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.

Since fall 2014, sixty students have formally enrolled in the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods Program.  Congratulations to the eight members of the 2017-2018 cohort for completing their first year in the program!

Cathea Carey is an MPH student in the Department of Health Services. She is interested in mental health access and quality of care, the use of demographic methods to forecast health-care access, and policy reform of evidence-based practices for mental health disorders.

Brenda Gellner is a student in the Evans School Ph.D. program in Public Policy & Management. Her research interests include social and economic mobility, inequality, retirement preparation, long-term support and services, policies targeted at people with disabilities, and barriers to employment.

Youngwon Kim is a doctoral student in Learning Sciences and Human Development in the School of Education. Youngwon is interested in the impact of socioeconomic status and public policies on child learning and development and variation across ethnic groups and gender.

Bradley Kramer completed his first year in the Ph.D. Program in Health Services. He is interested in the integration of evidenced-based programming into clinical practice and is currently working on developing and diffusing community health-worker interventions for chronic disease.

Max McDonald recently received an MPA from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. He is interested in the political and economic determinants of international migration. Max is interested in conducting research on the migration patterns of the Filipino diaspora. In the fall, he will begin a Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) Fellowships to study Tagalog.

Yohan Min is a doctoral student in the College of Built Environments. He is interested in studying resilient and sustainable infrastructure systems in the built environment to promote community resilience by encouraging the deployment of renewable energy and innovative management systems in consideration of invisible costs of environmental externalities and human health and private investment opportunities.

Emily Pollock is a doctoral student in anthropology. She is a biological anthropologist and is interested in infectious disease epidemiology and human and disease ecology, in particular, social and sexual networks, and the spread of infectious disease. Emily is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow.

Rebecca Rebbe is a Ph.D. Candidate in Social Welfare in the UW School of Social Work. She studies the responses to child maltreatment through systems, laws, and policies. Rebecca is also an NIH Translational Research Trainee through the UW Institute of Translational Health Sciences.

Interested in joining the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods Program? Stay tuned for a call for applications for the 2018-2019 cohort in September, prior to the beginning of the quarter.

Congratulations to CSDE Fellow Michael Esposito for receiving his Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Washington! Dr. Esposito will begin a three-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Social Research’s Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan, beginning September 2018.

Mike established a research agenda in population health early on in graduate school that seeks to explain how and why race matters for health. His work describes the processes that generate racial disparities in health outcomes and addresses methodological difficulties by applying cutting-edge methods to unique data. Specifically, Mike’s research connects health disparities to institutional and structural features related to race—for example, education, mass incarceration, and residential segregation).

In his innovative dissertation, “Interwoven Social Determinants:  Race, Education, and Health in the United States,” Mike interrogates the well-documented heterogeneity in the health-protective effects of education in the US. This research describes the processes that give rise to smaller health protective effects of education in the black population than the white population. To estimate the effects of education on health, the study employs machine/statistical learning methodologies and techniques that allow for causal(-like) inferences from observational data. Mike examined different mechanisms, including the role of income in explaining black-white differences in the educational gradient in health.

Mike’s paper in Longitudinal and Life Course Studies with his CSDE mentors, Jerald Herting and Hedwig Lee, and other co-authors estimates the impact of early adult incarceration on health. In another paper that will be published soon, Mike, and his coauthors Frank Edwards and Hedwig Lee, explicate racial-disparities in police-involved mortality (i.e., deaths, of civilians, resulting from interactions with law-enforcement) by examining how place or location factors into this important institutional and public health concern. The paper utilizes crowd-sourced data on fatal encounters to address several shortcomings in federal document of deaths involving police and uses Bayesian, multilevel models, with weakly informative priors to achieve precision on relatively sparse events.

In addition to his CSDE Fellowship and completing the Graduate Certificate in Demographic Methods, Mike completed a concentration in social statistics through the Center for Statistics and Social Sciences. Last year, Mike was also a Dissertation Fellow through the UW Graduate Opportunities and Minority Achievement Program (GO-MAP).