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Mark Mather

Ask PRB: Commenting on Federal Register Documents

You send us your thorniest research communications questions and we answer them.

Dear PRB, 

I’ve heard colleagues mention that they’ve submitted comments on federal policies and programs, but I don’t know where to start. And why should I bother—does anyone even read the comments that come in? 

Signed, 

Chatty Cathy 

_______________

Dear Chatty Cathy,

We’re so delighted that you’re interested in sharing your expertise! While there are many ways to engage in federal decisions on topics ranging from survey methodology to funding programs, the Federal Register is often the place to start.

What is the Federal Register, you ask? GovInfo describes the Federal Register as “the official daily publication for rules, proposed rules, and notices of Federal agencies and organizations, as well as executive orders and other presidential documents.” Many hearings and meetings are also announced in the Federal Register. For our purposes, think of it as the place where calls for public comment get posted.

Because it covers all of the federal government, a single issue of the Federal Register may be several hundred pages. Thankfully, you can sign up for notifications on topics that interest you, so you don’t need to scan hundreds of pages each day to stay informed. Professional associations may also send out action alerts when there’s a topic of interest.

Federal comment opportunities fall into a couple of categories:

Each Federal Register Notice (FRN) will include information about the topic or proposed change along with information about how to respond (often by sending communication to an email address by a given due date).

As for what to write, tone and content are a personal style choice. But a few strategies to consider when responding to an FRN are the following:

  • Be as concrete as possible about the costs/benefits of what you’re suggesting. For example:
    • Will the change improve survey response rates?
    • Will it better identify characteristics of a population of interest?
    • Will it better align with international standards or better reflect local community concerns?
    • Will the proposed change be harmful to a community, and thus should be reconsidered?
  • Citations aren’t strictly necessary but can be helpful. At a minimum, your comment should include information that establishes your research expertise.
  • In a 60-day comment period for data collection, suggestions for survey question wording and methodological changes are not just ok, they’re encouraged.

One very important note: Anything you submit in response to a FRN is part of the public record. That means your comments are searchable and readable by anyone. So keep that in mind as you type.

And to address your final question: Why bother?

While the federal government may seem like a bureaucratic morass to anyone outside of Washington, D.C., the truth is that federal agency staff are eager for public input. Comments can and do result in changes to federal programs and policies. For example, in response to public feedback, the U.S. Census Bureau recently changed their plans on revising disability questions in the American Community Survey.

Agency staff also use comments to identify key stakeholders and experts to include in future efforts such as workshops and convenings, special studies, and more.

In short, even though not every comment will be incorporated into the final plan or product, many do. Comments matter.

Happy commenting!

Sincerely,

Ask PRB

P.S.

For a video walk-through of the process, you can watch Responding to Federal Requests for Comment.

This article was written by Beth Jarosz, Senior Program Director in U.S. Programs at PRB.

2024 D4 Hack Week: Disasters, Demography, Disparities, and Decisions

The University of Washington invites you to apply to participate in a 5-day collaborative workshop from September 9-13, 2024, to advance research products and methods for improving observations, assessments, and forecasts across appropriate temporal and spatial scales to accomplish three goals:

  • Investigate the human behavior and societal adaptive responses to, and impacts of, severe weather and climate-related events, particularly flooding associated with atmospheric rivers, hurricanes, and severe storms, but also including other extreme events such as heat or fire.
  • Address the research gaps linking mitigation to adaptation and resilience in relation to severe weather. This will involve exploring co-benefits for human well-being from climate adaptation strategies that will further contribute to resilience to extreme weather events and climate mitigation.
  • Explore pathways to better understand the dynamics of decisions and population disparities in responses to and impacts of past extreme climate / weather events.

Funding for the workshop derives from a grant from NOAA to AI2ES (Award NA23OAR40505031) and a center grant to CSDE from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development via the P2C HD042828 mechanism.

For more information and to apply: https://csde.washington.edu/research/2024-d4-workshop/

Sharp Rise in Firearm Deaths Among Rural Black Youth

Firearm-related injuries have been the leading cause of death in children and adolescents in the United States since 2020, surpassing motor vehicle crashes. New research from the University of Minnesota shows the sharpest increase in firearm-related mortality over the past decade is not in urban areas but among Black rural youth.1

Historically, firearm-related deaths between ages 1 and 19 have predominantly occurred through homicides among Black urban youth and suicides among white and Indigenous rural youth. The team analyzed data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on youth mortality between 1999 and 2022 to determine if historical mortality patterns still exist today.

The study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found:

  • Firearm-related mortality rates increased 35% for all youth between 1999 and 2022, with the greatest increase among Black youth.
  • For decades, firearm-related deaths among Black youth were far more common in urban areas, but, since 2018, Black rural youth experienced firearm-related mortality rates as high as those of Black urban youth.
  • The firearm-related mortality rate in Black rural youth quadrupled since 2013. The overwhelming majority of these firearm-related deaths were homicides.
  • In 2013, when Black rural youth firearm deaths began to rise, Black and white rural youth had a similar risk of dying from firearms. In 2022, Black rural youth died from firearms at four times the rate of white rural youth.

“Firearm-related homicide is no longer an issue that disproportionately affects Black urban youth, it now impacts all Black youth,” said lead author Allison Lind, a graduate student in the School of Public Health and trainee at the Minnesota Population Center (MPC). “This significant increase in firearm-related deaths in the last decade underscores the urgent need for public health attention to better understand and prevent these deaths.”

The researchers found that Black youth made up 10% of the rural youth population but accounted for 30% of the rural youth firearm deaths in 2022.

“Though the homicide rate in general increased during the pandemic, Black rural youth’s firearm deaths started to skyrocket well before that,” said co-author Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, associate director of the MPC and an associate professor in the College of Liberal Arts. “Black rural youth’s firearm death rates have increased much more sharply than any other group of youth.”

The researchers emphasize that solutions will require additional analysis to understand the unique circumstances driving this epidemic.

“Although the proportion of Black youth living in rural areas is relatively small–9% of Black youth–the scale and duration of the increased risk for these young people is significant,” said co-author Susan Mason, a member of the MPC and an associate professor in the School of Public Health. “This change could potentially indicate substantial shifts in who is at risk of dying from firearms.”

This article was adapted from a press release by the Minnesota Population Center.

References

1. Allison Lind et al. “Increasing Firearm-Related Deaths among U.S. Black Rural Youths.” The New England journal of medicine 19 (2024). doi:10.1056/NEJMc2403665.

Ask PRB: Navigating the New Social Media Landscape

You send us your thorniest research communications questions and we answer them.

Dear PRB,

The social media landscape is a confusing mess. Not so very long ago being on Twitter was enough. But now people are dispersing across the internet. There’s Bluesky Social, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon (and its many, many servers), Post, Threads, and TikTok, plus others I’m probably forgetting. Where should I go? What should I do?

Signed,

Dazed and Confused

_______________

Dear Dazed and Confused,

As a social media manager, believe me when I say that I feel your pain in trying to navigate this new world. What may help is trying to think less about where “everyone else” is going, and focusing more on what you want to gain from the experience.

Here’s our take on each of the platforms you mentioned:

Bluesky Social: We’ve noticed quite a few academics and journalists on Bsky.app, so if you want to connect with researchers around the world, it might be the right fit. Invitation code requirements limited growth, but that requirement was removed in February 2024. Also, while there are lots of great features on Bluesky, we’ve been unimpressed with the lack of a mechanism for reporting mis- and dis-information. And…no hashtags (as of February 2024).

Facebook: Facebook is for keeping tabs on people you knew in high school. You can share your work there, but it’s unlikely your academic colleagues will “friend” you. And that’s probably for the best.

Instagram: Does your research involve lots of photos, charts, or infographics? Do you like recording short informational videos from your car? Then Instagram might be right for you! Insta is great for sharing information, but “feeding the algorithm” with fresh visual content every day can be a full-time job.

LinkedIn: Are you on the job market? Do you want to learn about upcoming conferences and events? Do you want a place to share your latest publication? LinkedIn can be useful for all of those things.

Mastodon (and its many, many servers): So. Many. Servers. The learning curve for Mastodon has been described as being steep, but we didn’t find it much different than other microblogging sites. The biggest hiccup is that the server you start from can help (or hinder) your ability to connect with others. We’ve found population researchers have gravitated toward the sciences.social server, so if you’re going to give Mastodon a try, consider starting there.

Once you’re there, some fun features include: 500 character posts, hashtags galore, and chronological rather than algorithmic content in your feed.

Post: If you want a firehose of news to scroll through, Post is your place.

Threads: Threads is Meta’s answer to Twitter. The functionality is similar, with a couple of quirks. You can re-post, quote-post, and add images and GIFs to your threads. But you are limited to just one hashtag. Perhaps more notably, in attempt to limit the spread of mis- and dis-information, Meta has chosen to constrain hashtags. #COVID, for example, is not permitted.

TikTok: TikTok dance challenges can be fun! But the platform is banned by U.S. federal government agencies, so you can’t have TikTok installed on device(s) where you do any federally-funded work. (Yes. That includes removing TikTok from your mobile if you use that phone for work email.)

It probably wasn’t the right place for research anyway.

X: The site formerly known as Twitter is not what it used to be. Are people there? Sure. But key indicators—including website traffic, ad revenue, and active users—have all declined sharply. Also, changes to the algorithm to prioritize paid subscribers and sensational content can make it harder to reach other users.

Others: Yes… there are more. If you find the right niche, Redditt can be helpful for learning and for sharing information. Newsletter services like Medium and Substack are useful if you want to write longer-form content and/or to monetize your work. And there are probably more that we’re not thinking of. The landscape keeps changing, and we’ll keep you posted.

This article was written by Beth Jarosz, Senior Program Director in U.S. Programs at PRB.

COVID-19 Linked to an Increase in the Risk of Preterm Birth

Researchers found that the risk largely disappeared by the end of 2022.

A healthy human pregnancy lasts for about 40 weeks. Preterm birth—birth occurring before 37 weeks—increases the risk of infant death and many lasting health problems.

Infection with SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID-19) during the third trimester of pregnancy has been linked with an increased risk of preterm birth. Vaccines against SARS-CoV-2 have been shown to be safe and effective during pregnancy. However, whether they reduce the risk of preterm birth hasn’t been clear.

In a new study funded in part by NIH, Dr. Florencia Torche from Stanford University and Dr. Jenna Nobles from the University of Wisconsin-Madison looked more closely at this question. They examined births in California hospitals between 2014 and 2023. Beginning in June 2020, the state tracked COVID testing on mothers upon admission. This provided a highly accurate estimate of infections during labor and delivery among hospitals with universal testing. Results were published in the December 5, 2023, issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers analyzed siblings to examine the effects of COVID-19 infections. This approach accounts for other factors that might affect the risk of preterm birth, such as poverty, race and ethnicity, and personal risk factors. The analysis showed that COVID-19 infection raised the risk of preterm birth from 7.1% to 8.3% from July 2020 to February 2023. This increase in risk is similar to that seen from a massive environmental exposure, such as three weeks of exposure to high-intensity wildfire smoke.

The largest effect of maternal COVID-19 infection on preterm birth was in 2020, with the preterm birth rate rising by 5.4% between July and November 2020. COVID-19 infection then increased the probability of preterm birth by around 2-4% during 2021, which saw waves of infections caused by different variants. During 2022, the impact of COVID-19 infection on preterm birth disappeared.

To tease out the effect of vaccination, the researchers compared the impact of COVID-19 infection on preterm births between areas with the fastest vaccine uptake and those with the slowest. Zip codes with the fastest uptake had an 86% vaccination rate by March 2022. Those with the lowest rates reached 51% during the same time period. Until May 2021, the impact of COVID-19 infection on preterm birth rates was similar between areas. They then dropped sharply in high-vaccination areas, while staying high in low-vaccination areas until almost a year later. This strongly suggests that vaccination accounted for the difference in the rate of preterm births.

By the end of 2022, the impact of COVID-19 on preterm births had faded, despite an increase in infections caused by the Omicron variant. Vaccines had become widely available as well as effective therapies for COVID-19. New variants had emerged, and more of the population had acquired immunity to SARS-CoV-2.

As SARS-CoV-2 continues to mutate, updated booster shots will likely be needed to keep immunity high. Currently, booster uptake in pregnant individuals lags behind that of the rest of the population.

“We already know there is very little evidence of adverse effects of vaccination on fetal development. The results here are compelling evidence that what will actually harm the fetus is not getting vaccinated,” Nobles says. “By increasing immunity faster, early vaccination uptake likely prevented thousands of preterm births in the U.S.”

This article was adapted from an NIH Research Matters article by Sharon Reynolds. The work of researchers from Stanford University and the NICHD-funded Center for Demography and Ecology at  the University of Wisconsin-Madison is highlighted.

References

1. Florencia Torche and Jenna Nobles, “Vaccination, immunity, and the changing impact of COVID-19 on infant health,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 120, no. 49 (2023): e2311573120. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2311573120.

PRB Wins a Clio Health Award for Campaign to Raise Awareness of the Black Maternal Health Crisis

PRB and Dr. Shalon’s Maternal Action Project won a Clio Health award for our 2023 national campaign to raise awareness of the Black maternal health crisis in America. See the page on the Clio site here, which includes the award-winning video that uses data from PRB’s story on NICHD-funded research that found that U.S. Black women are 3.5 times more likely to die of pregnancy/postpartum complications than White women.

PRB collaborated with TANK Worldwide on a video and accompanying website that promoted the campaign and research through social media (including custom graphics), a press release, and fact sheet. Our goal with this project was to amplify the data, evidence, and research. In that vein, we also recruited researchers Paris Adkins-Jackson of Columbia University and Marie Thoma of the University of Maryland to serve as a spokespeople from the research side, and published a follow-up blog about emerging research.

The campaign was picked up by various media, including NPR’s Here and Now and Ms. Magazine

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