Fellows Michael A. Lindsey, Ron Avi Astor, Desmond Upton Patton, and Lawrence M. Berger pictured left to right.

Firearm Carrying Accelerates Suicide Risk in High Schoolers

August 5, 2026 — AASWSW President and Fellow Michael A. Lindsey, PhD, MSW, MPH, Dean and Paulette Goddard Professor of Social Work at the NYU Silver School of Social Work, is corresponding author of a new JAMA Network Open study finding that adolescents who carry a firearm are nearly four times more likely to have attempted suicide within the previous 12 months than noncarriers. Drawing on self-reports from more than 23,000 high school students across 15 states, the study identifies firearm carrying as a strong accelerator of suicide risk — with significant implications for youth suicide prevention and firearm safety policy.

Read more from NYU.

A Public Reversal on What Drives School Shootings

July 27, 2026 — Fellow Ron Avi Astor, PhD, professor of social welfare at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, is featured in a Hechinger Report Proof Points column reporting on his striking public reversal at the American Educational Research Association’s annual meeting, where he told fellow scholars, “We were wrong” about his long-held view that improving school climate and reducing bullying would help prevent school shootings. While those efforts have made schools generally safer, school shootings have not declined. Astor now argues many perpetrators are driven by a desire for notoriety and calls on journalists and social media companies to adopt guidelines that reduce attention on shooters, delay publication of manifestos, and focus more coverage on victims.

Read more from the Hechinger Report.

The AI Blind Spot Hurting Black Youth

July 18, 2026 — Fellow Desmond Upton Patton, MSW, PhD, Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor and founding director of the SAFELab at the University of Pennsylvania, is profiled in Rolling Out on "the AI blind spot hurting Black youth." Patton is a pioneer in using AI to detect signals of grief, violence, and well-being in social media posts by youth of color — after finding early on that standard AI tools misread expressions of grief as aggression because they were trained on predominantly white English. His SAFELab has since developed the Contextual Analysis of Social Media (CASM) framework, which brings culture, community context, and linguistic nuance into machine learning. His current work explores how joy can inform more equitable AI design.

Read more from Rolling Out.

How Eviction Moratoria Shaped Foster Care Entries

August 2026 — Fellow Lawrence M. Berger, PhD, Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Social Work and former Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, co-authored a new JAMA Health Forum study examining how state eviction freezes during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the number of children entering foster care — contributing to a growing evidence base linking housing stability to child welfare system involvement.

Read more from JAMA Health Forum.