About Dr. Signe Svallfors
My research focuses on the intersection of violence, social inequality, and health dynamics, with an emphasis on reproductive rights and gender-based violence in Latin America. I explore questions like: What are the consequences of armed conflict and violent crime on bodily autonomy and healthcare access? How do different forms of violence—such as war, crime, and gender-based violence—interconnect? Do marginalized ethnic groups have different fertility patterns and desires compared to majority groups? What drives people to choose C-sections when they are not medically necessary? This work highlights how local contexts shape health outcomes, especially for vulnerable populations.
I currently serve as a Wallenberg postdoctoral fellow with the Department of Sociology and Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University. Before this, I was a postdoctoral fellow with the Global and Sexual Health research group at the Department of Global Public Health at Karolinska Institutet. I have been a guest researcher with Columbia University and the College of Mexico. Starting in 2025, I will join the Department of Sociology at Stockholm University, where I earned my doctorate in sociological demography in December 2021.
My primary research line focuses on the impact of armed conflict and violent crime on sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice. My doctoral research analyzed this topic in Colombia, using an innovative combination of data from the Demographic and Health Surveys, the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, and original interviews with key Colombian stakeholders. In more recent work, I have conducted comparative work analyzing demographic and health outcomes of local violence in Latin American countries. My current research focuses on the impact of violent crime on sexual and reproductive health in the context of Mexico.
In a second research line, I have participated in developing and implementing a novel module to measure attitudes toward sexual and reproductive health and rights collected via the World Values Survey (WVS) in Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, and India. I have used data from this module to analyze, for example, the impact of armed conflict on such attitudes in Nigeria, the relationship with people’s reproductive agency, and how to measure attitudes and norms related to sexual and reproductive health and rights. Thanks to team efforts under my coordination, parts of this module will be included in the next wave of the global WVS, enabling future international research in a new direction of attitudinal research.
In a third burgeoning research line, I study the impact of climate change on sexual and reproductive health. I have conducted a scoping review, commissioned by the WHO Human Reproduction Programme, to map knowledge gaps on this topic in low- and middle-income countries. This review pointed to critical knowledge gaps in areas such as contraception and abortion as well as in the Latin American continent, which I address in my research.
