At the CSDE seminar on February 26th, Dr. Dennis Feehan will present “Estimating Adult Mortality Using Sampled Social Network Data: Evidence from Brazil”. Dr. Feehan will discuss his research on two leading approaches to estimating adult death rates: the state of the art sibling survival method and the newer network survival method. Dr. Feehan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Demography at the UC, Berkeley. He is an expert in social networks, demography, and quantitative methodology and has used a number of unique data sources and methods for his research.

Register for Dr. Feehan's Zoom seminar here. This quarter, CSDE is recording the seminar series and posting the links on its website. Visit our site here.

After the seminar, UW Anthropology PhD student Emily Pollock will facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Feehan. RSVP by emailing her at emilypo@uw.edu. (read more)

CSDE is offering two workshops on “Introduction to Survey Data Sources” (02/24) and “Agent Based Modeling in R” (03/05). Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register for our workshops and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington as well. If you miss a workshop, recordings will be available on our website for 3 months after the workshop. To register, click here.

CSDE Training Director  and Research Scientist Dr. Christine Leibbrand will lead the workshop on February 24th on accessing some major American demographic survey data sources. Participants will learn about a variety of longitudinal survey data sources that are (for the most part) publicly-available and easily accessible. These data sources will include: The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) and its Child Supplement (CNLSY); The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 (NLSY97); Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) and The Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Topics covered include their sampling strategies, the characteristics of their survey populations, the years they surveyed populations, an overview of the data included in these surveys, and an introduction into how to access and download the publicly available data and access restricted data. By the end of this workshop, participants will have a better understanding of longitudinal survey data sources that you might consider using for your future research projects. Dr. Leibbrand is uniquely qualified to offer this workshop, as she has analyzed and published analyses using all of these data sources.

CSDE Research Scientist Dr. Deven Hamilton will lead the workshop on March 5th on agent-based modeling in R. The workshop will  provide a basic introduction to Agent-Based Modeling (ABM) and will be divided into three sections. The first section will review and discuss the basic elements of ABMs and their application in a variety of fields including demography, sociology, anthropology, political science and public health. The second section of the course will work through examples of an ABM and reproduce the models in R. Finally, the workshop will discuss an example of a complex ABM using the statnet and EpiModel R packages. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to describe the unique features of ABM that make them distinct from other modeling approaches, write R functions to produce a simple ABM, and be familiar with additional R packages that provide functionality for ABM. (read more)

CSDE’s Executive Committee is pleased to introduce four of our new UW Faculty Affiliates:

• Daniel Casey– Epidemiologist, Public Health- Seattle & King County (PHSKC). Casey’s work focuses on creating and monitoring equitable metrics of residential displacement, local migration patterns, and neighborhood change as part of the Communities of Opportunity project. Casey joins CSDE as a regional affiliate.
• Horacio Duarte– Acting Instructor, Pediatrics: Infectious Disease; Acting Instructor, Allergy and Infectious Diseases, University of Washington. Duarte is a board certified physician with UW Medicine and a UW instructor of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. His research interests are in mathematical modeling and cost-effectiveness analysis to improve health policy and resource allocation decisions in low- and middle-income countries, with a current focus on HIV-related health outcomes. Duarte joins CSDE as a faculty affiliate.
• Kathie Friedman – Associate Professor, Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies; Adjunct Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Washington. Friedman's research focuses on comparative forced migrations and immigration, particularly to the United States and the EU, with a focus on ethnic and political incorporation. Her research has been funded by the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities, the UW Royalty Research Fund, and the Mellon Foundation. Friedman joins CSDE as a faculty affiliate.
• Emiko Tajima– Associate Professor, School of Social Work, University of Washington. Tajima’s scholarship focuses on the problem of interpersonal violence, seeking to identify points of intersection, cross-systems issues and to build knowledge regarding specialized populations to improve policies and service provision for victims and their children. She is the executive director of Partners for Our Children. Tajima joins as a CSDE faculty affiliate. (read more)

CSDE Fellow Jessica Godwin and CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield just published their research on “Space-Time Modeling of Child Mortality at the Admin-2 Level in Low and Middle Income Countries Context” in Statistics in Medicine.  Their work demonstrates innovative approaches in statistical methods for estimating child mortality when data are sparse or variably observed at different levels of aggregation and collected through different methodologies. They extend earlier work to provide estimates at the Admin-2 Level so as to improve information for targeted interventions to reduce child mortality. In the paper they describe four extensions to previous work: (i) combining summary birth history (SBH) data with first birth history (FBH) data, (ii) modeling on a yearly scale, to combine data on a yearly scale with data at coarser time scales, (iii) adjusting direct estimates in Admin‐2 areas where we do not observe any deaths due to small sample sizes, (iv) acknowledge differences in data sources by modeling potential bias arising from the various data sources. The methods are illustrated using household survey and census data from Kenya and Malawi, to produce mortality estimates from 1980 to the time of the most recent survey, and predictions to 2020. To read the article, click here. (read more)

CSDE Fellow Neal Marquez and CSDE Affiliate Jon Wakefield recently published “Harmonizing Child Mortality Data at Disparate Geographic Levels” in Statistical Methods in Medical Research. The authors present a new method for analyzing masked survey data, using an approach that is consistent with the data-generating process. In addition, they critique two previously proposed approaches to analyzing masked data and illustrate that they are fundamentally flawed methodologically. To validate their method, they compare their approach with previously formulated solutions in several realistic simulation environments in which the underlying structure of the risk field is known. They simulate samples from spatiotemporal fields in a way that mimics the sampling frame implemented in the most common health surveys in low- and middle-income countries, the Demographic and Health Surveys and Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys. In simulations, the newly proposed approach outperforms previously proposed approaches in terms of minimizing error while increasing the precision of estimates. The approaches are subsequently compared using child mortality data from the Dominican Republic where their findings are reinforced. The ability to accurately increase precision of child mortality estimates, and health outcomes in general, by leveraging various types of data, improves our ability to implement precision public health initiatives and better understand the landscape of geographic health inequalities. To read the article, click here. (read more)

CSDE Trainee Aasli Nur and co-authors recently published a practice article in BMJ Global Health titled “Behavior Adoption Approaches During Public Health Emergencies: Implications for the COVID 19 Pandemic and Beyond.” The authors  draw from the emerging evidence on behavior adoption during diverse public health emergencies to develop a framework that contextualizes behavior adoption vis-à-vis a combination of top-down, intermediary and bottom-up approaches. Using the COVID-19 pandemic as a case study, they operationalize the contextual framework to demonstrate how these three approaches differ in terms of their implementation, underlying drivers of action, enforcement, reach and uptake. They illustrate how blended strategies that include all three approaches can help accelerate and sustain protective behaviors that will remain important even when safe and effective vaccines become more widely available. They conclude that as the world grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic and prepares to respond to (re)emerging public health threats, a contextual framework can inform the design, implementation, tracking and evaluation of comprehensive public health and social measures during health emergencies. To read the article, click here. (read more)