Population Studies and Training Center
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Over the last three generations, Christian children in Africa have surpassed their parents’ level of education at a much higher rate than Muslim and traditionalist children there have, research shows.
Minnesota Reformer

A crazy idea worth considering: more school

Minnesota children spend fewer hours and days in the classroom than their peers nationwide. Among states with mandated instructional time, only Colorado requires fewer days than Minnesota, according to the Education Commission of the States.
On Thursday, May 18, members of the PSTC community gathered to celebrate the graduation of 10 PSTC trainees who will receive PhDs from the Brown University Graduate School this month.
In honor of Mother's Day, Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg shares her favorite anecdotes from parenting writers and experts, including one from PSTC economist Emily Oster.
A $3.1 million NIH grant supports Professor Blair T. Johnson and collaborators from Brown University in analyzing the effectiveness of mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) interventions.
The past several weeks have seen somewhat widespread discussion of a truly upsetting trend in adolescent and teen mental health. In the most recent CDC data, 40 percent of high school students indicated that during the previous year they had experienced sadness severe enough that it impeded their ability to do their normal activities for at least two weeks.
Climate change disasters’ impact on population health, health disparities, and the national health care delivery infrastructure are subjects of too little academic research at a time when policymakers’ need for such data has never been greater. That’s according to five top academic research experts convened in a virtual seminar at the University of Pennsylvania’s Leonard Davis Institute of Health Economics (LDI).
Air travel is essential to connecting firm workers who reside in different locations by effectively and efficiently shrinking the geographic distance between them. But beyond merely bridging this physical gap, can it also play a role in helping global organizations overcome cultural, temporal and other dimensions of distance and contribute to positive innovation outcomes?
The Washington Post

We Need More Research on Guns

Some researchers have created databases to describe mass shooters. But this is descriptive data, not a predictive model. What is it about a school kid, a lonely elderly man, or a young adult that makes them shoot themselves or someone else? Are there environmental signals that we can act on? Are they long term, or in the moment? How do we identify these signs, whether in social media or personal interactions, without violating privacy rights and without bias?
Racism operates at the interpersonal, cultural, and structural levels, marginalizing or excluding minoritized racial and ethnic groups from the social, economic, and political resources and opportunities that represent important social determinants of health—and exposing these groups to higher levels of social, economic, environmental, and psychosocial harms throughout the life course.
The Critic

The pontiff who looked the other way

The job of a pope is, compared to that of secular leaders, enviably straightforward. He is absolute ruler of a tiny sovereign state with a vast spiritual diaspora. Where the job starts to get more complicated is in times of global crisis, when popes are expected to provide moral leadership, not just to fellow Catholics but to the whole world.
Knowable Magazine

America is failing women’s health

The state of women’s health in the US is shocking — even to us, medical sociologists and demographers with a history of studying gender and health.
Oded Galor's book, "The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality," has been included on The Times' list of Best Philosophy and Ideas Books of 2022.
This October, Professor of Population Studies Mike White and PSTC Postdoctoral Research Associate Chantel Pfeiffer gathered with fellow researchers from the Migrant Health Follow Up Study (MHFUS) for a mini-conference at the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) School of Public Health in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Despite an increase in wildfire risk spurred by climate change, Americans are moving to wildfire-prone areas and prioritizing lower housing costs and amenities such as temperate weather and recreational opportunities over risk of natural disasters.
The Atlantic

Let's Declare a Pandemic Amnesty

PSTC Economist Emily Oster advocates for shifting our energies toward solving problems the pandemic revealed or created and away from arguing over choices made during the uncertainty of a novel public health crisis.
As part of his ongoing work with the Land Degradation Neutrality Project (Tools4LDN), Interim Director of Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) and Assistant Professor of Population Studies Kevin Mwenda and his colleagues hosted a series of virtual pilot workshops with collaborators in Colombia to assess how current datasets can be better used to monitor the impacts of global land degradation.