Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

The CSDE Data Services Core offers data management consulting to faculty, staff, and students studying demography and other social sciences.

We can facilitate demographic research by assisting CSDE affiliates throughout the research process:

  • Developing data collection strategies
  • Data collection, cleaning, reformatting, and management
  • Grant proposal and manuscript preparation

To make an appointment for data services consultation, use the following e-mail link to request data services consultation. In order for the statistics core team to route your request to the best staff member, please include as much detail in your message as possible, such as:

  • your research question(s)
  • the nature and source of your data
  • what outputs you are trying to develop
  • specific methods you are interested in

Services

CSDE can provide data services, as time permits, for short-term projects of CSDE faculty affiliates. In addition, we can supervise graduate students or research staff doing data science. Staff are also available to have some of their time “bought out” to do longer-term data analysis on grant-funded projects.

Detailed listings of our services are below.

Data services

Some of the services CSDE can provide:

  • Data collection strategies
  • Relational database design and analysis
  • Data formatting and restructuring for efficient analysis
  • Data cleaning
  • Extraction of variables from larger data sets

Grant Proposals

CSDE can provide comprehensive grant-proposal support. For statistical grants, we can help with research conceptualization and design, perform preliminary and power analyses, and assist in writing the data-analysis section.

If you receive assistance from CSDE, we would appreciate you noting our partial support in the budget in order to help with the data management, data analysis, and/or statistical analyses of the research project.

For more information visit Grants and other services.

Applied Workshops

Topics and techniques in data management are included in CSDE’s roster of workshops

Projects

CSDE data services support a variety of student, staff, and faculty-led research. Click below for more details on some recent research.

Sugary beverage tax in Seattle

Seattle’s Sweetened Beverage Tax is an excise tax of 1.75 cents per ounce on sugar-sweetened beverages and is one of the highest beverage taxes in the U.S. These taxes are hypothesized to affect consumption by raising prices, thus prompting decreased demand for sweetened beverages.

CSDE has supported this research through development of sampling methodologies, GIS measurements, and processing of shopping receipt data.

  1. Jones-Smith JC, Walkinshaw LP, Oddo V, Knox M, Neuhouser ML, Hurvitz PM, Saelens BE, Chan N. Impact of a sweetened beverage tax on beverage prices in Seattle, WA. Econ Hum Biol. 2020. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1570677X20301878

Accelerometry, GPS, and spatio-temporal databases

CSDE can provide help in study design, collection, and analysis of data from GPS data loggers, accelerometers, and other time-indexed devices. These data can be used to generate high-resolution estimates of time spent in different levels of physical activity and/or in different locations. These examples illustrate methodological issues:

  1. Hurvitz, P. M. et al. (2014) ‘Emerging Technologies for Assessing Physical Activity Behaviors in Space and Time’, Frontiers in Public Health, 2, p. 15. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2014.00002/full
  2. Scully JY, Vernez Moudon A, Hurvitz PM, Aggarwal A, Drewnowski A. A time-based objective measure of exposure to the food environment. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2019;16(6):14. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/16/7/1180

And this presents an analysis of walking and neighborhood walkability based on combined GPS and accelerometry data:

  1. Hwang L-D, Hurvitz PM, Duncan GE. Cross Sectional Association between Spatially Measured Walking Bouts and Neighborhood Walkability. Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2016;13(4):1-11. https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/13/4/412/pdf

Moving to Health

The Moving to Health Study is centered at Kaiser Permanente of Washington (KPWA, formerly Group Health) and investigates the effect of changes in built and social environments on weight change and metabolic status for a large cohort of patients within the KPWA system. CSDE staff have supported address geocoding and measurement of built environment characteristics for this very large cohort.

  1. Mooney SJ, Bobb JF, Hurvitz PM, Anau J, Theis MK, Drewnowski A, et al. Impact of Built Environments on Body Weight (the Moving to Health Study): Protocol for a Retrospective Longitudinal Observational Study Corresponding Author : JMIR Res Protoc. 2020;9(5):1–14. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7268006/
  2. Drewnowski A, Arterburn DE, Zane J, Aggarwal A, Gupta S, Hurvitz PM, et al. The Moving to Health (M2H) approach to natural experiment research: A paradigm shift for studies on built environment and health. SSM – Popul Heal [Internet]. 2018;7(100345):1–11. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2018.100345

Other Resources

Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences (CSSS)

The purpose of CSSS is to galvanize collaborative research between social scientists and statisticians and to offer graduate statistics courses for students in the social sciences. In addition, CSSS offers statistical consulting.

Center for Social Science Computation and Research (CSSCR)

CSSCR is a computer resource center providing facilities and support for social science departments at UW. The center is located on the sixth floor of Condon Hall, where there is a computer lab as well as graduate student consultants. The center offers many introductory courses in statistical software and maintains a large archive of social science data.

UW eScience Institute:

The eScience Institute empowers researchers and students in all fields to answer fundamental questions through the use of large, complex, and noisy data. The eScience Institute brings expertise and helps researchers at UW to leverage data science tools, methods, and best practices in their research and in their grant proposals.