look at the impacts of criminal justice system involvement on health through the pathways of financial stress via legal financial obligations and employment impacts.
CSDE’s development core provided early input to the team as they developed their concept into a research proposal. You can learn more about the Royalty Research Fund here.
Story updated 7/22/2018 to reflect the addition of project team faculty.
Fellows identify and work with a Nature Conservancy mentor and a senior scholar (or scholars) from one of the NatureNet Partner Universities to develop a research program. Eligible individuals will not be employed as a postdoctoral student at the start of this fellowship. Applicants employed in non-postdoctoral positions that will continue into the fellowship period should address in their application how they will manage the responsibilities of both positions.
Each Fellow will receive a non-negotiable annual salary of $50,000 plus benefits and an annual research and travel budget of approximately $25,000.
University Partners (Full Postdoctoral Fellowship)
The program is run in partnership with universities that represent traditional and non-traditional disciplines relevant to conservation science. Applicants must identify one university as their home institution and may submit only one application, but are encouraged to suggest collaborations with additional universities and institutions. This year’s participating universities for the full fellowship are: the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society; Columbia University’s Earth Institute*; Science for Nature and People Partnership; Stanford University; University of California – Los Angeles’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability; University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, University of Virginia, and the University of Queensland.
* For those applying for a fellowship through Columbia University, this must be the first post-doc position you will hold.
Seattle’s average household income has increased; however, one KUOW listener wanted to know just how many of those households fit into the nation’s top 1 percent income bracket.
KUOW turned to CSDE Affiliate Mark Long, Associate Dean for Research at the Evans School, for the answer. He reported that in 2016, 1 percenters earned more than $470,000. 9,245 Seattle households fit this description in 2016 – three times the national average.
Click below to learn more about Long’s analysis and to see accompanying data visualizations.
Are decades-long careers the norm for Major League Baseball pitchers – or is the true timeline shorter? CSDE Research Affiliate David Swanson, Professor of Sociology at the University of California Riverside sought to find out. Although estimating working life expectancies is typically seen as a labor-intensive task, Swanson and colleagues Jack Baker, Jeff Tayman, and Lucky Tedrow set out to find a more straightforward solution.
The group used cohort change ratios in their estimations, which enabled them to forecast using the same data used in working life expectancy. Explains Swanson: “We used pitchers in the 1980–1981 season because that gave almost everyone enough time to finish their careers. But we excluded those who had interrupted careers, such as those who played for a bit but might have been sent back down to the minor leagues for more training or because of injury. We wanted to look only at uninterrupted careers in the MLB, and it turns out that, on average, they’re really short.”
How short, though? Swanson and his colleagues estimate that the average professional working life of a baseball pitcher is just 3.99 years.
Swanson believes that this approach can be used to assess the working life of other sports by position: “We suspect we can do something similar with the types of positions that are in American football, other types of football, and basketball and see what happens. We suspect that most other Major League sports are not going to be too dissimilar. We don’t think there are really long careers in a lot of these sports where there’s much more contact than in Major League Baseball.”
CSDE Affiliate William Zumeta, Professor at the Evans School, researches the factors that shape state support for higher education. This summer, he presented on both the structural and political factors that impact financial support for higher education – and how they have changed over time.
In June, Zumeta was the keynote speaker at “Volatility in State Spending for Higher Education,” an AERA-sponsored conference held at the University of Illinois. In this address, he explained the structural and political factors behind both the volatility and the long-term decline in state support for higher education. He also assessed the merits and drawbacks of various proposals to mitigate volatility. In the end, dynamic political factors limit the extent to which volatility can be reduced.
In July, Zumeta and Dr. Alicia Kinne-Clawson coauthored “The State Higher Education Executive Officer and Higher Education Finance and Policy: Structure, Policy Orientation and Relationships Matter,” in a just-published book entitled The State Higher Education Officer and the Public Good: Developing New Leadership for Improved Policy, Practice and Research. The chapter reviews the recent empirical literature on the relationship between state higher education governance structural factors and financial support of higher education. Then, they provide case studies of State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) influence in Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Maryland. Their conclusion: that SHEOOS’ relationships with their governors are a critical factor in effectiveness.
A quick reminder for all members of the CSDE community who use WiFi at UW: make sure to connect to the Eduroam network. As UW’s encrypted Wi-Fi network, Eduram offers enhanced security for your wireless connection. Be sure to configure your devices to access this service.
Please read the full story for more information about the Eduroam service and instructions on how to configure it on your Wi-Fi enabled device.
Designed to complement formal course instruction, CSDE Workshops are offered in a shorter, more accessible format responsive to the specific demographic research needs of CSDE’s Trainees and Faculty Affiliates. Join us for:
- Introduction to Graphics in R: Tuesday, July 10th, 1:30-3:30pm
- R Programming for Sample Size Calculations: Friday, July 20th, 1:30-3:30pm
Click below to register for each workshop.
9-to-5 work shifts aren’t the only solution for busy families. CSDE Trainee and Shanahan Fellow Christine Leibbrand, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, examined the benefits of non-standard schedules in “Flexibility or Constraint? The Implications of Mothers’ and Fathers’ Nonstandard Schedules for Children’s Behavioral Outcomes.”
Leibbrand found that consistent working hours–no matter what time of day–provide families with flexibility and can even improve children’s behavior. She focused on two-parent families in which one parent worked a non-standard shift. Her findings include:
- A mother’s night shift tended to have benefits for boys and girls, especially when they’re young
- A mother’s rotating shift, or a split shift — say, going to work for a few hours in the morning, and again in the evening — was associated with greater problems among boys of all ages, and among older girls
- A father’s rotating or split shift was associated with more behavior problems among girls, particularly younger girls
- A father’s night shift tended to coincide with behavioral benefits among boys
Her research has been featured in USA Today, The Times of India, and UW News. You can read the study, published in the June issue of the Journal of Family Issues, below.
Although immigrants to the United States are typically healthier than their U.S.-born counterparts, the health of immigrants declines with duration of stay in the U.S. A team of researchers—which includes CSDE Affiliate Butch de Castro and CSDE Biodemography Director Eleanor Brindle—seeks to distinguish the effects of acculturation versus secular trends.
Butch de Castro, Professor and Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion at the School of Nursing, co-authored the paper with Gilbert Gee, Professor at UCLA’s Department of Community Health Sciences. Eleanor Brindle is consulting and providing lab work for the project. Health of Philippine Emigrants Study (HoPES) is funded with support from CSDE.
An article on their research was recently published in BMC Public Health, which you can read below.
The U.S. is in the midst of a major demographic shift. In a dozen years the last of the Baby Boomers—which have dominated American society for decades—will reach retirement age; meanwhile the oldest of the so-called Millennials, today’s young adults, will have arrived at middle age. What does the rise of the Millennial generation mean for America? How will growing ethnic and racial diversity shape American society? What trends are implicated in this momentum shift—namely, how do Millennials’ job prospects, educational achievements, and marital trends compare to previous generations? Join us for a fascinating discussion of the Millennial generation, featuring presentations by two leading researchers in population trends.