Research Item Archives - Page 4 of 8 - Evans School of Public Policy & Governance

Evans School Research Team Tackles Common Challenge in Administrative Data

Scholars and policymakers increasingly utilize administrative data from public program systems to understand program trends, implementation, and impact. Often times, however, administrative data resources lack key pieces of information or are not linked in a manner that allows researchers to examine questions about interplay between different types of programs.

For the last several years, a team of scholars at the Evans School and the UW School of Social Work have been building a large linked administrative data set that overcomes some of the common limitations. UW Social Work and Evans adjunct faculty Jennie Romich, along with Evans School faculty Mark Long, Heather Hill, and Scott Allard and doctoral students Callie Freitag and Elizabeth Pelletier, have worked to create the Washington Merged Longitudinal Administrative Data (WMLAD), which can be analyzed help answer a host of questions about employment, safety net program participation, and well-being. WMLAD links data from 2010 to 2017 across a number of Washington State agencies: Employment Security Department (ESD); Department of Social and Health Services (DSHS); Health Care Authority (HCA); Department of Health (DOH); Secretary of State (SOS); Department of Licensing (DOL); Washington State Patrol (WSP).

Another common challenge confronting administrative data involves identifying household spatial location at regular intervals, while protecting the confidentiality and anonymity of households in the data. Not all administrative data contain address information and addresses may not be consistently updated over time.

Recently, WMLAD team members Mark Long, Elizabeth Pelletier, and Jennie Romich developed an analytic strategy to construct regular spatial location information in instances where WMLAD has sporadic information about spatial location. This important technical work was featured in a Population Studies article entitled, “Constructing Monthly Residential Locations of Adults Using Merged State Administrative Data.”  The authors develop a simple, but powerful, algorithm for predicting monthly residential location when information about location may occur less often in the data. Of particular importance is developing a rigorous way to impute the timing of a residential move for an individual, when long spells exist between two different address entries and it is not clear when the move may have occurred. Not only is this work critical to generating meaningful insights about the interplay of work, social programs, and workplace regulation, but it serves as a model for other scholars to follow in similar administrative data settings. 

Visiting Scholar: Q&A with Jung-Hwa Ha

The Evans School of Public Policy and Governance and the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (CSDE) welcome Professor Jung-Hwa Ha from the Department of Social Welfare at Seoul National University in South Korea, as a Visiting Scholar for the 2022-23 academic year. The Evans School found a few minutes to chat with Professor Ha in early September.

Evans School: Tell us a little about your areas of research expertise.

Jung-Hwa: My area of research is aging and health. My research examines how late-life transitions such as widowhood or a health decline affect older adults’ social and psychological well-being, and the extent to which various social and psychological factors moderate these relationships. I also conduct more practice-oriented research in the areas of end-of-life care, dementia care, and elder abuse. Recently I have engaged in a collaborative research project examining the needs of advance care planning for people with dementia to enhance the quality of their end-of-life care.

Evans School: Your current collaborative project sounds really interesting and important.

Jung-Hwa: I am excited. Now we are working to develop a coaching program for early dementia patients and their family caregivers in Korea to help them engage in advance care planning. My goal is to help these individuals not only think about their medical preferences in end-of-life care but also reflect on their values and preferences for what kind of care they would like to get and what makes their lives important when they lose cognitive abilities. 

Evans School: How will the year at UW and the Evans School support your ongoing research program?

Jung-Hwa: I hope that my time at UW and the Evans School will open up my eyes and expand my horizons for future research in the field of aging and health. In particular, I would like to learn more about research conducted by UW scholars on the implications of technology for older adults and climate change for vulnerable populations. 

Evans School: You trained in the U.S., have held faculty positions at top universities in the U.S. and in South Korea, and your work engages many different settings – how have those cross-cultural experiences shaped your scholarship and teaching?

Jung-Hwa: I am grateful that I had opportunities to study and work in the US. The time I spent here provided me with a lens to look at things from different perspectives and think about the cultural and social underpinnings underlying certain phenomena. However, I find many similarities in human nature, especially among older adults. For example, older adults in Korea and the US are both very much concerned about the well-being of their children and do not want to depend on them. They often express these concerns by saying “I don’t want to be a burden on my children.” What I find interesting is that the steps people can take to lessen the burden on their family varies across different societies. That is where social policy comes in. How can social policy or programs support older adults to be what they want to be? I try to tackle this question through my research and discussions in the classroom. 

Evans School: Last question – what is on your Seattle “bucket list” while you are here with your family?

Jung-Hwa: To visit Mt. Rainier and to see the cherry blossoms on the UW Quad. I am also looking forward to spending time in the beautiful Pacific Northwest as much as I can. 

Evans School: Sounds like you have some great plans. Hopefully there’ll be a day where the mountain is out and you can see the blossoms! Welcome to our community!

Alison Cullen Leads Research on Wildfire Risk

Alison Cullen, the Daniel J. Evans Endowed Professor of Environmental Policy at the Evans School, along with researchers from University of Washington, NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), and University of California, Merced, leads an NSF-funded project titled, ”Managing Future Risk of Increasing Simultaneous Megafires,“ that explores the challenges megafires currently pose to decision makers and stakeholders, and supports proactive planning for future scenarios to mitigate risk. This interdisciplinary research team brings expertise in decision science, climate science, statistics, and fire science to collaborations with a host of decision makers including fire managers, fire ecologists, and land managers for tribal and U.S. government agencies.

Emblematic of this work have been two recent co-authored publications the explore wildfire risk and managements strategies. In June 2022, Evans Ph.D. student Sunniva Bloem, along with Cullen and co-authors, published an article, “The Role of International Resource Sharing Arrangements in Managing Fire in the Face of Climate Change,” in the journal, Fire. Longer and more impactful fire seasons are proving to outstrip national fire suppression capacity in many settings, which have led to resource sharing arrangements between countries across the globe. The authors explore the recent emergence of these partnerships and identify paths to strengthening cross-national resource sharing agreements.

More recently, Cullen contributed to the work of a large team that published an article entitled, “Reimagine Fire Science for the Anthropocene,“ in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) Nexus. Amidst rising fire dangers globally, the article develops a cross-disciplinary research agenda essential to improving mitigation of and response to an “increasingly flammable world.”

Isabelle Cohen’s Research on Improving Tax Compliance in Uganda Cited in J-PAL

Assistant Professor Isabelle Cohen’s research on tax compliance in Uganda was cited in a recent J-PAL policy insight brief, entitled “Improving Tax Compliance through Reminder Messages for Taxpayers.” Isabelle’s dissertation research in Uganda shows how low-cost, easily implementable text messages sent near tax-time can increase tax compliance substantially. This work has received media coverage elsewhere this year and recently received honorable mention for the 2022 APPAM PhD Dissertation Award.

Assistant Professor Benjamin Brunjes Policy Fellow for Small Business Administration

Assistant Professor Benjamin Brunjes  has been serving as a policy fellow for the U.S. Small Business Administration’s (SBA) Office of Policy Planning and Liaison (OPPL) to help create and update federal procurement rules and regulations, identify and share new data on federal contracting, and study trends in and the performance of federal procurement equity programs. His work for SBA was featured in a story in the Government Executive news daily, which discusses how the bundling of smaller contracts into larger contracting vehicles may hamper SBA’s efforts to support small businesses – particularly those owned by women.