Professor Kashyap’s research spans different areas of demography, including questions linked to mortality and population health, gender inequality, marriage and family, and migration and ethnicity.
Ridhi has worked on the demographic manifestations and implications of son preference as one of the most striking ways in which gender inequality interacts with demographic behaviours, and has also studied the relationship between educational expansion, gender norms, and marriage and partnership patterns in different contexts.
Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ridhi has researched the varying social and demographic impacts of the pandemic, including topics such as the pandemic’s mortality impacts in cross-national perspective and information-seeking dynamics and the role of trust in science for public health.
A central interest of Ridhi’s research has been to leverage computational approaches for demographic research within the growing area of Digital and Computational Demography, and forge links between demography and a growing interdisciplinary community of computational social science. Within the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science, she co-leads the strand on Digital and Computational Science.
Ridhi is also interested in how computational methods (such as agent-based models, microsimulation, machine learning) and new data streams (including digital trace data from the web and social media), can contribute to the study of population dynamics and social inequalities. Within the Digital Gender Gaps project, Ridhi uses social media data together with survey data to nowcast global digital gender inequalities in internet and mobile access, a global Sustainable Development Goal indicator for which there is a significant data gap.
More information