Ongoing results of studies concerning the United States War on Drugs uncover how policies have raised the incarceration rates of racial minorities for nonviolent, drug-related crimes, profoundly stigmatized drug users, and redirected resources from drug prevention and treatment to militarizing federal and local law enforcement. Yet,
While injection drug use poses a large risk for the spread of infectious diseases like HIV and HCV, people who use injection drugs (PWID) have developed a variety of methods to prevent such infection in their networks. For instance, one method is "serosorting"—a type of
Substance use of all varieties has seen great demographic shifts throughout the United States in the past century. While attention to drug use, trafficking, and addiction was once centered on urban populations and networks, epidemics like those concerning methamphetamines, heroin, and opioids have increasingly complicated
In Puerto Rico, the urgency of HIV infection is visible in shear numbers: the rate of diagnosis is the fourth highest in all the United States at 33.8 per 100,000 of the population compared to a national average of 19.7. Even more concerning is the
It has been consistently found in Aboriginal communities that the continuation of cultural traditions of is vital to the maintenance, resilience, and health of a society. For a community familiar to forced acculturation and discrimination, the identity and empowerment found in the conservation of Aboriginal culture has
A group from the REACH Lab recently published a research paper in the 36th volume of the Puerto Rico Health Science Journal. The objective of this research was to examine the social network and recruitment patterns of a sample of people who inject drugs (PWIDs) in rural
The REACH Lab's director of data analysis, Patrick Habecker, and principle investigator, Kirk Dombrowski, worked with other researchers to publish a paper in the International Journal of Drug Policy's May 2017 volume. This paper found that people who inject drugs in urban settings were significantly more
Another year of the Minority Health Disparities (MHD) Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) has been successfully completed! Undergraduates from across the United States, with knowledge in multiple disciplines, joined together at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to complete a summer research project. Professors from sociology, agricultural
May 2017 Ph.D. Sociology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Dissertation: “Who Do You Know: Improving and Exploring the Network Scale-Up Method” Committee: Kirk Dombrowski & Lisa A. Kort-Butler (co-chairs), Jolene D. Smyth, Lisa Sample Minor: Survey Research and Methodology
Last month, REACH Lab Directors Bilal Khan and Kirk Dombrowski presented updated research on estimating the size of hidden and hard-to-reach populations using social network and mobile phone methods. The paper can be found in the Cornell ArXiv here. More developed drafts including additional simulation