Shahryar Minhas, Duke University

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

The Center for Social Statistics Presents: Predicting the Evolution of Intrastate Conflict: Evidence from Nigeria url: http://css.stat.ucla.edu/event/shahryar-minhas/ The endogenous nature of civil conflict has limited scholars' abilities to draw clear inferences about the drivers of conflict evolution. We argue that three primary features characterize the complexity of intrastate conflict: (1) the interdependent relationships of conflict between […]

Research Ethics: The Use of Big Data

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

The use of big data has become increasingly common in social and health research, raising a series of new and difficult questions about research ethics.  In this informal workshop, a panel of investigators using big data for their research will describe issues that they have faced and other potential problems.  As background to this workshop, […]

Fragile Families Challenge: Getting Started Workshop

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

“Fragile Families Challenge: Getting Started Workshop” Ian Lundberg Ph.D. Student, Sociology and Social Policy,  Princeton University The Fragile Families Challenge is a scientific mass collaboration that combines predictive modeling, causal inference, and in-depth interviews in order to learn more about the lives of disadvantaged children. Fragile Families Challenge builds on the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study […]

UCLA – HKUST International Symposium on Segregation & Neighborhood Effects

UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate 110 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, United States

UCLA – HKUST International Symposium on Segregation & Neighborhood Effects June 6th 2017, 9:00 AM – 5:15 PM UCLA Ziman Center for Real Estate Symposium Agenda: 1) Segregation in the United States and its Global Impact. Discussant: Michael Lens, UCLA. 2) New Measures and New Impacts: Segregation in the United States. Discussant: Anne Pebley, UCLA. […]

Randall Akee, UCLA

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"Reservation Employer Establishments: Data from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Data Set"

Abstract: The presence of employers and jobs on American Indian reservations has been difficult to analyze due to limited data. We are the first to geocode confidential data on employer establishments from the U.S. Census Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) to identify location on or off American Indian reservations. We identify the per-capita establishment count and jobs in reservation-based employer establishments for most federally recognized reservations. Comparisons to nearby non-reservation areas in the lower 48 states across 18 industries, reveal that reservations have a similar sectoral distribution of employer establishments but have significantly fewer of them in nearly all sectors, especially when the area population is below 15,000 (as it is on the vast majority of reservations and for the majority of the reservation population). By contrast, total jobs provided by reservation establishments are, on average, at par with or somewhat higher than in nearby county areas but are concentrated among casino-related and government employers. An implication is that average employment per establishment are higher in these sectors on reservations, including those with populations below 15,000, while the rest of the economy is sparser in reservations (in firm count and jobs per capita) Geographic and demographic factors such as population density and per capita income statistically account for some but not all of these differences.

James Robins, Harvard University

Room 33-105 CHS Building 650 Charles E Young Drive South, Los Angeles, CA, United States

The UCLA Departments of Epidemiology, Biostatistics, Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents: Causal Methods in Epidemiology: Where has it got us and what can we expect in the future? The principal focus of Dr. Robins’ research has been the development of analytic methods appropriate for drawing causal inferences from complex observational and randomized […]

2017 Federal Statistical Research Data Center Annual Conference

4240 Public Affairs Bldg

The California Census Research Data Center (CCRDC) at University of California Los Angeles invites proposals to present papers and posters at the 2017 Federal Statistical Research Data Center Annual Conference. We also will consider proposals for workshops and panel discussions.

2017-2018 CCPR Welcome and Introductions

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Please come join us to learn all about the California Center for Population Research!

CCPR Grant Writing Workshop Session I: Planning an NIH grant proposal

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Grant Writing Workshop Series:
The workshop will include an overview of the basics, including NIH funding mechanisms, types of grant programs (we will focus on the R series with some discussion of K series), finding a funding opportunity (FOA): Parent Announcements, Program Announcements (PAs) vs. Request for Applications (RFAs) Administrative and other supplements Roles on a grant (PI, Co-PI, Co-Investigator, others), the process of preparing NIH proposals, identifying NIH institute (NIH matchmaker), working with NIH staff, due dates and the application to funding timeline, applications & resubmissions.

Roland Rau, University of Rostock

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"The challenges of estimating mortality in small areas -- using German counties as a case study"

Abstract: We develop and analyze Bayesian models that produce good estimates of complete mortality schedules for small areas, even when the expected number of deaths is very small. The models also provide estimates of uncertainty about local mortality schedules. The TOPALS relational model is the primary building block, used to model age-specific mortality rates within each small area. TOPALS models produce estimates for single-year ages from a small number of local parameters. We experiment with Bayesian models for smoothing and ‘borrowing’ mortality information across space, using two alternative specifications. First we test a Bayesian model with conditional autoregressive (CAR) priors for TOPALS parameters. CAR priors assign higher probability to parameters that are similar across adjacent areas, thus emphasizing spatial smoothness in estimated rates. Second, we test a hierarchical Bayesian model, which assigns higher probability to parameters that are similar for locations that are close in terms of political geography.

Workshop: Useful R 4 Stata Users Brown Bag

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"R 4 Stata Users"

This workshop is a brown bag forum. Participants are encouraged to bring in tangible questions they wish to explore using R. To serve as a background road map, the instructor will provide an abbreviated sample of what he thinks are the most useful features of R. However, the goal is to have participants ask questions that the collective group can figure out using R. Any R question is fair game, for example: questions about fundamental R concepts or even questions about how to run Stata-equivalent R commands. Participants will be provided access to Rstudio, so please bring a laptop.

This CCPR brown-bag is intended to be an open forum that complements the 3 great resources below. Please see the resources, especially the first one.

1) 10 minute demo: interactive call–response slideshow of R basics
http://tryr.codeschool.com/

2) Worked out examples from a UCLA IDRE workshop on R concepts
https://stats.idre.ucla.edu/r/seminars/intro/

3) R 4 Data Science e-book
http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Daniel Benjamin, USC Dornsife Center for Economic and Social Research

The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents: Redefine Statistical Significance Daniel Benjamin will discuss his paper (written by him and 71 other authors), “Redefine Statistical Significance”. The paper proposes that the default p-value threshold should be changed from 0.05 to 0.005. The paper is available at this link. Speaker: Daniel […]

David Chae, Auburn University

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"Getting Under the Skin: Socio-Psychobiological Pathways and Racial Disparities in Health"

Abstract: Racism is physically embodied through social, behavioral, and psychobiological mechanisms. In this talk, David H. Chae, will discuss the utility of a social-ecological and developmental lens to examine how racism is biologically embedded. He will discuss his research on multiple levels of racism and the channels through which they compromise health throughout the lifecourse.

Workshop: Transparent Data Analysis Workflow

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

Instructor: Michael Tzen PLEASE BRING A PERSONAL LAPTOP Content: Researchers go through fundamental steps in a data analysis project. This workshop highlights key steps in a data analyst's workflow and encourages transparency in each of the steps. Throughout this workshop, we go through hands on exercises that integrate: a transparency engine, obtaining federal API data, […]

Sander Greenland, UCLA Department of Epidemiology

The UCLA Department of Statistics and the Center for Social Statistics presents: Statistical Significance and Discussion of the Challenges of Avoiding the Abuse of Statistical Methodology Sander Greenland will offer his perspective on the paper, “Redefine Statistical Significance”, which was the topic of the previous week’s seminar. Also he will discuss the challenges of avoiding […]

Mark Kaplan, UCLA

CCPR Seminar Room 4240 Public Affairs Building, Los Angeles, CA, United States

"The Impact of Socioenvironmental Stressors on Alcohol-Linked Suicides: A Nationwide Postmortem Study"

Abstract: Not only is suicide a major public health problem, but also, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 8,179 deaths and 273,206 years of potential life lost resulted from alcohol attributable suicides in 2006-10 (the latest years available). Since 2011, Professor Kaplan and his colleagues have worked with the National Violent Death Reporting System Restricted Access Database on two projects funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, focusing on acute alcohol use immediately prior to suicide. This presentation will show that nearly a third of suicide decedents nationwide were intoxicated at the time of death. Furthermore, Prof. Kaplan will describe the effects of the 2008-09 economic contraction and other adverse socioenvironmental conditions on rates of suicide involving acute alcohol intoxication.