Recently, eight CSDE trainees from five departments or schools shared their latest work and demographic insights at the first CSDE Trainee Lightning Talks and Poster Session. The high-quality research and presentations were well received by over 60 attendees who contributed to lively conversations. Maria Vignau-Loria was recognized with the best poster award for her work on “the health of returned migrants in Mexico.”

The event was moderated by Sociology graduate student Erin Carll and held in the Research Commons of the Allen Library South, where all posters will remain on display throughout the Winter Quarter. All posters from the session are also now available online in PDF format; you can view these on the page below.

Congratulations to Connor Gilroy and Jessica Godwin, the recipients of the CSDE Big Data to Knowledge (BD2K) Fellowships, funded by CSDE’s NIH T32 institutional Grant!

Connor, a first-year graduate student in the Department of Sociology, has research interests at the intersection of Sociology, Demography and Data Science. As part of his fellowship, Connor will be studying the relationship between online and offline LGBTQ communities. The project is intended to combine online and offline data to understand the impact of the development of online communities on offline behavior. It is an important topic that is tied to the well-being of populations, which is a central research theme at CSDE. Connor’s CSDE Affiliate mentors are Kate Stovel and Emilio Zagheni.

Jessica, a fourth-year graduate student in the Department of Statistics, has an MA in Statistics and is interested in statistical problems with applications in demography and the social sciences. As part of her fellowship, Jessica will be studying spatial and temporal variation in health outcomes in a global health setting. She will be combining large amounts of surveyed health data (millions of monthly records in each survey year) with covariate information on a fine spatial gird, and to subsequently smooth with space-time Gaussian process (GP) models.  She will also be producing global small area estimates of under-five mortality, addressing statistical issues that inevitably arise when fitting a model to different data, and working on interpreting and synthesizing the findings. This research would bring demography research on small area estimates of health and under five mortality up to the standards of the state of the art in spatial estimation, along with allowing for the inclusion of covariates. Her CSDE Affiliate mentors are Jon Wakefield and Tyler McCormick.

Matthew Dunbar, Assistant Director of CSDE, recently published work on surveillance of HIV assisted partner services (aPS) using routine health information systems (HIS) in Kenya. The utilization of HIS for this purpose in sub-Saharan is lacking for a variety of reasons, but this research seeks to improve knowledge about its scope and quality. The team concluded that such surveillance could feasibly use new technologies and expand into HIV registries throughout the region. Full results are available below.

Thanks to CSDE’s research services, the team was able to leverage survey design tools, programming support, and data collection using the Open Data Kit (ODK) platform on Android cell phones. CSDE offers researchers a variety of assistance throughout every stage of their work—find out how your next study can benefit!

Do Recent Declines in U.S. Life Expectancy Signal Bad News for Healthy Life Expectancy?

Life expectancy for non-Hispanic white (henceforth white) Americans with less than high school education has fallen in recent years—particularly for women – while life expectancy has increased substantially for the college educated population. However, the extent to which the declines/increases in life expectancy translate into healthy life expectancy remains unclear.

Mark Hayward and his team combine data from the Health and Retirement Study and U.S. Vital Statistics, using the Sullivan method, to decompose the change in total life expectancy (TLE) to healthy life expectancy (HLE) and disabled life expectancy (DLE) between 2000 and 2010, specific to gender and education groups. They measured disabled life expectancy using both severe (ADL) and less severe (IADL) disability prevalence. Consistent with previous research, they find a modest downward/stable TLE change in the US is concentrated at the bottom end of the education distribution for whites and at ages prior to age 65. Although there was little change in TLE, substantial gains in DLE and losses in HLE were observed, due to the increased rates of disability (especially ADL disability) before age 70. Among the college educated, TLE increased substantially during the decade, especially among males. HLE also increased over the decade, with much of the increase from declining mortality after age 70. Much of the improvement in HLE from mortality was offset by a rise in IADL disability.

The demographic factors influencing HLE shifted from younger ages to advanced ages with higher levels of educational attainment. The findings show that focusing exclusively on the declines in life expectancy, and external causes of death, obfuscates a more dynamic decline in health among whites with low levels of education and significant improvements in health among highly educated persons.

Schedule a meeting with Dr. Mark Hayward here.