California Center for Population Research

Taylor Hargrove, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2022-02-09 12:00 - 13:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Biography: Dr. Hargrove is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and a faculty fellow at the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). Her program of research examines how and why social inequalities in health unfold across the life course, focusing on inequalities by race/ethnicity, skin color, gender, and socioeconomic status. Her current program of research integrates biomedical perspectives into the study of health inequality in the US by exploring linkages among socio-geographic contexts, individual-level characteristics, and biological measures of health in early adulthood. The goal of this work is to elucidate how macro-level environments shape the consequences of social statuses on more proximate causes of poor health. Hargrove plans to continue this line of research in efforts to help elucidate the pathways through which social factors ‘get under our skin’ to shape health and undergird social stratification.
Mental Health across the Early life Course at the Intersections of Race, Skin Tone, and School Context
Abstract: Considerable research documents higher levels of depressive symptoms among Black Americans relative to whites. Yet, we know little about the role of other dimensions of race (e.g., skin tone) and early life contexts (e.g., childhood racial contexts) in shaping trajectories of depressive symptoms across adolescence and adulthood. This study asks: 1) to what extent do self-identified race and skin tone shape disparities in depressive symptoms between Black and white adults across ages 12-42? 2) Do the relationships between race/skin tone and depressive symptoms depend on school racial context, as measured by the racial composition of middle and high schools? This study uses five waves of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and employs growth curve models to address these questions. Overall, results suggest that trajectories of depressive symptoms across ages 12-42 vary by race and skin tone among Black adults. Further, racial and skin tone disparities in depressive symptom trajectories are contingent on school racial context, highlighting competing advantages and disadvantages of navigating majority spaces in early life for Black adults of different skin tones. Findings and implications will be discussed in more detail.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.

Jack Mountjoy, University of Chicago
2022-02-16 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Jack Mountjoy is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Robert H. Topel Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His research explores the economics and econometrics of education, labor markets, and social mobility. Prior to joining Chicago Booth, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at Princeton University in the Industrial Relations Section. He is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate at the University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab, MIT Blueprint Labs, and Statistics Norway.
Jack holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation work earned a fellowship from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. He also holds a post-baccalaureate Certificate in Mathematics from George Washington University and a B.A. in Economics and Politics from Whitman College.

The Returns to College(s): Relative Value-Added and Match Effects in Higher Education

Abstract: Students who attend different colleges in the U.S. end up with vastly different economic outcomes. We study the role of relative value-added across colleges within student choice sets in producing these outcome disparities. Linking administrative high school records, college applications, admissions decisions, enrollment spells, degree completions, and quarterly earnings spanning the Texas population, we identify relative college value-added by comparing the outcomes of students who apply to and are admitted by the same set of institutions, as this approach strikingly balances observable student potential across college treatments and renders our extensive set of covariates irrelevant as controls. Methodologically, we develop a framework for identifying and interpreting value-added under varying assumptions about match effects and sorting gains, generalizing the constant treatment effects assumption typically employed in the value-added literature. Empirically, we estimate a relatively tight, though non-degenerate, distribution of relative value-added across the wide diversity of Texas public universities. Selectivity poorly predicts value-added within student choice sets: a fleeting selectivity earnings premium fades to zero after a few years in the labor market, and more selective colleges tend to have lower value-added on STEM degree completion. Non-peer college inputs like instructional spending more strongly predict value-added, especially conditional on selectivity. Educational impacts predict labor market impacts: colleges with larger earnings value-added also tend to be colleges that boost persistence, BA completion, and STEM degrees along the way. Finally, we probe the potential for (mis)match effects by allowing each college’s relative value-added to vary flexibly by student characteristics. At first glance, Black students appear to face small negative returns to choosing more selective colleges, but this pattern of modest “mismatch” is entirely driven by the availability of two large historically Black universities with low selectivity but above-average value-added. Across the non-HBCUs, Black students face similar returns to selectivity, and indistinguishable value-added schedules more generally, compared to their peers from other backgrounds.

You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
A recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

Berk Ozler, World Bank
2022-02-23 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Berk Ozler received his B.Sc. in Mathematics from Boğaziçi University in 1991, and his Ph.D in Economics from Cornell University in 2001. After working on poverty and inequality measurement, poverty mapping, and the 2006 World Development Report on Equity and Development earlier, he decided to combine his interest in cash transfer programs and HIV risks facing young women in Africa by designing a large cash transfer experiment in Malawi, the longer-term evaluation of which is still ongoing. He has since conducted a number of cluster-randomized field experiments. He is currently interested in ways to reduce unintended pregnancies, especially among adolescent females and young women. He is trialing approaches to increase the take-up of modern contraceptives among this population with an adaptive experiment in Cameroon. He is a co-founder of and a regular contributor to the Development Impact blog.
Can Improved Counseling Increase Willingness to Pay for Modern Contraceptives
Abstract: Long-acting reversible contraceptives are highly effective in preventing unintended pregnancies, but take-up remains low. This paper analyzes a randomized controlled trial of interventions addressing two barriers to long-acting reversible contraceptive adoption, credit, and informational constraints. The study offered discounts to the clients of a women’s hospital in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and cross-randomized a counseling strategy that encourages shared decision-making using a tablet-based app that ranks modern methods. Discounts increased uptake by 50 percent, with larger effects for adolescents. Shared decision-making tripled the share of clients adopting a long-acting reversible contraceptive at full price, from 11 to 35 percent, and discounts had no incremental impact in this group.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.
A recording of the seminar may be accessed here.

Goleen Samari, Columbia University
2022-03-02 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Goleen Samari is an assistant professor and population health demographer in the Heilbrunn Department of Population and Family Health and Program on Forced Migration and Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. Her research considers how racism, gender inequities, and migration-based inequities shape reproductive and population health with a particular focus on populations in or from the Middle East and North Africa. She was the first to draw attention to the racialization of religious minorities and Islamophobia as a public health issue. Her research aims to understand and alleviate intersectional structural determinants of health over the life course and bridge some of the gap between research and policy. Dr. Samari is a former doctoral trainee of the California Center for Population Research, and she earned a Ph.D. in public health, an MPH in community health sciences, and an MA in Islamic studies from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Structural Xenophobia and Birth Outcomes: The Role of Exclusive Immigration Policies
Anti-immigrant stigma or xenophobia is increasingly pervasive globally. The epidemiological implications of the recent wave of xenophobic policies are increasingly of interest to population health scientists. This talk will present findings from a study that explores the impact of one such policy, the 2017 travel ban on individuals from Muslim majority countries, and birth outcomes among women from those countries residing in the US. We also consider how structural xenophobia can be measured and present a new measure, the immigration policy climate (IPC) index, that captures state immigration policy environments from 2009 to 2019. The IPC index includes fourteen inclusionary and exclusionary policies across all US states and Washington, DC. We will discuss how the IPC index offers opportunities to explore immigrant health and behavioral outcomes including reproductive and maternal health outcomes.
You can access the CCPR seminar using this link.

CCPR Workshop: Planning for and Writing an NIH grant proposal
2022-03-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Abstract: This seminar will describe key issues in planning for and writing a research grant proposal for the National Institutes of Health if you are a demographer, social scientist, and/or working on the social determinants of health. The emphasis will be on R01, R21, and R03 proposals. Participants are invited to bring their own experiences with NIH grant proposal preparation and questions for discussion.
The recording of the workshop may be accessed here.

DemSemX: Making the Most of Conferences
2022-03-21 13:00 - 14:15 | Zoom link https://go.wisc.edu/d4vz8f
Presenters: Elizabeth Bruch (Michigan), Lauren Gaydosh (UT-Austin), Jayanti Owens (Brown), Alexis Santos (Penn State), Rob Warren (Minnesota)
Moderated by: Jenna Nobles, UW–Madison
Join via Zoom at https://go.wisc.edu/d4vz8f
Co-sponsored by: Center for Family and Demographic Research (BGSU); Population Studies and Training Center (Brown); Cornell Population Center (Cornell); Population Studies Center (Michigan); Minnesota Population Center (UMN); Population Research Institute (PSU); Texas Population Research Center (UT-Austin); California Center for Population Research (UCLA); Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology (Washington), Center for Demography and Ecology (UW–Madison).
Flyer here

CCPR 2022 PAA Practice Session
2022-03-30 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Nathan Hoffmann
Title: Strangers in the Homeland? The Academic Performance of Children of Return Migrants in Mexico
Abstract: The number of return migrants from the U.S. to Mexico has swelled in recent years, and yet we know little about the academic performance of the over 500,000 U.S.-born children who have accompanied them. This paper harnesses PISA test score data to compare U.S.-born children of return migrants in Mexico to two groups: Mexican-born students in Mexico, and students in the U.S. born to Spanish-speaking immigrant parents. Contrary to previous work highlighting the academic struggles faced by children of return migrants, these adolescents attain higher PISA scores than their Mexican-born counterparts. This advantage persists in models that control for both pre- and post-migration family characteristics. However, these adolescents’ scores are much lower than similar youths in the U.S., and controlling for variables related to immigrant selection barely changes estimates of disparities. Furthermore, results vary little by possible moderators. Overall, these findings suggest that these often forcibly displaced adolescents quickly assimilate to the relatively low educational standards of Mexican schools, highlighting the importance of institutional factors in the assimilation process.
Caitlin Ahern
Title: When and For Whom is College “Worth” It? The Direct and Indirect Effects of Less-Selective College Enrollment on Economic Insecurity
Abstract: As high-quality jobs and socioeconomic stability for less-educated workers have diminished, college is seen as the surest way to avoid negative socioeconomic outcomes. However, institutional differences suggest that the receipt of these economic benefits may depend not only on whether an individual enrolls in school but also where. In this study, I use data from the NLSY97 to assess how enrollment in a broad access institution – either a less-selective four-year college or a community college – affects low wage work and unemployment. I further assess the mediating pathway of degree attainment, and explore heterogeneity by socioeconomic background. Findings indicate that community college enrollment reduces low-wage work and unemployment relative to no college, and that less-selective four-year college rather than community college enrollment reduces low wage work. Yet, less-selective four-year college enrollment rather than more-selective four-year college enrollment does not appear to increase low wage work or unemployment. In addition, degree attainment appears to substantially mediate the effects of broad-access enrollment on low wage work. Finally, although I find some suggestive evidence of heterogeneity by socioeconomic background in the direct effects of community college and less-selective four-year college enrollment on low-wage work, the results are imprecise and no clear pattern emerges.

Sandra Black, Columbia University
2022-04-12 15:30 - 17:00 | In-person seminar: Bunche 9383
Biography: Sandra E. Black is Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. She received her B.A. from UC Berkeley and her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. Since that time, she worked as an Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and an Assistant, Associate, and ultimately Professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA, and held the Audre and Bernard Centennial Chair in Economics and Public Affairs in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin before arriving at Columbia University. She is currently an Editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and was previously a Co-Editor and Editor of the Journal of Human Resources. Dr. Black is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Director of the NBER Study Group on Economic Mobility. She served as a Member of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from August 2015-January 2017. Her research focuses on the role of early life experiences on the long-run outcomes of children, as well as issues of gender and discrimination.
“Where Does Wealth Come From?”
Abstract: Much attention has been given to rising wealth inequality in recent decades. However, understanding inequality requires an understanding of how wealth relates to the potential wealth an individual could accumulate and where this wealth comes from. Using administrative data from Norway, we create measures of potential wealth that abstract from differential consumption and spending behavior. We then examine how these measures relate to observed net wealth of individuals at a point in time and the role played by different sources of wealth in the distribution of potential wealth. We find that net wealth is a reasonable proxy for potential wealth, particularly in the tails of the distribution. Importantly, people in different parts of the potential wealth (or actual net wealth) distribution get their wealth from very different sources. Labor income is the most important determinant of wealth, except among the top 1%, where capital income and capital gains on financial assets become important. Inheritances and gifts are not an important determinant of wealth, even at the top of the wealth distribution. Finally, although inheritances are not important, parental wealth does influence child’s wealth; children of wealthy parents accumulate wealth from very different sources than children of less wealthy parents.
A recording of Dr. Black’s talk may be accessed here.

Stephen Machin, London School of Economics
2022-04-20 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Stephen Machin is Professor of Economics and Director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, has been President of the European Association of Labour Economists, is a Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and was an independent member of the UK Low Pay Commission from 2007-14. His current research interests feature the study of labour market inequality, social mobility, education and crime, and the interactions between them.
“Real Wage Stagnation and the Brexit Exchange Rate Depreciation”
Rui Costa, Swati Dhingra and Stephen Machin
Abstract: Immediately after the UK’s vote to leave the European Union, the value of sterling plummeted to record its biggest 24 hour depreciation since the collapse of Bretton Woods. This caused an intermediate import cost shock, not offset by an export revenue gain, and aggregate real wage growth stalled. Real wages fell more and stagnated for workers employed in industries, largely in the services sector, that experienced a bigger cost shock.

Workshop: CCPR Computing Resources Overview
2022-04-27 12:00 - 13:30 | Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Instructor: Matt Lahmann
Instructor: Mike Tzen
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings. At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research. In the second half, we’ll walk through how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

Rasmus Landerso, Institute of Labor Economics
2022-05-04 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Rasmus Landersø is a Research Professor at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Rasmus has received his BA from the University of Copenhagen and his PhD from Aarhus University, and he has also been a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago. Rasmus is currently an Associate Editor of the Journal of Human Capital, and he is also an associate member of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD) and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) working group, a Research Associate at Center for Research & Analysis of Migration (CReAM), and Research Affiliate at IZA. Rasmus’ research interests include labor economics, the economics of education, the economics of crime, and applied microeconometrics. His research covers both studies of intergenerational mobility, inequality, welfare policies, and spillovers in criminal behavior.
More information about Dr. Landerso may be accessed here.
The Consequences of Cutting Welfare Benefits for Refugees
A key concern when introducing welfare reforms to incentivize employment and self-sufficiency is how disincentives from more generous welfare programs, on the one hand, should be balanced against the potential adverse consequences of lower income and exposure to poverty for vulnerable groups, on the other hand. With Europe standing on the verge of an immense humanitarian crisis with large refugee flows, information on how welfare policies affect refugees’ lives is critical. This presentation will be based on two papers where we study the intended and unintended effects of Denmark’s Start Aid welfare reform from 2002 using administrative register data tracking individuals for up to two decades after the reform’s implementation. While the reform led to substantial short run increases in employment, the effects quickly faded with local demand being an important mediating factor. In addition, we document numerous adverse consequences for families that manifest in different outcomes and with different timing according to the age when individuals were first exposed to the large reduction in disposable income induced by the reform. These include increases to crime for adults and adolescents as well as reductions to completed schooling and lower GPA for refugees who were children when they arrived in Denmark.
The recording of Dr. Landerso’s talk may be accessed here.

Katie Genadek, University of Colorado, Boulder & U.S. Census Bureau
2022-05-11 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Katie R. Genadek is the Director of the Decennial Census Digitization and Linkage (DCDL) project and an Economist working at the U.S. Census Bureau. She is also a faculty associate at the University of Colorado – Boulder. She previously worked at the University of Minnesota where she managed the IPUMS-USA data project. She is a demographer and economist, and her research is focused on the relationship between policy, work, family, and time use.
More information about Dr. Genadek may be accessed here.
Motherhood Wage Penalties over the Life-Course in the United States: Results from Administrative Data
Abstract: Women with children are shown to experience a motherhood wage penalty, and it is often assumed leaving the labor force for long periods results in the growth of this penalty. However, there has been limited investigations into the relationship between the length of time out of the labor force and the wage penalties related to it. This study uses administrative data linked to survey data to investigate is the relationship between time out of employment and over the life course for mothers. This unique dataset includes yearly earnings data from 1950s-the present from the Social Security Administration (SSA) for respondents in the Current Population Survey (CPS) Annual Social and Economic Supplement data from 2001-present. By linking these two data sets, along with information on births from SSA, this longitudinal dataset is one of the most comprehensive panels of women’s fertility, employment, and wage trajectories ever created for the United States. We find non-linear impacts of years out of employment on wages for mothers over the life course and will investigate demographic and socio-economic variation in life-cycle wages by years spent out of the labor force.

Kari White, The University of Texas at Austin
2022-05-18 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Kari White is an associate professor in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work and Department of Sociology at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on evaluating the interrelationship between people’s reproductive health behaviors and outcomes and the health services and policies that shape their access to care. She is the lead investigator of the Texas Policy Evaluation Project – a multidisciplinary group of researchers who have been evaluating the impact of Texas’ legislation and policies related to contraception and abortion for 10 years. Her other recent projects include studies examining factors influencing vasectomy use and people’s access to abortion care in the Deep South. She co-led amicus briefs submitted to the US Supreme Court in June Medical Services v Russo and Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, summarizing extensive research on the adverse effects of abortion restrictions to challenge laws in Louisiana and Mississippi, respectively.
More information about Dr. White may be accessed here.
“Assessing the impact of abortion restrictions in Texas”
This presentation will provide an overview of how Dr. White and colleagues have assessed the impact of abortion restrictions in Texas over nearly 10 years. This will include a review of the diverse data and methodological approaches used to assess changes in abortions provided in Texas, out of state and pregnant people’s experiences accessing abortion care, as well as rapid response data collection activities.
A recording of Dr. White’s talk may be accessed here.

Ping Qin, University of Oslo
2022-05-25 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Dr Ping Qin is professor at National Center for Suicide Research and Prevention, University of Oslo in Norway, and head of research group for register-based study on suicide and self-harm. Professor Qin has been dedicated to reseach on suicide prevention and psychiatric epidemiology for more than 25 years, with extensive experience in population studies with data from longitudinal registries, previously in Denmark and since 2012 in Norway. Her main focus of research has been quantitative investigation on contextual influence of multifactorial exposures on risk for suicidal behavior and follow-up care for people with deliberate self-harm. She has led a number of international collaboration projects. She is the co-chair of 2021 IASR/AFSP International Summit on Suicide Reseach, a founding co-chair of the Special Interest Group on Suicide and Self-harm in Middle-aged Adults, and past Vice-President of International Association for Suicide Prevention.
More information about Dr. Qin may be accessed here.
Suicide Prevention Research: Searching Evidence from Real-life Data in Routine Registers
Abstract: Routine population registries offer extensive opportunities for research because the data is recorded uniformly, precisely and longitudinally, and often covers a large population. The registries allow research on children as well as adults, enable follow-up of individual subjects beyond the limited time span, and ensure cost-efficient and easy access to data of both common and rare exposures. Starting from the Nordic countries and increasingly more from other parts of the world, a range of studies have used this valuable source of data to search for meaningful evidence on factors contributing to suicide and suicide prevention. The studies have been able to include a great variety of social and health-related factors to study their contextual effect on risk for suicide and deliberate self-harm, to disentangle contributing effects of specific exposures, to examine interactive effects of multiple exposures, and to assess the effect of clinical treatments and inventions. In this lecture I will discuss strengths and limitations in utilizing register data for suicide research, and present important findings from our group. Emphases will go to investigation on temporal, contextual and interactive effects of socioeconomic disadvantages, adverse experiences and psychiatric and physical illnesses, and on what follow-up psychiatric care was delivered to patients presenting to hospitals with deliberate self-harm and what effect it had on the patients’ health prospectively.

Fifth Annual Robert Mare Student Lecture: Fernanda Rojas, PhD (c), Economics, UCLA
2022-06-01 12:00 - 13:30 | CA
Biography: Fernanda Rojas-Ampuero is a PhD candidate in the Department of Economics at UCLA. Her research focuses on two different topics. First, she studies the welfare consequences of urban policies in developing countries. Specifically, she investigates the long-term impact of public housing programs on families and their children and their consequences on income inequality within the city. Second, she investigates gender issues in the public finance literature, such as maternity leave and unemployment benefits, with a special interest in developing countries. In her research, she collects and digitize historical data that she combines with administrative sources, with the purpose of following individuals for long periods of time. In her dissertation, she studies the long-term effects of moving to a high-poverty neighborhood on earnings and schooling using evidence from a slum clearance program implemented in Santiago, Chile, between 1979 and 1985. Fernanda is from Chile, where she earned her BA and Master’s degree in Economics from Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (PUC Chile). Beginning in Summer 2022, Fernanda will be a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and in January 2024 she will join the Department of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an Assistant Professor.
Sent Away: The Long-Term Effects of Slum Clearance on Children and Families
Abstract: We study the long-term effects of moving to a high-poverty neighborhood on earnings and schooling using evidence from a slum clearance program implemented in Santiago, Chile, between 1979 and 1985. During the country’s dictatorship, the government mandated the eviction of entire slums and their relocation to public housing in low-income areas: Two-thirds of slums were relocated to new housing projects on the periphery of the city, and the rest received housing at their initial location. To estimate a displacement effect, we compare the outcomes of displaced and non-displaced children 20 to 40 years after the end of the policy. We show that displacement is unrelated to families’ demographics or neighborhood attributes prior to eviction. We construct a novel data set that combines archival records with administrative data containing 19,852 homeowners matched to 55,343 children. We find negative effects on children and families: Displaced children have 10% lower earnings and 0.5 fewer years of education as adults than non-displaced. Moreover, displaced children are more likely to work in informal jobs and their parents are more likely to die after the intervention. Destination characteristics mediate our results: Lower social cohesion in destination projects reduces children’s schooling, and their earnings are also affected by worse labor market access.

CCPR Welcome at the Sculpture Garden
2022-09-28 12:00 - 13:00 | Sculpture Garden Coral Tree Walk
CCPR Welcome and Introductions at the Sculpture Garden
This will be the kick-off event for the start of the upcoming 2022-23 CCPR Seminar Series. Please join us to learn all about CCPR as we welcome new affiliates and reconnect in person.
Lunch boxes will be provided.

Feinian Chen, Johns Hopkins University
2022-10-05 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Feinian Chen is Professor of Sociology and faculty affiliate at the Hopkins Population Center at Johns Hopkins University. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001 and was trained in social demography at the Carolina Population Center. Her research crosscuts a range of areas in demography, family sociology, gender, aging, and quantitative methodology. Her main research interests include women’s work and family, intergenerational relations, population aging and health. Her work has been published in the American Sociological Review, Social Forces, Demography, Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, Journal of Health and Social Behavior, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Sociological Methods and Research. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Hewlett Foundation. She is actively engaged in research in family transitions, gender dynamics, and their health implications in the diverse contexts of China, India, the Philippines, and the U.S.
Reconfiguring Social Disconnectedness and Its Link to Psychological Well-being among Older Adults in Rural China
Abstract: Using data from 2015 and 2018 waves of the Longitudinal Study of Older Adults in Anhui Province, China, we investigated associations between different forms of social disconnectedness (social isolation, loneliness, living alone) and psychological well-being of older adults longitudinally. The results showed that social isolation and loneliness were independently associated with psychological well-being, whereas living alone was not. Different forms of social disconnectedness had additive and interactive effects on psychological well-being of older adults. Those who were exposed to all three forms of social disconnectedness suffered from the lowest level of psychological well-being. Moreover, the adverse effects of social disconnectedness on psychological well-being were found to be stronger for older women than for older men. The results underscore the necessity to consider multiple forms of social disconnectedness as well as their different combinations in explaining psychological well-being in later life.

Alexandra Killewald, Harvard University
2022-10-12 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Alexandra (Sasha) Killewald is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. She uses quantitative methods to study inequality in the contemporary United States. In one line of research, Killewald investigates the gendered intersection of work and family. In another, she analyzes how wealth inequality persists across generations and the role of intergenerational processes in the racial wealth gap.
Killewald’s research has been published in journals including American Sociological Review, Demography, Social Forces, and Journal of Marriage and Family. She is the recipient of the William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the ASA Section on Inequality, Poverty, and Mobility and has received article awards from the ASA Section on Family and the ASA Section on Sociology of Population.
Killewald received her PhD in Public Policy and Sociology from the University of Michigan in 2011. Prior to her appointment at Harvard, she was a researcher at Mathematica.
Title: Can Changing Family Demographics Help Explain the Narrowing Gender Wage Gap?
Abstract: We argue that changing family demography can help explain the narrowing gender pay gap in the United States since 1980. To understand this, we introduce the concept of “wedge characteristics” — characteristics differently associated with wages for women compared to men. While prior analyses often spotlight how convergence in men’s and women’s human capital can narrow the gender pay gap, wedge characteristics imply that changes in the family-demographic composition of the labor force can also alter the gender pay gap. Gender pay gaps are larger among the married than the unmarried and among parents than the childless, suggesting that declines in marriage and fertility since 1980 can help explain gender pay convergence. We find that changes 1980-2018 in marriage and fertility alone explain about a quarter of the gender convergence in pay among full-time employees and explain 14 percent net of changes in human capital. We further show that these results are largely driven by compositional change and do not require gender convergence in family-demographic traits. Our results also reveal that the pace of family-demographic change was fastest in the 1980s and subsequently slowed, which, in conjunction with persistent wage wedges, helps explain stalled progress toward gender pay parity.

Workshop: CCPR Computing Resources Overview
2022-10-19 12:00 - 13:00 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Workshop: CCPR Computing Resources Overview
Instructor: Matt Lahmann
Instructor: Mike Tzen
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings. At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research. In the second half, we’ll walk through how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

Kareem Haggag, UCLA
2022-10-26 12:00 - 13:30 | CA
Biography: Kareem Haggag is an Assistant Professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management in the Behavioral Decision Making area. He is also a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Professor Haggag studies topics at the intersections of economics, political science, and psychology. Much of his research examines the roots and consequences of biases in the contexts of consumer choice, finance, education, voting, and labor markets.
The Effects of Racial Segregation on Intergenerational Mobility: Evidence from Historical Railroad Placements (with Eric Chyn and Bryan Stuart)
Abstract: This paper provides new evidence on the causal impacts of city-wide racial segregation on intergenerational mobility. We use an instrumental variable approach that relies on plausibly exogenous variation in segregation due to the arrangement of railroad tracks in the nineteenth century (Ananat 2011). Our analysis finds that greater segregation reduces upward mobility for Black children from households across the income distribution and White children from low-income households. Moreover, segregation lowers academic achievement while increasing incarceration rates and teenage birth rates. An analysis of mechanisms shows that segregation reduces government spending, weakens support for anti-poverty policies, and increases racially conservative attitudes among White residents.

Ray Lovett, Australian National University
2022-10-28 12:00 - 13:20 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Title: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Data Development in Australia: Supporting Our Nation(s) Agenda.
Author(s) and presenters: Ray Lovett (Wongaibon/Ngiyampaa), Jan Chapman (Taungurung), Makayla Brinckley (Wiradjuri), Nadine Hunt (Iamalaig and Kaanju).
Indigenous Peoples worldwide lack opportunity to develop and implement their community development agendas from their cultural framework. Instead, governments and others impose what they conceive as development. This constitutes a modern form of settler-colonialism which at a minimum has the potential to be ineffective and at worst is harmful to Indigenous Peoples. This presentation will highlight how Indigenous community driven processes in Australia were applied to develop a national level cohort study and community-based census, and how these are being used to influence Australian policy. We will also highlight how, at a community level, these data tools can be used for community development aspirations.
Biographies:
Dr. Raymond Lovett BN, RN, BHSc, MAE, PhD is a Senior Research Fellow with the Epidemiology for Policy and Practice group at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, The Australian National University. He also holds an adjunct Fellowship at the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) in the Indigenous Social and Cultural Wellbeing group. Ray is an Aboriginal (Ngiyampaa/Wongaibon) epidemiologist with extensive experience in health services research, large scale data analysis for public health policy development and evaluation.
Jan Chapman, BPubPol is Aboriginal (Taungurung) from Australia. She graduated from the University of Tasmania with a degree in Public Policy and Social Ecology. Jan is the Mayi Kuwayu Study Manager in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program at the Australian National University. She has extensive Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander policy experience across Indigenous Chronic Disease and for the last ten years she has managed all Mayi Kuwayu data development and data collection, including through the extensive community networks. Together with Nadine, Jan is currently assisting one community to embed their own data systems and processes aligned with their community development agenda.
Makayla-May Brinckley is a Wiradjuri woman with family ties to Cootamundra, NSW. After graduating from Psychology Honours from the ANU in 2019, she worked as a research assistant in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program in the Research School of Population Health. Makayla is now an Indigenous Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Program, with much of her work based within Mayi Kuwayu: the National Study of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Wellbeing. Makayla is passionate about holistic health and wellbeing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and taking a strengths-based and decolonial approach to health and wellbeing.
Nadine Hunt is an Iamalaig and Kaanju woman and a Community Researcher, based in Cairns with travel throughout Far North Queensland. Nadine has spent the last six years working with the Indigenous Marathon Foundation in Canberra, developing a national grassroots running program in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island communities. Nadine continues her volunteer work as a running coach with the Cairns Deadly Runners, and has recently begun a Bachelor of Business degree through James Cook University.

Cecilia Menjivar and Panel
2022-11-02 12:00 - 13:20 | CA
State-created Categories, Displacements and Possibilities from the Margins: A conversation with demography
Abstract: This panel discussion is based on Menjívar’s ASA presidential address. She argues for the importance of state-created categories and classification systems that determine eligibility for tangible and intangible resources. Through classification systems based on rules and regulations, bureaucracies maintain entrenched inequality systems that include, exclude, and neglect. She proposes adopting a critical perspective when using state-created and formalized categories in our research, which would acknowledge the constructed nature of those categories, their naturalization through everyday practices, and their misalignments with lived experiences. This lens can reveal the systemic structures that create both state classification systems and enduring patterns of inequality. This approach can reframe questions about the people sorted into the categories we use in our work.
Panelists:
Dr. Cecilia Menjivar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She specializes in immigration, gender, family dynamics, social networks, religious institutions, and broad conceptualizations of violence. She focuses on two main areas: the impacts of the immigration regime and laws on immigrants and the effects of living in contexts of multisided violence on individuals, especially women. Her work on immigration concerns mainly the United States, where she focuses on Central American immigrants, whereas her work on violence is centered on Latin America, mostly Central America. Menjívar is interested in how state power manifests itself through legal regimes and formal institutions and bureaucracies to shape microprocesses in everyday life.
Her work has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Social Problems, International Migration Review, Ethnic & Racial Studies, among other journals. Her most recent publications include the edited volume, Constructing Immigrant Illegality: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge, 2014), the book, Immigrant Families (Polity 2016), and the edited volume The Oxford Handbook of Immigration Crises (Oxford, 2019).
Dr. Cecilia Menjívar co-authored an amicus brief in the consolidated DACA cases before the U.S. Supreme Court along with a dozen other prominent empirical scholars who study DACA and its effects. One of her many prominent publications includes “Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America” (California, 2000), which was the winner of the William J. Goode Outstanding book award from the Family Section of the American Sociological Association, Honorable Mention from the International Migration Section, and a Choice Outstanding Title. Other publications include “Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala” (California, 2011). She is co-editor of Constructing Immigrant “Illegality”: Critiques, Experiences, and Responses (Cambridge, 2014), Latinos/as in the United States: Changing the Face of América (Springer 2008), and When States Kill: Latin America, the US, and Technologies of Terror (Texas, 2005).
Dr. Randall Kuhn (Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania, 1999) is a demographer and sociologist focused on the social determinants of health among vulnerable populations. He is an expert in survey design, longitudinal analysis and counterfactual research design. In the field of migration and health, Kuhn has designed new approaches to estimating the impact of migration on health. In global health, Kuhn leads a 35-year longitudinal study of the impact of health and development programs in Bangladesh. In the area of homelessness, Kuhn conducted some of the earliest quantitative research on health and substance use risks among chronically homeless adults. He co-authored recent reports on homelessness and the coronavirus outbreak for the National Alliance to End Homelessness and on health and homelessness in Los Angeles. He currently leads or co-leads new studies that use mobile phones to measure the well-being of unhoused and recently-housed populations. To learn more, visit: https://www.homelessresearch.akidolabs.com/.
Kuhn is a fellow of the California Center for Population Research, where he serves as Chair of the Executive Committee. He also serves on the advisory boards of the UCLA Center for the Study of International Migration and the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. Kuhn previously chaired the Population Sciences Subcommittee of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. For 10 years Kuhn was Director of the Global Health Affairs Program at the University of Denver, where he developed an innovative curriculum, tripled enrollments, and built a programmatic emphasis on the health and human rights of disabled, LGBTQ, indigenous, and migrant populations as an essential component of achieving global health justice and equity. Kuhn founded the Goal 18 campaign for inclusive UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr. Desi Small-Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and American Indian Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has partnered with Indigenous communities in the U.S. and internationally as a researcher and data advocate for more than ten years.
Desi’s research examines the intersection of race, indigeneity, data, and inequality. With a focus on Indigenous futures, her current research explores the racialization of Indigenous identity and group boundary making, Indigenous population statistics, and data for health and economic justice on Indian Reservations.
Desi directs the Data Warriors Lab, an Indigenous social science laboratory. She is the Co-Founder of the U.S. Indigenous Data Sovereignty Network, which helps ensure that data for and about Indigenous nations and peoples in the U.S. (American Indians, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians) are utilized to advance Indigenous aspirations for collective and individual wellbeing. She also serves on the Board of Directors for the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Database. She is a proud alumna of the University of Arizona (Ph.D. Sociology), University of Waikato (Ph.D. Demography), Stanford University (B.A. and M.A.).
Faculty host:
Abel Valenzuela Jr. is a professor of Urban Planning and Chicana/o Studies and the former director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. As of 2022, Professor Valenzuela serves as interim dean for UCLA’s Division of Social Sciences. Professor Valenzuela is one of the leading national experts on day labor and has published numerous articles and technical reports on the subject. His research interests include precarious labor markets, worker centers, immigrant workers, and Los Angeles. His academic base is urban sociology, planning, and labor studies. In addition to the topic of day labor, he has published numerous articles on immigrant settlement, labor market outcomes, urban poverty and inequality, including co-editing (with Lawrence Bobo, Melvin Oliver, and Jim Johnson) Prismatic Metropolis: Inequality in Los Angeles published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2000, Immigration and Crime: Race, Ethnicity, and Violence (with Ramiro Martinez Jr.). He has also published in American Behavioral Scientist, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Annual Review of Sociology, New England Journal of Public Policy, Working USA: a Journal of Labor and Society, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, and Regional Studies. Dr. Valenzuela earned his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and his M.C.P. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was born and raised in Los Angeles and currently lives in Venice Beach with his wife and three sons.

Amanda Glassman, Center for Global Development
2022-11-09 12:00 - 13:30 | Venue: Zoom seminar. Please contact ccpradmin@ccpr.ucla.edu for Zoom link.
Biography: Amanda Glassman is executive vice president and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and also serves as chief executive officer of CGD Europe. Her research focuses on priority-setting, resource allocation and value for money in global health, as well as data for development. Prior to her current position, she served as director for global health policy at the Center from 2010 to 2016, and has more than 25 years of experience working on health and social protection policy and programs in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world.
Prior to joining CGD, Glassman was principal technical lead for health at the Inter-American Development Bank, where she led policy dialogue with member countries, designed the results-based grant program Salud Mesoamerica 2015 and served as team leader for conditional cash transfer programs such as Mexico’s Oportunidades and Colombia’s Familias en Accion. From 2005-2007, Glassman was deputy director of the Global Health Financing Initiative at Brookings and carried out policy research on aid effectiveness and domestic financing issues in the health sector in low-income countries. Before joining the Brookings Institution, Glassman designed, supervised and evaluated health and social protection loans at the Inter-American Development Bank and worked as a Population Reference Bureau Fellow at the US Agency for International Development.
Glassman holds a MSc from the Harvard School of Public Health and a BA from Brown University, has published on a wide range of health and social protection finance and policy topics, and is editor and coauthor of the books What’s In, What’s Out: Designing Benefits for Universal Health Coverage (Center for Global Development, 2017), Millions Saved: New Cases of Proven Success in Global Health (Center for Global Development 2016), From Few to Many: A Decade of Health Insurance Expansion in Colombia (IDB and Brookings 2010), and The Health of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (World Bank 2001).
Title: Breakthrough to Policy Use: Reinvigorating Impact Evaluation for Global Development
Description: Better use of evidence in policymaking could improve lives and save hundreds of millions of dollars in public and aid spending each year. There has been tremendous progress in harnessing better evidence to inform public policy decision making, especially from impact evaluations of programs in low- and middle-income countries. Yet only a fraction of all development programs are evaluated, and far too often, policymakers lack the solid, policy-relevant research they could use to make better decisions. Given the potential real-world benefits, why have decision makers within governments, aid agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs not yet fully harnessed the value of evidence—including from impact evaluations—for better public policies? Looking ahead, how can the development community renew momentum and broaden bases of support for rigorous evaluations and the evidence agenda? And how can researchers foster stronger partnerships with policymakers and generate more timely and useful findings to inform policy decisions?
In response to these questions and building on progress to date, CGD launched the Working Group on New Evidence Tools for Policy Impact from 2020 to 2022, bringing together 40 policymakers and experts from 20 countries with collective experience at over 100 organizations to review progress, identify challenges, and propose recommendations to enhance the policy value and use of data and evidence for global development. The final report highlights how far the field has come in addressing persistent critiques about the scale, generalizability, and policy utility of impact evaluation methods. It also examines the importance shifting research agenda-setting power and resources to those who best specific policy contexts and decision making needs. This seminar will explore progress, challenges, and recommendations for better research funding and practice in detail, including the application of the agenda to specific target audiences such as philanthropies.

Zack W. Almquist, University of Washington (CANCELLED)
2022-11-16 12:00 - 13:00 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Biography: Zack W. Almquist is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Adjunct Associate Professor of Statistics, and Senior Data Science Fellow at the eScience Institute at the University of Washington. Before coming to UW in 2020, Prof. Almquist held positions as a Research Scientist at Facebook, Inc and as an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Statistics at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Almquist is a recipient of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Methodology’s Leo Goodman Award. He is also a recipient of the NSF’s CAREER Award and the ARO’s Young Investigator Program Award. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mathematical Sociology. His research centers on the development and application of mathematical, computational and statistical methodology to problems and theory of social networks, demography, homelessness, and environmental action and governance.
A Qualitative and Quantitative PIT Count using Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS): Understanding and Counting Unsheltered Homelessness in King County
Abstract: Traditionally, unsheltered Point in Time (PIT) Counts are the result of volunteers conducting an in-person head-count of individuals experiencing homelessness on a single night. This resource-intensive method is widely understood to be an undercount. It also fails to capture essential qualitative data about what people living unsheltered experience and need.
This past spring, the King County Regional Homelessness Authority (RHA), in coordination with Professor Zack W. Almquist (University of Washington) and Lived Experience Coalition (LEC), took a novel approach to the PIT. The RHA conducted the 2022 unsheltered PIT count as a combined qualitative interview process and quantitative survey over the course of a month. The respondent selection for both the qualitative and quantitative surveys followed a Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) protocol. RDS provides a sampling strategy for estimating size and percentages of hard-to-reach populations that lack an administrative sampling frame.
During this seminar, I will provide an overview of the RHA partnership effort, and how we executed this novel approach to the PIT. I will review the history of RDS as a means of sampling vulnerable populations, and I will cover the implementation of the sampling and estimation strategies based on the RHA RDS sample. Finally, I will review the demographics provided to HUD, and what we learned from conducting the RDS sample for the PIT count, and how it can and should affect future PIT counts going forwards.

Professional Development Series: The Stark Realities and Ethical Challenges of Transparent and Reproducible Population Research (CANCELLED)
2022-11-30 12:00 - 13:30 | In-person seminar: SSCERT lab (Public Affairs Building 2400)
Panelists:
Cecilia Menjivar holds the Dorothy L. Meier Chair in Social Equities and is Professor of Sociology at UCLA. She specializes in immigration, gender, family dynamics, social networks, religious institutions, and broad conceptualizations of violence. She focuses on two main areas: the impacts of the immigration regime and laws on immigrants and the effects of living in contexts of multisided violence on individuals, especially women. Her work on immigration concerns mainly the United States, where she focuses on Central American immigrants, whereas her work on violence is centered on Latin America, mostly Central America. Menjívar is interested in how state power manifests itself through legal regimes and formal institutions and bureaucracies to shape microprocesses in everyday life.
Randall Kuhn is a demographer and sociologist focused on the social determinants of health among vulnerable populations. He is an expert in survey design, longitudinal analysis and counterfactual research design. In the field of migration and health, Kuhn has designed new approaches to estimating the impact of migration on health. In global health, Kuhn leads a 35-year longitudinal study of the impact of health and development programs in Bangladesh. In the area of homelessness, Kuhn conducted some of the earliest quantitative research on health and substance use risks among chronically homeless adults. He co-authored recent reports on homelessness and the coronavirus outbreak for the National Alliance to End Homelessness and on health and homelessness in Los Angeles.
Felipe Goncalves is an Assistant Professor of Economics at UCLA. His research applies tools from labor and public economics to understand issues in policing, crime, and education. He received a BA in economics-mathematics from Columbia University and a PhD in economics from Princeton University. Prior to joining UCLA, he worked at the New York Crime Lab as a postdoctoral fellow.

Benjamin R. Karney, UCLA
2023-01-11 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Benjamin Karney is a Professor and Chair of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. His research examines intimate relationships, especially marriage, and focuses on how relationships are facilitated or constrained by the contexts in which they take place. Currently, he leads the Los Angeles Project on Newlywed Development (LAPOND), a longitudinal study of low-income couples, and co-directs (with Thomas Bradbury) the UCLA Marriage and Close Relationships Lab. He has twice received the National Council on Family Relation’s Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding family science.
Title: Public policies and private lives: How socioeconomic status affects intimacy
Abstract: lthough the desire for a stable, healthy intimate partnership is nearly a human universal, the likelihood of achieving this goal varies widely across levels of socioeconomic status. Compared to their more affluent peers, individuals at lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder far less likely to marry, and once married far more likely to divorce. What happens to intimacy under conditions of financial strain and limited access to resources? In this talk, I describe a program of research exploring answers to this question through longitudinal and observational studies of recently first-married couples recruited from lower-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles, CA and Harris County, TX. The results of this work highlight new directions for policies aimed at supporting and strengthening lower-income families.

Computing Resource Overview Workshop
2023-01-18 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
CCPR Workshop: Computing Resources Overview
Jan 18, 2022, 12:00pm-1:30pm
Presenters: Matt Lahmann
This workshop has two halves. In the first half, we will dive into the 3 main computing resources that CCPR offers to affiliates, including it’s remote and on campus offerings. At the end of the first half, we’ll get participants signed up for hoffman2 and TS2. Once signed up, you’ll have state of the art hardware resources and most software you’ll ever need for demographic research. In the second half, we’ll walk through how to use these computing resources, identifying what resource is better to use for different computing project scenarios.

Charlie Branas, Columbia University
2023-01-25 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Dr. Charles Branas is currently Department Chair and Gelman Endowed Professor of Epidemiology at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health. Dr. Branas has conducted research that extends from urban and rural areas in the US to communities across the globe, incorporating place-based interventions and human geography. He has led win-win science that generates new knowledge while simultaneously creating positive, real-world changes and providing health-enhancing resources for local communities. His pioneering work on geographic access to medical care has changed the healthcare landscape, leading to the designation of new hospitals and a series of national scientific replications in the US and other countries for many conditions: trauma, cancer, stroke, etc. His research on the geography and factors underpinning gun violence has been cited by landmark Supreme Court decisions, Congress, and the NIH Director. With community partners, Dr. Branas led the first citywide randomized controlled trials to transform vacant lots and abandoned buildings as sustainable solutions to improving health and safety, including reductions in gun violence. He has worked internationally on four continents and led multi-national efforts, producing extensive cohorts of developing nation scientists, national health metrics, and worldwide press coverage.
Guns, Places, and Public Health
Abstract: There are many competing influences in terms of why we have seen record levels of gun violence in the US this past year and why gun violence is now the leading cause of death in US children. While we should continue to focus on gun laws and law enforcement as possible solutions, both these approaches have their limitations. As a complementary series of solutions now supported by multiple large-scale scientific studies, addressing the basic structures and places that generate gun violence in the first place may offer scalable and more sustainable benefits to US communities long-suffering from the tragedy of gun violence.
To access the recording please click here.

Graeme Blair, UCLA
2023-02-01 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Graeme Blair is an associate professor of political science at UCLA and serves as Co-Director of Training and Methods of Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP). Graeme uses experiments, field research, and statistics to study how to reduce violence and how to improve social science research. He works primarily in Nigeria, often in partnership with government, civil society, or international organizations. His work is published in journals including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Science Advances, American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, and Political Analysis. His book on community policing is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press Studies in Comparative Politics and his book on research design is forthcoming with Princeton University Press. He is the recipient of the Leamer-Rosenthal Prize for Open Social Science, the Society for Political Methodology best statistical software award, and the Pi Sigma Alpha best paper award.
Better research planning through simulation
Abstract: The talk introduces a new way of thinking about research designs in the social sciences, with the aim of making it easier to develop and to share strong research designs. At the heart of our approach is the MIDA framework, in which a research design is characterized by four elements: a model, an inquiry, a data strategy, and an answer strategy. We have to understand each of the four on their own and also how they interrelate. The design encodes your beliefs about the world, it describes your questions, and it lays out how you go about answering those questions, both in terms of what data you collect and how you analyze it. In strong designs, choices made in the model and inquiry are reflected in the data and answer strategies, and vice-versa. This way of thinking pays dividends at multiple points in the research design lifecycle: planning the design, implementing it, and integrating the results into the broader research literature. The declaration, diagnosis, and redesign process informs choices made from the beginning to the end of a research project. These ideas will appear in Research Design in the Social Sciences: Declaration, Diagnosis, and Redesign, forthcoming in the fall with Princeton University Press.
To access the recording please click here.

Robert Hummer, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
2023-02-08 12:00 - 13:20 | 4240A Public Affairs Bldg
Biography: Robert A. Hummer is the Howard W. Odum Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC-CH). He moved to UNC-CH in 2015 after spending 19 years at the University of Texas at Austin, where he served as Director of their NICHD-supported Population Research Center, PI of their NICHD-supported Training Program in Population Studies, and Chairperson of their Department of Sociology. He recently served as the 2021 President of the Population Association of America and is currently a member of the Committee on Population of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. His research focuses on the accurate documentation and more complete understanding of health and mortality disparities in the United States. He is currently Director and Principal Investigator of the long-running National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health), which is now funded by the National Institute on Aging and five co-funding institutes/offices (NICHD, NIMHD, NIDA, OBSSR, ODP). Now in its sixth wave, Add Health is one of the most innovative and well-utilized nationally representative cohort studies of Americans ever undertaken and provides data for thousands of researchers to more fully understand the multi-level (biological, survey, contextual) life course factors that contribute to health and health disparities in US adolescents and adults.
Title: Assessing Cognitive Functioning and Health Disparities in Early Midlife: A Sneak Peek at Wave VI of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health)
Abstract: For over 25 years, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health) project has provided the scientific community with innovative data to understand the health and social life of a nationally representative cohort of Americans who were in grades 7-12 in 1994-95. The Add Health cohort is now in their 40s. Recently funded primarily by the National Institute on Aging, Wave VI of Add Health is currently in the field and is focused on providing the scientific community with novel data on the cognitive and sensory/physical functioning, social life, health, and health behavior of the cohort. This presentation by the principal investigator and director of Add Health will focus on findings from some of the Wave VI pilot data, which tested innovative methods for assessing the cognitive, physical, and sensory functioning of this early midlife cohort. The presentation will also provide an overview of the innovative design of Wave VI, information on some of the new measures that have been added to the survey and biological data collection, and a timeline of the fieldwork and data dissemination plan.
The recording of Dr. Hummer’s talk may be accessed here.
