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683 results on '"Singh, Susheela"'

2. Trends in adolescent unions and childbearing in four Central American countries

Author

Remez, Lisa, Singh, Susheela, and Prada, Elena

Subjects
adolescent pregnancy, adolescent unions, Central America, consensual unions, Economic theory. Demography, HB1-3840
Abstract

Context: Four low-income Central American nations—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua—have the highest rates of adolescent fertility in Latin America. More information on time trends in adolescent marital and reproductive behaviors is needed to assess the need for improved information and services to delay marriage and childbearing. Methodology: Data from these countries’ recent Demographic and Health Surveys and Reproductive Health Surveys are used to examine trends in adolescent unions and childbearing by comparing two cohorts roughly a generation apart, 40–44-year-olds and 20–24-year-olds. We tested for significant differences over time, both for women overall and within subgroups, using Pearson Χ2 statistics that take the stratified, cluster sample design into account. Findings: As of 2001–2005/6, adolescent unions, which are far more likely to be consensual than legal, were still widespread in the subregion, as 45–60% of 20–24-year-old women in these four countries had entered into a union before their 20th birthday. Nonetheless, such early unions have fallen significantly over time in all four countries, declining by relatively less in Honduras (by six percentage points) than in the other three countries (by 10–15 percentage points). In contrast, no comparable uniform trend emerged in the timing of first births: The proportions giving birth before age 20 fell significantly only in Nicaragua (by eight points); declines were smaller and nonsignificant in the other three countries (2–5 points). At the subgroup level, just one change was significant within area of residence—the 12-point decline in the proportion with any adolescent birth in urban areas in Nicaragua. Although the change was not significant at the population level, adolescent births increased significantly among less-educated women and the poorest women in El Salvador and Honduras, as traditional behaviors likely became more concentrated in those subgroups of women that shrank over time. Conclusions: Possible reasons for why first births did not decline in tandem with first unions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras include greater pressure and desire to conceive sooner after entering a union and a possible increase in premarital conceptions and childbearing. Since evidence suggests that women are having now fewer second- and third-order births during adolescence but not necessarily postponing a first birth until after age 20, more innovative strategies are needed to help them adopt contraceptive use before rather than after a first birth.

Published
2009

3. A nonparametric spatial test to identify factors that shape a microbiome

Author

Singh, Susheela P., Staicu, Ana-Maria, Dunn, Robert R., Fierer, Noah, and Reich, Brian J.

Subjects
Statistics - Methodology
Abstract

The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has made data from DNA material readily available, leading to a surge of microbiome-related research establishing links between markers of microbiome health and specific outcomes. However, to harness the power of microbial communities we must understand not only how they affect us, but also how they can be influenced to improve outcomes. This area has been dominated by methods that reduce community composition to summary metrics, which can fail to fully exploit the complexity of community data. Recently, methods have been developed to model the abundance of taxa in a community, but they can be computationally intensive and do not account for spatial effects underlying microbial settlement. These spatial effects are particularly relevant in the microbiome setting because we expect communities that are close together to be more similar than those that are far apart. In this paper, we propose a flexible Bayesian spike-and-slab variable selection model for presence-absence indicators that accounts for spatial dependence and cross-dependence between taxa while reducing dimensionality in both directions. We show by simulation that in the presence of spatial dependence, popular distance-based hypothesis testing methods fail to preserve their advertised size, and the proposed method improves variable selection. Finally, we present an application of our method to an indoor fungal community found with homes across the contiguous United States., Comment: 26 pages, 4 figures

Published
2018

11. Algorithms in Diffraction Profile Analysis

Author

Singh, Susheela P., primary, Paterson, Alisa R., additional, Wendelberger, Laura J., additional, Fancher, Chris M., additional, Reich, Brian J., additional, Smith, Ralph C., additional, Wilson, Alyson G., additional, and Jones, Jacob L., additional

Published
2020
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