Mining Data

Assistant Professor Benjamin Capistrant, Sc.D., looks at data sets coming out of a host of national surveys to help answer an array of questions.

This year, he teamed up with SSW colleague Ora Nakash, M.A., Ph.D., and professor and chair of the HBSE sequence, to coauthor a series of articles based on data analysis they hope will lead to even more research. Nakash, too, sees in epidemiological data great opportunities to increase understanding of the needs of people who historically have been marginalized.

“Some of our work overlaps and we have similar interests,” said Nakash. Like Capistrant, she joined the faculty in July of 2018.

Both researchers are drawn to explore questions around disparities facing understudied and underserved groups—Nakash looks at racial and ethnic disparities, while Capistrant

tends to focus on the LGBTQ population.

Much of Capistrant’s research drills down into national data in search of a nuanced picture of the needs, in particular, of LGBTQ older adults.

“We don’t want to look at LGB adults as a monolith,” he noted. “Within the group there’s a lot of variation.”

Already, much scholarly research has looked at the needs of LGBTQ youth in light of the increased risk for suicide that group experiences.

“Indeed, that makes sense because that’s where the risks are the highest, but we find that there are additional sets of risk factors—or we don’t know very much about the risk factors—for older LGB adults,” said Capistrant. So far, Nakash said, an article looking at the suicide risks in older LGB adults has been accepted for publication, while an article looking at their risk for depression and another about opioid use are under review.

Capistrant and Nakash are also analyzing data for a fourth submission, looking at substance use among LGB adults.

Photo by Shana Sureck

Capistrant teaches research and research methods to master’s and doctoral students, and statistics and data science to Smith undergraduates.

He noted that it’s only been since about 2013 that national surveys began asking questions about sexual orientation. Even so, in order to have

a meaningful statistical sample for analysis purposes, data sometimes needs to be combined from multiple years. Meanwhile, there are few questions on these national surveys about gender identity, which makes for a dearth of data about transgender people, he noted.

“In some ways it seems like there have been huge strides made and in other ways it continues to be frustrating,” he said.

Nakash has focused some of her research on mental health disparities and how to improve access and quality of care.

“In recent years, I’ve been interested in intersectional identities,” said Nakash, who will be teaching advanced psychological theories to doctoral students this summer. Already, she’s been advising students working on doctoral and master’s writing projects.

“We’re really looking at multiple dimensions of identity, and understanding how different identities intersect in terms of mental health care,” she said.

Meanwhile, in light of the growing population of older Americans in

general, they decided to also focus on older adults in order to understand their specific needs within their other intersecting identities, including race, gender identity, sexual orientation and class.

Both Nakash and Capistrant said joining forces to work together is helpful because their strengths are complementary, given that she is a clinical psychologist and his background is rooted in public health.

Both experience limitations within existing national data sets, which don’t necessarily ask questions to bring forth the data for the groups they want to study most closely.

The data sets are especially limited, Capistrant noted, “particularly when we’re taking an intersectional approach,” looking at patterns of the convergence of race, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Still, Capistrant and Nakash are using the existing data sets to look for patterns that might shed light on the similarities as well as the differences within subgroups.

Currently, Capistrant is in year two of a five-year research project funded by the National Institutes of

Health about gay, bisexual men and trans folks with prostate cancer, in an attempt to create an intervention that will improve outcomes for social support, quality of life and sexual functioning.

As this project moves forward, he believes it will offer data that can be dissected and analyzed by master’s and doctoral students looking for answers to other questions.

Meanwhile, the paper he and Nakash submitted recently looking at data related to opioid use among LGB adults found, among other things, the rates of opioid use among younger lesbians is much higher than their heterosexual counterparts.

Such findings, he said, are the tip of the iceberg, prompting deeper research dives to answer bigger questions, top among them; “Why?”

Nakash said that while they have theories about why, they need empirical evidence to support those theories. And once that bridge has been crossed, she said, they aim to look for even deeper answers, like how to develop evidence-based interventions in response.

“That’s the ultimate goal,” she said. —Laurie Loisel

Photo by Shana Sureck