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Long Doan along with Faculty Associates Liana Sayer, Sociology, and Jessica Fish, Family Science, will examine the social impacts of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic.

New book co-edited by Ruth Zambrana to be released in November 2014

Scholars discussed how systemic racism in the United States has made historically marginalized communities more vulnerable to coronavirus

Guiteras, et al.; 2014-014-appendix

Jie Chen and colleagues will publish a study examining the behavioral health treatment among individuals with co-occurring opioid use disorder and mental illness

Because consumer reviews leverage the wisdom of the crowd, the way in which they are aggregated is a central decision faced by platforms. We explore this "rating aggregation problem" and offer a structural approach to solving it, allowing for (1) reviewers to vary in stringency and accuracy, (2) reviewers to be influenced by existing reviews, and (3) product quality to change over time. Applying this to restaurant reviews from Yelp.com, we construct an adjusted average rating and show that even a simple algorithm can lead to large information efficiency gains relative to the arithmetic average.

Reducing Administrative Burdens in Social Safety Net Programs Reduces Mortality

As a strategy for combating physical inactivity, obesity, and other health conditions, the apperception of greenspace and importance of human-nature relationships have increased in recent decades. With this raised awareness in greenspace, the development of park auditing tools has been positioned primarily in the material conditions (e.g., physical environmental conditions) of parks. An examination of existing park auditing tools has shown that by focusing on particular material conditions, built environment and active living scholars have set aside other characteristics, namely, those that consider the user (e.g., the active human), as a separate concern from the focus of these tools. We have sought to engage with these tools to examine how they can be more effective in analyzing both the physical and human elements of parks and other natural environments.

NIH $3.7 million interdisciplinary grant will focus on residential air quality, state policies and legal protections

Purpose Psychosocial stress has been associated with susceptibility to many infectious pathogens. We evaluated the association between perceived stress and incident sexually transmitted infections (STIs;  Chlamydia trachomatis ,  Neisseria gonorrhoeae , and  Trichomonas vaginalis  genital infections) in a prospective study of women. Stress may increase vulnerability to STIs by suppressing immune function and altering the protective vaginal microbiota. Methods Using the 1999 Longitudinal Study of Vaginal Flora (n  = 2439), a primarily African American cohort of women, we fitted Cox proportional hazards models to examine the association between perceived stress and incident STIs. We tested  bacterial vaginosis  (measured by Nugent Score) and sexual behaviors (condom use, number of partners, and partner concurrence) as mediators using VanderWeele's difference method. Results Baseline perceived stress was associated with incident STIs both before and after adjusting for confounders (adjusted hazard ratio = 1.015; 95% confidence interval, 1.005–1.026). Nugent score and sexual behaviors significantly mediated 21% and 65% of this adjusted association, respectively, and 78% when included together in the adjusted model. Conclusions This study advances understanding of the relationship between perceived stress and STIs and identifies high-risk sexual behaviors and development of bacterial vaginosis—both known risk factors for STIs—as mechanisms underlying this association.