David Russell

As the Chair of the Medical Sociology section of ASA, I’m excited for next week’s meeting in Chicago —follow our new account for live coverage! @asamedsoc.bsky.social

A screenshot of the Sociological Methods & Research website showing the special issue title

I’m delighted to share that the August 2025 special issue of Sociological Methods & Research on Generative AI is out now. Along with my co-editor, Daniel Karell, we put together this issue to build on the conference we organized last year.

Here's a thread on each of the ten papers:

🚨 Why do rampage #SchoolShootings persist?

New #Socius study by Drs. @russelldavid.bsky.social, Jon Gordon & Kelly M. Thames refines #ConstellationTheory—revealing how #SocialMarginalization, #MasculinityThreat & #GunCulture collide to drive deadly #GunViolence.

Read: doi.org/10.1177/2378...

The New Social Roots of School Shootings: A Refined Constellation Theory of Rampage Attacks - David Russell, Jon Gordon, Kelly M. Thames, 2025 School shooting scholars call for a comprehensive approach that can integrate idiosyncratic studies, solve definition dilemmas, and foster programmatic clarity....

NEW study in @SociusJournal presents refined Constellation Theory factors for rampage school shootings & shows that psychosocial support infrastructures are inflection points for surveillance system failures that create time for shooters to realize their attacks.
journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I really like this scaffolded approach and have used it in a senior capstone course. One thing that I think students appreciated was also doing periodic presentations (~3-5 minutes) to the class with updates on their progress with each section and brief feedback sessions afterwards.

Prior school shootings, including the attack on Columbine High School in 1999, provided narrative resources (cultural scripts) for planning and executing their own attacks

While most rampage shooters had access to guns at home, they were also socialized into gun use through target practice, family activities, and role-playing games involving guns

Surveillance system failures, including attention to threats and limited psychosocial support infrastructures, provided shooters with additional time to plan their attacks

Their social marginalization was exacerbated by psychosocial issues, including childhood traumas and family problems, mental illness and suicidal ideation

Rampage shooters' life histories displayed an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, often driven by their ostracism from valued peer and family groups, teasing, bullying, and experience of gender and sexual identity threats

Rampage school shootings can be distinguished from other school shootings by their duration and lethality, as well as by the factors that underlie them, which include social marginalization, psychosocial issues, surveillance failures, gun access and socialization, and use of cultural scripts

The New Social Roots of School Shootings: A Refined Constellation Theory of Rampage Attacks - David Russell, Jon Gordon, Kelly M. Thames, 2025 School shooting scholars call for a comprehensive approach that can integrate idiosyncratic studies, solve definition dilemmas, and foster programmatic clarity....

Since the attack on Columbine High School 25 years ago, rampage shootings have occurred with some regularity. In this article, we refine a constellation theory that identifies factors and indicators, and interactions among them, that help account for these events journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Pregnancy is a minefield when you're disabled Few OB-GYNs get disability training—and their disabled patients are far likelier to die.

Disabled people are 11 times more likely to die during labor/in the postpartum period than non-disabled people. Better education and smashing ableism is how we get out of this horrible stat.

For the past year, I’ve been looking into the topic of disability and pregnancy for @motherjones.com 🧵

Associations between positive and negative social experiences and epigenetic aging - Scientific Reports Scientific Reports - Associations between positive and negative social experiences and epigenetic aging

Building on previous work showing that negative social experiences accelerate biological aging, we find from MIDUS that positive social experiences such as providing assistance to others and attending social meetings, have the potential to decelerate biological aging www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Cutting the NIH—The $8 Trillion Health Care Catastrophe This JAMA Forum discusses the recent budget cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH), the effects of these cuts on scientific research and health of individuals in the US, and the prospects for cha...

How will the proposed 43% cut to NIH impact the US?

This piece nicely counts the ways with dollar figures--and there's a lot of them packed into this short read. Another example of FAFO policymaking.

🛟medsky health policy science communication policysky sociology

We heard directly from more than 150 researchers, scientists and investigators about their terminated NIH grants and the science that’s being lost. Full story ⤵️

Excess US Deaths Before, During, and After the COVID-19 Pandemic This cohort study examines trends in excess deaths in the US before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

For 40 years, Americans have lived shorter lives than people in other rich countries.

For 10 years, that's been rapidly getting worse.

New research: in 2022-2023, there were 1.5 million "missing Americans," who died--but wouldn't have, if America didn't have such uniquely high death rates.

Looking for a PhD fellowship in family demography? We are looking for candidates with a strong quantitative background and interest in men’s fertility and family participation. Reach out to Vegard or me if you have questions.

Graph from the Washington Post showing declines in spending at NIH. New grants cut from 1 billion to around 400 million. Overall grants down from 4.5 billion to 2.4 billion.

Trump has cut the NIH budget by more than half in defiance of Congressionally mandated appropriations for the agency. No comparison historically, not even the Great Recession. This is clearly not legal and Congress needs to address it.

Consumer-Directed Personal Care in the New York Metropolitan Area: Trends in Use From 2017 to 2022 Despite growing interest in expansion of consumer- (or self-) directed models of Medicaid-funded personal care, research characterizing program use is limited. We leverage health plan and claims data ...

In this article, we found that use of consumer-directed personal care, where Medicaid home-based long-term care enrollees can select and hire their own paid caregivers (including family members), increased substantially in the greater NYC area between 2017 and 2022. www.jamda.com/article/S152...

How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? | PNAS Large language models (LLMs) are being increasingly incorporated into scientific workflows. However, we have yet to fully grasp the implications of...

An LLM "creates textual claims, and then predicts the citations that might be associated with similar text. Obviously, this practice violates all norms of scholarly citation.

At best, LLMs gesticulate toward the shoulders of giants."

Bender, West, and I contributed to this pro/con piece in PNAS.

This is such an absolutely trivial thing compared w the scale of this catastrophe, but it’s the scale I can comprehend:

I promised a grad student last week I’d send a data-related question to NCHS & I haven’t gotten to it yet, & now who knows when they’ll be able to even respond to public queries