Friday, 10/29/2010
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Faculty Club, Grand Lounge Dr. Suzanne Bianchi, Professor of Sociology, UCLA 4th Annual Huber Population Lecture
3:30 p.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Faculty Club, Grand Lounge Dr. Suzanne Bianchi, Professor of Sociology, UCLA 4th Annual Huber Population Lecture
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Menstrual Cup Adoption and Effects on Education
Dr. Rebecca Thornton, Asst. Prof. of Economics, University of Michigan
Tuesday, 03/09/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Policy-makers have cited menstruation and lack of sanitary products as barriers to girls' schooling. We evaluate these claims using a randomized evaluation of sanitary products provision to girls in Nepal. We find that menstruation has a very small impact on school attendance: girls miss only 0.4 days in a 180 day school year due to their period. Second, improved sanitary technology (menstrual cups) have no effect on reducing this (small) gap: girls who randomly received sanitary products were no less likely to miss school during their period. Claims that menstruation is a barrier to schooling are overstated and modern sanitary products are unlikely to affect educational attainment. However, menstrual cups were associated with significant time saving benefits and the cup was quickly adopted, suggesting other potential benefits for girls.
Methods Workshop: Sampling Urban Residents and Female Sex Workers in Shanghai: Sexual Behavior, Sexual Networks, and Implications for the Spread of HIV/STDs
Giovanna Merli, Associate Professor, Duke University
Tuesday, 03/02/2010
12:30 - 2:00
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
China is a low HIV prevalence country. In 2007, there were an estimated 700,000 HIV cases corresponding to 0.05 percent of the adult population, with 49% of new cases attributed to heterosexual contact and 20% of all infections among female sex workers and their clients. I present selected findings from two sexual behavior surveys conducted in Shanghai in late 2007-early 2008. The first is a citywide survey of sexual behaviors and (egocentric) sexual networks of a probability sample of 1,689 urban residents and migrants. The second is a study of sexual behavior and sexually transmitted diseases among 522 female sex workers recruited through Respondent Driven Sampling, an innovative network-based sampling approach which purports to extend the sample to all potential members of a hidden population and yield statistically unbiased estimates of risk behaviors and infection status. Special emphasis will be laid on a discussion of the appropriateness of the selected sampling approaches to document crucial risk factors leading to HIV acquisition and transmission in the Chinese context and the implications of these factors for the potential spread (or failure to spread) of HIV in the worlds largest population.
Event cancelled
No seminar today
Tuesday, 02/23/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Cancelled
Ana Diez Roux, School of Public Health, University of Michigan
Tuesday, 02/16/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
OSU Media Training for IPR Affiliates
Earle Holland and Jeffery Grabmeier
Tuesday, 02/09/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Earle Holland is director of research communications in the Office of University Relations. As senior science communications professional at OSU, he oversees the promotion of research activities, including crisis communications involving research risks (lab animal use, human subjects experimentation, radiation safety, biosafety, infection control, computer security and scientific misconduct). He edits two national news services, has edited the former tabloid magapaper (Quest) and a major four-color magazine reporting on cancer research, treatment and education (Frontiers), and manages the university's research news website. For 20 years has taught a graduate level science writing course for OSU's School of Journalism. Jeff Grabmeier, assistant director of research communications, has been with the office since 1985. Jeff's primary responsibility is to help prepare the office's two national news services, which highlight the faculty's research accomplishments to print and broadcast reporters across the country. For the services, he assigns stories, works with writers, and edits copy. He is the principal writer covering research in the social sciences, business and human ecology. Jeff also assists reporters who are looking for sources or seeking more information on Ohio State research. In addition, Jeff edits the Research page for onCampus, the faculty and staff newspaper, and writes for Quest, the university's tabloid magapaper. Jeff co-chaired the 1997 national CASE Conference titled Effective Techniques for Communicating University Research.
Tobacco Use and Cessation in Ohio Appalachia
Dr. Mary Ellen Wewers, College of Public Heath
Tuesday, 02/02/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 JR
Methods Seminar: Geographic Analysis, Part II
Dr. Mei Po Kwan, Professor of Geography, and GeoHealth working group faculty, OSU
Tuesday, 01/26/2010
12:30 - 2:00
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
GIS Methodology Seminar
Dr. Mei Po Kwan, Dr. Ningchuan Xiao
Tuesday, 01/19/2010
12:30 - 2:00
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Geocomputation and 3D Geovisualization as Methods in Population and Health Research Dr. Mei-Po Kwan Department of Geography Recent advances in geospatial technologies have enabled the collection of space-time data at high spatial and temporal resolutions, often in conjunction with other contextual and biomarker data. This part of the seminar discusses geocomputation and geovisualization as methods for analyzing these data in population and health research. Geocomputation seeks to depict geographical variations of phenomena across scales and often involves the development and use of dedicated computational algorithms. 3D geovisualization facilitates the identification and interpretation of spatial patterns and relationships in complex data in the geographical context of a particular study area. The use of these methods in the study of individual accessibility and human activity patterns will be presented. (Part II) Dr. Ningchunan Xiao Department of Geography Agent-based Modeling and Social Network Analysis: Linking Spatial Analysis, Computational Science, and Population Research--This part of the seminar will provide an overview of the literature on the topics of agent-based modeling and social network, with a focus placed on overarching some recent developments in spatial analysis, computational science, population and public health research. Examples from social science, public health, economics, and geography will be used.
Children of Adversity: The Health and Nutrition of American Slaves
Dr. Rick Steckel, Professor of Economics, Ohio State University
Tuesday, 01/12/2010
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building
Adult height summarizes net nutrition and health aspects of welfare in childhood, but longitudinal data are virtually unavailable for a thorough investigation of its proximate determinants, which are diet, disease and physical activity from conception to maturity. Here I use a time series of children measured once at different ages to address the data challenge by creating a synthetic measure of longitudinal growth that is sensitive to current conditions.The paper analyzes fluctuations in the measure estimated from heights of 20,000 slave children recorded on coastwise shipping manifests.Drawing upon an economic model that links investments in child health to the relative prices of food, slaves and cotton, and using a novel proxy for exposure to pathogens, I show how economic incentives contributed to fluctuations in growth and to a peculiar pattern of health: severe early childhood stunting followed by extraordinary catch-up by teenagers. The methods expand our tool kit for height studies and the results show that plantation owners systematically manipulated net nutrition in response to price signals. Despite owning all their future labor, planters found it profitable to feed young children poorly, thereby distorting the slave family, cognitive development and personality.
The Contribution of Neighborhood Social Disorganization to SexuallyTransmitted Infection Using Biomarker Measures
Dr. Jodi Ford, Assistant Professor, School of Nursing, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 11/17/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
This study examined the contribution of neighborhood social disorganization to sexually transmitted infection (STI) among U.S. young adults using Wave III of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) and 2000 U.S. Census data. The dependent variable, STI, was a urine biomarker measure of Chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomonas vaginalis. Neighborhood social disorganization was measured via three separate composite indicators: concentrated poverty, residential instability and ethnic heterogeneity. Hierarchical generalized linear modeling was employed to adjust for the nesting of individuals within neighborhoods. Findings indicate that concentrated poverty was positively associated with STI, but residential instability was negatively associated, after adjusting for individual sociodemographic and risk behaviors and neighborhood controls. The findings suggest that more mobile neighborhoods may serve as protective environments against STI, potentially through more open network structures. However, a better understanding of how concentrated poverty contributes to STI among young adults is needed. Future research directions and neighborhood theory applications to STI will be discussed.
Schooling and Sexual Behavior in South Africa: The Role of Peer Effects
David Lam, Professor of Economics, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, 11/10/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
This study examines the influence of exposure to older peers on sexual debut in urban South Africa. The study analyzes data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), a longitudinal survey of young adults in metropolitan Cape Town. The combination of early sexual debut, high levels of school enrollment into the late teens, and high rates of grade repetition create an environment in which young people who progress through school ahead of their cohorts interact with classmates who may be several years older. We construct a measure of cumulative exposure to classmates at least two years older, and show that this measure has a statistically significant positive effect on sexual debut of adolescent girls. It also increases the age difference of the first sexual partner for those girls, and helps explain a significant fraction of the earlier sexual debut of African girls compared to coloured and white girls in Cape Town.
OSU/BGSU Graduate Student Conference
Graduate Student Researchers
Friday, 11/06/2009
10:00 - 2:30
217 and 243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
3rd Annual Huber Lecture-- Some Economic Consequences of the Demographic Transition and Population Aging: Insights from National Transfer Accounts
Dr. Ronald Lee, Professor of Demography, The University of California, Berkeley
Friday, 11/06/2009
3:30 - 5:00
140 Pfahl Hall
Dr. Lee is director of UC Berkeley's Center for the Demography and Economics of Aging, one of 11 centers established by the National Institute on Aging that form part of the national infrastructure for developing the emerging field of the demography of aging. He is the author of numerous articles, papers and publications. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Economic Association, the Population Association of America, the International Union for the Scientific Study of Population, the European Society for Population Economies, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Lee has also served as a consultant to the Social Security Administration and was a member of the Census Advisory Committee on Population Statistics for the U.S. Bureau of the Census.
Gender Equality and Relationship Transitions
Dr. Lynn Price Cooke, Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy, The University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, UK
Tuesday, 11/03/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
The theory and cross-national evidence as to effects of a partnered woman’s employment on relationship stability remain mixed. The Gender Equality in Relationship Transitions (GERT) network brings together sociologists, demographers, and economists from Australia, Belgium, East and West Germany, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and the United States to harmonize diverse national longitudinal datasets to compare effects of partnered women’s employment on relationship stability. The selected countries represent a range of usual levels and type of female employment, allowing us to assess how the individual effects of women’s work hours and wages vary in context. Initial results from analyses of British, German, and US panels highlight how the socioeconomic context and total household production are more important predictors than a woman’s employment. Lynn Prince Cooke (DPhil, Nuffield College, Oxford University) is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Kent in Canterbury, UK. From an interdisciplinary perspective and using a multimethod approach, she explores policy effects on life course outcomes for members of different social groups (class, gender, ethnic and demographic intersections). Her research has appeared in American Journal of Sociology, Journal of Social Policy, European Sociological Review, and Journal of Marriage and Family, and she serves on the editorial board of the latter two journals.
Neighborhood Stressors and Health: Crime Spikes, Social Cohesion,and Short-Term Variability in BMI
Dr. Christopher Browning, Associate Professor of Sociology, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 10/27/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
Disparities in the prevalence of overweight and obesity across sociodemographic characteristics remain a source of enduring concern for social scientists, clinicians, and policy makers. We apply neighborhood theory to understanding variation in short-term changes in body mass index (BMI), focusing on the role that neighborhood social cohesion and rapid increases in the crime rate (“crime spikes”) play in influencing weight gain. Data on BMI change for adults ages 30-65 are drawn from the 2000-2002 Dallas Heart Study. Results from multilevel linear models indicate that crime spikes increase short-term weight gain while social cohesion exerts a protective effect. However, social cohesion amplifies the positive impact of crime spikes on weight gain, suggesting that cohesive neighborhoods more efficiently disseminate stress-inducing information about local crime. These findings shed light on the contextual processes that influence changing health status and offer a rigorous design for the investigation of neighborhood effects.
How Immigration, Migration, and Aging in Place are Changing America’s Regions and Metropolitan Areas
Dr. William Frey, The Brookings Institute
Tuesday, 10/20/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W.18th Ave.
Dr. Frey specializes in issues involving urban populations, migration, immigration, race, aging, political demographics, and the US Census. He is one of the foremost chroniclers of contemporary urban trends, and is regularly quoted in major newspapers. Dr. Frey's work is factual and thought provoking and covers a broad variety of topics including the 2008 election, race/ethnicity, aging, and the housing market. Recent papers include: "Painting the Mountain States Blue;" "Virginia and Florida: Bookends of the New South;" "Race, Immigration and America’s Changing Electorate." Dr. Frey has worked on the housing/foreclosure crisis, looking at how migration to hot housing markets cools off and how the housing bust influenced state migration patterns. His papers "Older Cities Hold On to More People: Mapping the Growth of Older America" and "Immigration and Demographic Balkanization: Toward One America or Two?" reflect his interest in mainline demography. Finally, Dr. Frey is well-known for his predilection for attending major league baseball games.
Co-sponsored by CURA and IPRCausal Mediation Analysis
Dr. Luke Keele, Professor of Political Science, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 10/13/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
In a highly influential paper, Baron and Kenny (1986) proposed a statistical procedure to conduct a causal mediation analysis and identify possible causal mechanisms. This procedure has been widely used across many branches of the social and medical sciences and especially in psychology and epidemiology. However, one major limitation of this approach is that it is based on a set of linear regressions and cannot be easily extended to more complex situations that are frequently encountered in applied research. In this paper, we propose an approach that generalizes the Baron-Kenny procedure. Our method can accommodate linear and nonlinear relationships, parametric and nonparametric models, continuous and discrete mediators, and various types of outcome variables. We also provide a formal statistical justification for the proposed generalization of the Baron-Kenny procedure by placing causal mediation analysis within the widely-accepted counterfactual framework of causal inference. Finally, we develop a set of sensitivity analyses that allow applied researchers to quantify the robustness of their empirical conclusions. Such sensitivity analysis is important because as we show the Baron-Kenny procedure and our generalization of it rest on a strong and untestable assumption even in randomized experiments. We illustrate the proposed methods by applying them to a randomized field experiment, the Job Search Intervention Study (JOBS II). We also offer easy-to-use software that implements all of our proposed methods.
Geographic and Racial Disparities in Mental Health Outcomes
Dr. Stephen Gavazzi, Professor of Human Development and Family Science, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 10/06/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W.18th Ave.
This presentation begins with a brief review of a study of approximately 5,000 families of children and adolescents with significant behavioral health care. Families in the study participated in the statewide family empowerment initiative through the time period of July 1, 2004 to June 30, 2007. Differences in enrollment rates and service delivery as a function of county size were detected, yet there was no association between the amount of services received and treatment gains. While the behavioral health progress of youth served in this initiative generally followed a positive trajectory in terms of the overall sample, lower improvement rates among minority youth were quite pronounced. The geographic and racial disparities in this relatively small and select sample prompted the need to compare these findings against that of the entire database of youth served during the same time period. We look at 52,339 youth between the ages of 5-11 (children) and 12-16 (adolescents) from the two largest racial/ethnic groups, White non-Hispanic and African American non-Hispanic. Our findings show that race and geography continues to matter in terms of the outcomes reported on this larger sample. Findings regarding the use of both Level 1 (youth’s race and age, hours of treatment received, parent involvement in treatment planning, problem severity and child functioning levels) and Level 2 (county size, per capita resource allocation for behavioral health care, and socioeconomic indicators) variables will be discussed.
Geographical Analysis Revisited: Implications for Population and Health Research
Dr. Mei Po Kwan, Professor of Geography, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 09/29/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W.18th Ave.
In this seminar Dr. Kwan will first discuss the vision, agenda and services of the Geographical Analysis Core under the new NIH center grant funding at OSU. She will focus on its mission and how it will foster innovative population and health research at OSU. She will then discuss some of the key features of her own research, which seeks to advance geographical analysis beyond the conventional area-based spatial framework (in light of recent developments in geospatial technologies that enable us to collect and analyze data at very fine spatial and temporal scales). Dr. Kwan explores the challenges facing contemporary geographical analysis through revisiting four fundamental notions: distance, geographical context, time, and human experience. Drawing upon her recent research projects, she will discuss how new developments in geographical analysis that take these notions into account will help us move population and health research forward in significant ways.
Population Heterogeneity and Causal Inference
Dr. Yu Xie - University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
Tuesday, 06/02/2009
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Yu Xie argues that the very objective of social science is not to discover abstract and universal laws but to understand population variability. He calls this "Variability Principle." Causal inference with observational data in social science is impossible without strong assumptions. There are two potential sources of bias. The first is bias in unobserved pretreatment factors affecting the outcome additively. The second is bias due to heterogeneity in treatment effects. The first potential source of bias is usually handled with either collection of new data or unique design features (such as fixed effects models). Our understanding of the second source of bias is so far inadequate. In this presentation, Yu Xie discusses a simple scenario of "composition bias," which is a form of selection bias, under the classic assumption of ignorability. Both simulation and empirical examples are given.
The Mental Health of Mothers and Fathers Before and After Cohabitation
Dr. Claire Kamp Dush, Assoc. Prof. HDFS, Ohio State
Tuesday, 05/26/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Using data from years one and three of the Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study, changes in depressive and anxious symptoms are compared for mothers and fathers who: 1) dissolve a cohabitating union versus remain intact; 2) dissolve a marital union versus remain intact; and 3) dissolve a cohabiting as compared to a marital union. In order to take into account potential sources of third variable bias from selection factors that differentiate those who are in cohabitations from those who are in marriages, mothers and fathers were matched on several sociodemographic control variables that research has demonstrated to be related to union formation and mental health outcomes. Results indicated that fathers who dissolve cohabitating or marital unions have greater increases in depressive and anxious symptoms over time than those who remain in their unions. In contrast, mothers increased in depressive and anxious symptoms, regardless of the type or stability of the union. For both mothers and fathers, no differences were found in change in mental health by type of union dissolution. In this low-income sample of parents, results suggest that the impact of cohabitation and marital dissolution on mental health are similar in magnitude.
Dr. Bill Frey - The Brookings Institute
This IPR & CURA Co-sponsored event has been cancelled
Tuesday, 05/19/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Reliability and Validity of Prisoner Self-Reports Gathered Using The Life Event Calendar Method
Dr. Paul Bellair, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 05/12/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Data collection using the life event calendar method is growing, but reliability and validity are not well established. We examine test-retest reliability of monthly self-reports of criminal behavior collected using a life event calendar from a random sample of minimum security prisoners. Tabular analysis indicates over eighty percent agreement between self-reports of drug dealing, property, and violent crime during a baseline interview (test) and a follow-up (retest) approximately three weeks later. Hierarchical analysis reveals that criminal activity reported during the initial test is strongly associated with responses given in the retest, and that the relationship varies only by the lag in days between the initial interview and the retest.
Analysis of validity reveals that self-reported criminal history is strongly predictive of official criminal history, that African American's provide more valid responses relative to other groups, and that subjects reporting higher illegal earnings provide less valid responses. However, in practical terms the differences are not large, suggesting that self-reports of criminal behavior collected in criminal justice settings using a life event calendar are acceptably reliable and valid.
Co-Sponsored by IPR and the CJRC.Nonparametric Methods for Modeling Nonlinearity in Regression Analysis
Dr. Robert Andersen- University of Toronto
Tuesday, 05/05/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism, 242 w. 18th Ave.
The linear model and related generalized linear model (GLM) are important tools for sociologists. If the relationships between y (or in the case of the GLM, the linear predictor) and the xs are linear, these methods provide elegant summaries of the data. On the other hand, these methods fail to adequately model underlying relationships if they are characterized by complex nonlinear patterns. In such cases nonparametric regression, which allows the functional form between y and x to be determined by the data themselves, is more suitable.
There are many types of nonparametric simple regression. I focus on locally weighted scatterplot smoothing(lowess or loess) and smoothing splines because they are the most widely used. I also describe additive and generalized additive models (GAM), which allow modeling of categorical dependent variables, and explain how these methods can handle both parametric and nonparametric (i.e., lowess and smoothing splines) effects for many predictors. Finally, I briefly introduce the more recent development of the vector generalized additive model (VGAM), which further extends the GAM to handle multivariate dependent variables, and the generalized additive mixed model, which allows specification of smooth functions within the mixed model framework.
PAA Practice Session
IPR Student Affiliates
Tuesday, 04/28/2009
12:30 - 2:00
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Matthew Painter II and Jonathan Vespa: "Race/Ethnicity, Cohabitation and Marital Wealth Accumulation"
John B. Casterline and Jennifer Mendoza: "Unintended Pregnancy in Latin America: Historical Trends, Recent Patterns"
Rhiannon D'Souza and Christopher Browning: "The Effect of Neighborhood-Level Poverty on Perceptions of Weight among Adolescents"
Fertility Desires and The Prospects for Fertility Decline in Africa
Dr. John Casterline, Lazarus Professor of Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 04/21/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
TBA
Dr. Elliot Friedman, Associate Scientist, Institute on Aging
Tuesday, 04/20/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg., 242 W. 18th Ave
Do Changes in Job Mobility Explain the Growth of Wage Inequality among Men in the United States, 1977-2005?
Dr. Ted Mouw, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of North Carolina
Tuesday, 04/14/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 West 18th Ave.
To what extent did the increase in wage inequality among men in the United States over the past three decades result from job loss and/or employment instability? We propose a simple method for decomposing the change in wage inequality into components due to upward and downward employer mobility and within-employer wage changes using data on men’s wages and job mobility from the 1977-2005 waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). We find that downward employer mobility—a proxy for job displacement based on movement to a lower paid job with a new employer—has the largest effect on inequality over a two-year period. However, as the time since job displacement increases, the effect declines. Adding up the short and medium term effects over overlapping eight year periods, we find that the effect of job loss over accounts for 39% of the increase in inequality during the average eight year period between 1977 and 2005, compared to 52% attributable to wage changes for workers who stay with the same employer.
How Complete Are Men's Reports of Fertility In Surveys?
Dr. Kara Joyner - Bowling Green State
Tuesday, 04/07/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Researchers continue to question men’s willingness and ability to report their biological children in surveys. This study evaluates the quality of men’s fertility reports in the NLSY79, NLSY97, and NSFG 2002 by comparing male fertility rates in these surveys to those estimated for the population using data from the National Center for Health Statistics and the U.S. Census Bureau. Calculating the ratio of survey rates to population rates, we document how the undercount of births to men in surveys differs according to several factors (e.g., the inclusion of incarcerated men in the survey sample). We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate how, exactly, the birth undercount biases associations between early parenthood and other variables in conventional models. Finally, we reveal how age-specific fertility rates differ for men and women.
Revisiting the Leisure Class: How do Resources affect U.S. Women’s Leisure Time?
Liana Sayer, Associate Professor of Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 03/31/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W.18th Ave
Time allocation patterns have consequences for individual physiological and mental well-being, as well as investments in personal, social, and civic capital (Bittman 1999; Bourdieu 1984). Variation among women in their time spent on leisure, especially as it relates to their economic resources, is an important but understudied aspect of social stratification. Previous research suggests three key dimensions along which there could be socioeconomic variation in women’s leisure: future orientation; social engagement; and affect or pleasure (Bittman 2002; Kahneman et al 2006). Higher earnings and education may permit greater freedom for women to allocate leisure to activities that yield greater health, interpersonal, and affective benefits. They may also imply a greater ability to invest time in activities, such as physical exercise, that yield desirable outcomes in the future instead of, or in addition to, the present. Using data from the pooled 2003-2007 American Time Use Survey (ATUS), we document substantial differences among women with low and high earnings and education in time spent on health related leisure. Women with the highest 10 percent of earnings are twice as likely as women with the lowest 10 percent to spend any time on health related leisure activities, and spend more time on them per day. Our preliminary results indicate that women’s greater economic resources enable more time on future-oriented activities, suggesting time use may be a salient mechanism through which social class influences women’s well-being. Co-authors: Sanjiv Gupta, Sociology and Social and Demographic Research Institute University of Massachusetts at Amherst, sangupta@soc.umass.edu; Philip N. Cohen, Sociology, UNC at Chapel Hill, pnc@unc.edu
Governing the Commons in Lab and Field Experiments
Dr. Marco Janssen, Arizona State University
Tuesday, 03/10/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
In order to effectively govern our common resources we need to understand how institutions, rules and norms that shape human behavior, fit with ecological context. In this talk I present results from a series of lab and field experiments where we study how groups craft institutional arrangements for different ecologies. Traditional commons experiments have shown that people conditionally cooperate, especially if they can communicate and/or can use costly punishment. We include in our experiments more relevant (and complex) dynamics of resource dynamics of various types of ecologies, such as forestry, fishery and irrigation.
In the lab experiments we use real-time virtual resources, where we find that communication is very effective in improving the group performance, in contrast to costly punishment. In field experiments in rural villagers in Thailand and Colombia we find that trust in the community is a more important factor compared to relevant experience with resource management, in explaining the group performance in the experiments.
Co-sponsored with Environmental and Development Economics.Rebecca Thornton
University of Michigan, Department of Economics
Tuesday, 03/09/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
Status Exchange?: Marriage to a U.S. Citizen (and Access to Green Card)
Zhenchao Qian, Ohio State University
Tuesday, 03/03/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W. 18th Ave.
For temporary immigrants, access to green card is an important key to success in the United States. Some receive the green card through employment while others are sponsored by U.S. citizens through marriage. In this paper, analyzing data of legal permanent resident immigrants (LPR) and their spouses from 2003 New Immigrant Survey, we attempt to understand how mate selection patterns between citizen/immigrant marriages and immigrant/immigrant marriages differ by gender of the citizen spouse and racial, educational, age, and skin color pairing. We formulate hypotheses based on status exchange theories and make distinctions between whether the citizen spouse is male or female and whether the citizen spouse is U.S. born or naturalized.
No Seminar Today
Cancelled
Tuesday, 02/24/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism, 242 W. 18th Street
How Can Genetic Data Contribute To Social Science?
Dr. Jeremy Freese, Prof. of Sociology & Faculty Fellow, IPR, Northwestern
Tuesday, 02/17/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Abundant evidence from behavioral genetics indicates that the vast majority of individual-level outcomes of abiding sociological interest are heritable to a substantial degree. That genetic differences are important for individual variation in social science outcomes, however, does not explain how genetic differences can contribute to social science. Much recent attention has focused on studying gene-environment interaction, or exploring the possible role of genetic differences in explaining why the same social environmental cause affects different people differently. Gene-environment interaction is both conceptually and methodologically more difficult than is often recognized, and the importance of replication in studies of gene-environment interaction cannot be emphasized enough. I will consider three recent findings of gene-environment interactions in the domains of educational attainment, antisocial behavior, and votingand I will discuss the ongoing effort to integrate genetic data into the Wisconsin Longitudinal Data, which will offer the opportunity to study outcomes in a population of older adults.
Age-Period-Cohort Analysis in Social Research: What's New?
Dr. Yang Yang, Assistant Professor, University of Chicago
Tuesday, 02/10/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W.18th Ave.
Dr. Yang provides a summary and synthesis of various new developments in cohort analysis, including new models,methods, and empirical applications for three common research designs in social research: 1) Age-by-time period population data in the form of tables of rates; 2) Mircrodata from repeated cross-section surveys; and 3)accelerated longitudinal designs.
Is IQ Increasing among American Children? Investigating the Flynn Effect Using PIAT-Math Data from the NLSY
Dr. Joe Rodgers, Professor of Psychology, University of Oklahoma
Tuesday, 02/03/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building. 242 W. 18th Ave.
The Flynn Effect refers to increasing IQ scores over time among children in many developed countries around the world. The effect was first identified in the early 1980's, and has now been replicated in dozens of databases from different ages and geographic settings. A number of theories have been proposed to explain the effect. However, none of the theories are widely accepted as the single correcct explanation for the effect, and many features of the effect have not been specified. Rodgers and Wanstrom (2007) recently identified the Flynn Effect in PIAT-Math scores from the NLSY-Children database. In this presentation, I present two separate studies that follow from the earlier results. First, the Rodgers and Wanstrom analyses are replicated within demographic subgroups, to investigate the potential for gender, race, education, and urban/rural differences. Second, item-level information is used to identify the types of items that most strongly show the Flynn Effect, and these patterns are correlated with expert ratings of item content. A great deal of new information about the Flynn Effect and its causes in the U.S. emerges from these two investigations.
Agent-based Models as a Tool and Challenge for Social Science
Dr. Keith Warren, Assoc. Prof, College of Social Work, OSU
Tuesday, 01/20/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W.18th Ave.
Agent-based models are increasingly popular in fields as diverse as sociology, public health, archaeology, economics and ethnography. These models offer new tools for understanding interpersonal interactions on a wide range of scales. This talk will discuss the use of agent-based models in social science, with illustrations drawn from two ongoing projects. In the first, a simple agent-based model of residential segregation yields two forms of bistability. The model is sensitive to variations in the initial centralization of the agents, and in some cases yields two differing end states for identical initial conditions. In the second, agent interactions in a model therapeutic community (TC) are determined either by direct or indirect reciprocity rules. The interactions are saved as a social network, which is then compared to an empirical network of interactions in a corrections-based therapeutic community using reciprocity and transitivity statistics. The results suggest that direct reciprocity is inadequate to explain the empirical network.
The Desirability of Partner Traits: A One-and-a-Half Sex Model of Marriage
Dr. Randall J. Olsen, Economics, Ohio State
Tuesday, 01/13/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Bldg, 242 W. 18th Ave.
We estimate the weights on various hedonic attributes of potential spouses relative to a person's own characteristics to compute the number of persons who are "acceptable" matches, taking into account that men and women may attach different values to each trait. The number of potential matches is then used to explain marriage probability. This is not a full two-sex model as it does not take into account that the matching process involves the more or less simultaneous bi-lateral acceptance of mates and their joint withdrawal from the pool of matches.
While we assume homogamy is always conducive to a match, we also find that there are significant differences in how men and women value some traits leading to heterogamy on such traits.
Spatial, Environmental, and Social Network Analysis in Vaccine Trials
Michael Emch - University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Tuesday, 01/06/2009
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
The utility of conventional vaccine trial methods has recently been questioned. It is difficult for public health practitioners to use traditional protective efficacy measures to make decisions about whether or not to vaccinate diverse populations. Traditional vaccine trial methods have an underlying assumption that the effect of the vaccine is the same throughout the trial area. This paper tests whether this assumption is true for one vaccine trial using a spatially referenced database.
The results illustrate that the protective efficacy of oral cholera vaccines varies across neighborhoods and that the variation is inversely related to vaccine coverage (i.e., % of people vaccinated in an area) after adjusting for several ecological factors. Also, higher levels of neighborhood vaccine coverage are linked to lower risk of cholera among residents, both in placebo recipients, for whom a strong inverse relationship was observed, and in vaccines, for whom a suggestive relationship is evident. These findings suggest that progressively higher levels of vaccine coverage can lead to higher levels of indirect protection of non-vaccines, and may also lead to progressively higher levels of indirect protection that add to the direct protection of vaccines. The term used for this new approach is “ecological vaccine trials” because efficacy values are stratified by neighborhood-level variables in addition to conventional individual-level variables. The concept of ecological vaccine trials is now being extended by considering both environmental and social contexts of vaccine evaluation using a spatially explicit approach.
Do Rising Tides Lift All Boats Equally? Lifetime Socioeconomic Status and Health Outcomes among Blacks and Whites in the U.S.
Dr. Cynthia Colen - Dept. of Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 12/02/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Minority populations in the United States often face stark inequalities in health. The lifecourse perspective offers a unique viewpoint through which racial disparities in morbidity and mortality may be understood as the result of repeated exposures to risk factors during both childhood and adulthood. However, the utility of this approach is limited by its failure to investigate the degree to which minority populations are able to translate gains in socioeconomic status (SES) into favorable health outcomes. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, I employ growth curve models with both fixed and random effects to estimate the association between fluctuations in lifetime SES and two measures of physical wellbeing - self-reported health and disability status. Additionally, I assess the extent to which structural level racial inequalities, such as labor market segmentation, differential wealth accumulation, and residential segregation account for Black/White disparities in this association.
Methodology Workshop: An Introduction to Factor Analysis and Item Response Theory
Dr. Michael C. Edwards, Psychology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 11/25/2008
12:30 - 2:00
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
Latent variable measurement models are steadily replacing classical test theory (CTT) measurement models. Two very popular latent variable measurement models are factor analysis and item response theory. We'll begin with a brief discussion of latent variables generally before discussing in some detail exploratory factor analysis (EFA). I'll next describe confirmatory factor analysis (CFA)and some of the many variations on the standard CFA models that are commonly seen. Building on the base of factor analysis, we will explore item response theory (IRT) with special attention to how IRT improves on CTT.
Status Exchange?: Marriage to a U.S. Citizen (and Access to Green Card)
Dr. Zhenchao Qian, Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 11/18/2008
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building, 242 W 18th Ave
CANCELLED
Living in America May be Bad for Your Health:Toxic Waste From US Health Care Policy?
Dr. David Low
Thursday, 11/06/2008
12:30 - 1:18
Starling Loving Hall, 320 W.10th Ave
There are three principal factors acting over the life course that determine the health of any population:
1. Who you are, or your biology including genetic inheritance.
2. Where you live, or all of your living environments through a lifetime
3. How you live, or the social and economic environments that affect behavior and life choices.
While medical care may be helpful and even necessary at times, more doctors, more hospitals or more liberal access to the ones we already have will not equate to more health, and indeed may be harmful.
In spite of these well demonstrated facts, health policy debates in this country tend to focus exclusively on access to medical care and ways of paying for it. Our policymakers persist in ignoring the contextual factors within which all good and bad health develops; even worse, they fail to appreciate the opportunity costs that are a part of our enormous and increasingly unaffordable expenditures on medical care. By all measures, we spend vastly more than any other country in the world, and yet average life expectancy in the US is shorter than in 45 other nations. We are ranked only 12th among developed countries by the UN Human Development Index.
This seminar presentation will examine what we know about health, and what medical care can reasonably be expected to contribute to that state. It will review issues that follow from the dominance of medical models of health which include: confusion over the proven capabilities and best roles of medical care and our lack of knowledge of outcomes, cost-effectiveness and quality. It will look at medical care in the American social, cultural and economic context and the limits that context places on the effectiveness of those interventions.
It will review what we know with certainty about the non-medical determinants of health, i.e., social and economic circumstances affect health throughout life; stress harms health; the effects of early life experiences last a lifetime; genes are not necessarily destiny; context, especially family SES, affects everything; and social exclusion, discrimination and racism create misery and cost lives, to specify a few.
Finally the presentation will suggest guidelines for reframing the health policy question and will outline a proposal for creation of a society and health “superfund” to support action to deal with the toxic consequences of the present non-system.
*Co-sponsored by IPR and Public Health*
Election Day
No Seminar Today
Tuesday, 11/04/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Racial Segregation and Impoverished Neighborhood Environments: A Population Model
Dr. Lincoln Quillian - Sociology, Northwestern University
Tuesday, 10/28/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism
This talk discusses a formal demographic mixing model of how racial segregation (or any other poverty-correlated characteristic that is a basis for neighborhood segregation) contributes to the formation of high-poverty neighborhoods and to differential neighborhood poverty exposure across segregated groups. The formal model extends and refines simple simulation models in Massey's seminal "American Apartheid" (1990) paper, which demonstrated how racial segregation contributes to forming high-poverty neighborhoods.
Using data from the 1990 and 2000 U.S. censuses of population and housing, parameters for the analytic model are estimated for many large American cities. The model demonstrates that past efforts to statistically model how economic changes and segregation interact to form high poverty neighborhoods have been mis-specified in several respects. The model is also able to explain certain empirical modeling results that appeared to contradict Massey's argument regarding the interaction of segregation and economic conditions. Implications for the role of segregation in forming high-poverty neighborhoods are discussed.
A Rank-Based Clustering Method for the Analysis of Social Inequality Data
Dr. Tim Liao - Sociology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Thursday, 10/23/2008
3:30 - 4:30
Room 170 Eighteen Ave. Building (EA 170)
When studying social, economic or health inequality, the analyst must estimate clusters or classes contained in the data. The commonly used methods such as latent class/cluster models or the k-mean method assume the multivariate normal distribution. Most inequality data, however, are non-normal in distribution. This paper proposes a rank-based cluster analysis, which can take the form of a latent class/finite mixture model or a basic cluster method such the k-means algorithm; in either case, the multivariate normal distributional assumption is no longer crucial.
There are two theoretical foundations for the proposed method—relative deprivation theory in sociology and relative income concept in economics on the one hand, and topological distance in mathematical thinking on the other. This method offers an alternative view on inequality, and is nonparametric in essence. A simulation analysis of three-clusters mixtures indicated by two or three variables using three different data-generating mechanisms shows that when data are normal, either the (real) value-based or rank-based method would produce similar results. When data depart from normality, the results are more mixed: finite mixture models do somewhat better for data of real values while the k-means method performs much better for ranked data.
Three empirical data applications further demonstrate the usefulness of the rank-based method: an analysis of the 1991 British Household Panel Survey data with three variables for socioeconomic classification, a re-analysis of the classic diabetes data, and an exploration of fertility inequality using the 2006 U.S. General Social Survey data. All three examples suggest some new substantive insights unobtainable from the parametric analysis of the original data and require much reduced computation time for estimation.
Methods Workshop--Structural Equation Modeling
Dr. Pam Paxton, Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 10/14/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Food Insecurity, Health and Wellbeing and the Global Food Crisis
Dr. Craig Hadley - Anthropology, Emory University
Tuesday, 10/07/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Food insecurity occurs when individuals face unpredictable access to safe and nutritious foods. Although a common public health problem, food insecurity has rarely been a research priority among those studying population heath. This may be changing as food prices soar and many countries face a food crisis. In this talk I will discuss the current global food insecurity situation and highlight studies we have carried out in East Africa examining the impact of food insecurity on social, physical and mental health. I will then use data from our ongoing longitudinal study to examine the impact of the global food crisis on Ethiopian adolescents and specifically test several hypotheses promulgated in the popular media about who is most affected by the food crisis. Our results suggest that youth are not buffered from the negative impacts of the global food crisis. Our results also suggest that the patterns of vulnerability among Ethiopian youth differ considerably from those reported in popular media outlets. These data offer a cautionary tale to broad generalizations about who is being affected by the food crisis and suggest novel hypotheses and new research directions.
Fall Kick-Off Luncheon ( IPR faculty affiliates)
Tuesday, 09/23/2008
12:00 - 1:30
Faculty Club, 2nd floor
Fundamental Cause Theory and the Social Shaping of Population Health
Bruce G. Link - Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences, Columbia University
Tuesday, 05/20/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
In the last century human beings have greatly expanded their capacity to control disease and death. Any explanation of current health disparities by such factors as socioeconomic position or race must take account of this fact. Indeed we argue that disparities are created by the human capacity to control disease and death-- that when we gain such capacity people with more knowledge, money, power, prestige, and beneficial social connections are better able to harness the benefits of the control we have developed. Health disparities are the result. The talk will provide evidence pertaining to this explanation for health disparities while at the same time providing scope conditions that suggest limits to its explanatory reach.
Methods Workshop - Modeling Independent Choices
Elizabeth Bruch - Robert Wood Johnson Fellow, University of Michigan
Tuesday, 05/06/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Trends and causes of residential patterns continue to be a major social issue in the United States. There is a large literature in sociology and demography that uses decennial Census data to describe patterns of race and income segregation over time and across cities. However, it is not clear whether factors driving racial and economic segregation exacerbate or attenuate one another, and how this relationship is conditioned by economic inequalities among race groups. My work combines the theoretical appeal of agent (microsimulation) modeling with empirically based choice models and a realistic neighborhood context. In this talk, I present a dynamic, agent-based model of neighborhood sorting by race and income and use this model to understand how overall trends in inequality and households' mobility behavior interact to produce and maintain segregated neighborhoods. I simulate mobility behavior in Los Angeles County, and examine how segregation outcomes vary under different assumptions about economic inequality within and among race groups. Finally, I discuss a more general class of demographic problems in which the behavior of individuals and features of their environment are dynamically interdependent. I argue that agent-based modeling may help us understand these problems, and provide an overview of tools and software for this approach.
Methods Workshop - Specification and Estimation of Social Interaction Models with Network Structure, Contextual Factors, Correlation and Fixed Effects
Lung-fei Lee - Economics, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 04/29/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
This paper considers the specification and estimation of social interaction models with network structures and the presence of endogenous and contextural effects. With macro group settings, group fixed effects are also incorporated. Networks provide information on the identification of endogenous, exogenous and unobserved interactions among specific peers. We consider the identification and estimation of such a model. Empirical applications are provided to illustrate the usefulness of such a model. In addition to asymptotic properties of estimators, Monte Carlo studies provide evidence on finite sample performance of the estimation methods.
Insights from a Sequential Hazard Model of Sexual Initiation and Premarital First Births
Lawrence Wu - Sociology, New York University
Tuesday, 04/22/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Demographers have long acknowledged that sexual activity is a key proximate determinant of fertility. Implicit in such accounts is the presumption of fertility within marriage, yet sexual activity is plausibly of even greater relevance for nonmarital births. In this paper, we model premarital first birth risks in terms of a woman's sequential risks of entry into sexual activity and her risk of a premarital first birth conditional on entry into sexual activity. We note that: (1) never-married women have an identifiable period during which their premarital first birth risks are negligible - the period prior to the initiation of sexual activity; (2) never-married women can vary considerably in their ages at onset of sexual activity; and (3) age at onset of sexual activity will vary systematically with observed factors, with these factors also typically influencing the risk of a premarital birth. We exploit this rich empirical structure using techniques developed by Wu and Martin (2008), decomposing the effects of covariates into direct and indirect components. Our empirical results suggest that the direct effects of covariates typically outweigh indirect effects. Exceptions to this pattern provide additional insight into premarital first births.
PAA Practice Session
IPR student affiliates
Tuesday, 04/15/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 JR
Kate S. Adkins and Claire M. Kamp Dush: “The Implications of Violent and Controlling Unions and Leaving on Mental Health in Fragile Families”
Anna Cunningham: "Cohabitating Conceptions and Marriage Transitions"
Jonathan Vespa and Matthew A. Painter II: "The Paths to Marriage: Pre-Marital Cohabitation and Marital Wealth Accumulation"
Divorce as Risky Behavior
Audrey L. Light - Economics, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 04/08/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
We extend the orthodox divorce model by assuming that women are risk averse, marriage is risky, and divorce is even riskier. As long as divorce is location-independent riskier than marriage, our model yields the familiar result that the risk premium that compensates agents for the greater risk associated with divorce decreases monotonically in their level of relative risk tolerance. In short, we predict that the probability of divorce increases in individual risk tolerance. We assess this prediction by using a sample of women from the NLSY79 to estimate a discrete choice model of divorce. We control for a rich array of determinants of the gains to marriage and divorce, plus a measure of relative risk tolerance derived from responses to “income gamble” questions. We find that risk tolerance is an important determinant of divorce: e.g., a 1.5 standard deviation increase in risk tolerance raises the predicted probability of divorce by 11%.
Rethinking Transnationalism: The Cross-Border Dimension
Roger Waldinger - Sociology, UCLA
Tuesday, 04/01/2008
12:00 - 1:30
Journalism 243
The activities linking immigrants to their countries of birth -- the sending of remittances; travel; communication; political activity; business investment -- are increasingly important and visible. They are also generating controversy and acclaim in both new and old homes, while eliciting interest among policy makers looking for a way to reap migration’s harvest in ways that might help the stay-at-homes. Although widely studied, the phenomenon remains misunderstood, both by scholars convinced that globalization is leading to a de-territorialized world of unbounded loyalties and flows, and by policy makers hoping to turn migration into an engine of development. Drawing on a broader project designed to show the American experience at once facilitates, competes with, and structures immigrants’ involvements with the countries from which they come, this paper examines a migration universal, namely the associations that bring together migrants displaced from a common hometown. Sociologically interesting, the associations also highlight the convergence of academic preoccupations with the real world, as associational activity has triggered responses from international organizations and sending state actors, seeking to harvest political and economic rewards from these grassroots activities, undertaken by migrants in parallel, but uncoordinated form. As argued in this paper, the upsurge of hometown oriented activity exemplifies the cross-state spillovers generated by migration; however, it also shows how the potential for home country involvement at once derives from and is shaped by the bounded, receiving society resources that give the migrants new leverage not found before. Rather than linking immigrants and stay-at-homes in a single transnational community or social field, the cross-state activities undertaken by hometown associations yield not so much cross-state community, as cross-state conflict, reproducing inequalities between migrants and the stay-at-homes in ways that reflect the inequalities between receiving and sending places.
TBA
Tuesday, 03/30/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Introduction to Implementing Instrumental Variables Estimators
Dr. Patricia Reagan - Economics, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 03/25/2008
12:00 - 1:30
Journalism 243, 242 W 18th Ave
The technique of instrumental variables will be introduced. The two conditions for an instrument to be valid are relevance and validity. Empirical tests of relevance and validity (the two conditions for an instrument to be valid) will be discussed with emphasis on implementing these tests using STATA. Subsequent discussion will focus on the case of estimating the treatment effect of a dummy endogenous variable. The statistical conditions necessary to estimate the mean effect of treatment on the treated, the mean effect of treatment on randomly selected person and the local average treatment effect will be described. The benefits and pitfalls of IV techniques will be illustrated with classic examples from the economics literature. Participants will get more out of the discussion if they have first familiarized themselves with the IV reg procedures in the STATA manual. The more ambitious could read "Instrumental Variables: A Study of Implicit Behavioral Assumptions Used in Making Program Evaluations" by James Heckman in the Journal of Human Resources available through JSTORE.
Expectations, Networks and Interventions: Research on HIV/AIDS in Malawi
Hans-Peter Kohler - Sociology, University of Pennsylvania
Tuesday, 03/04/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
The talk will present three areas of recent research conducted as part of the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project. The first part discusses present a newly-developed interactive elicitation methodology to collect probabilistic expectations in a developing country context with low levels of literacy and numeracy, and we evaluate the feasibility and success of this method for a wide range of outcomes in rural Malawi. We find that respondent's answers about subjective expectations respect basic properties of probabilities, and vary meaningfully with observable characteristics and past experience. From a substantive point of view, the elicited expectations indicate that individuals are generally aware of differential risks. While many expectations---including also the probability of being currently infected with HIV---are well-calibrated compared to actual probabilities, mortality expectations are substantially over-estimated compared to lifetable estimates. This overestimation may lead individuals to underestimate the benefits of adopting HIV risk-reduction strategies. The second part of the talk focuses on a recent sociocentric study of sexual network on Likoma Island (Lake Malawi) that aims at investigating the structure and characteristics of sexual networks among the general population. The study documents the existence of a large and robust sexual network linking a substantial fraction of the island's young adult population: half of all sexually active respondents were connected in a giant network component, and more than a quarter were linked through multiple independent chains of sexual relationships. This high network connectivity emerges within short time frames. The prevalence of HIV also varied significantly across the network, with sparser regions having a higher HIV prevalence than densely connected components. Several risk factors related to sexual mixing patterns help explain differentials in HIV prevalence across network locations. Contrary to claims that sexual networks in rural sub-Saharan Africa are too sparse to sustain generalized HIV epidemics, therefore, the structure of the networks observed in Likoma appears compatible with a broad diffusion of HIV among lower-risk groups. The non-homogeneous distribution of HIV infection within the network suggests that network characteristics are an important determinant of the dynamics of HIV spread within a population. The third part of the talk presents some preliminary analyses of a randomized intervention studying the consequences for learning one's HIV status for subsequent behaviors.
Do Slums Promote High Urban Fertility?
John Weeks - Geography, San Diego State University
Tuesday, 02/26/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
There has been a rapid rise in the social sciences in the use of neighborhoods as units of analysis for differentiating behavior, closely linked to the increase in commercial applications of geodemographics. Little agreement exists, however, on what constitutes a neighborhood and about how important neighborhoods are in affecting reproductive behavior. This is especially true in cities of developing countries, where a majority of people are estimated to live in slums, which represent a particular type of neighborhood context. In this research, I use census data within a spatial agglomeration algorithm to define neighborhoods in Accra, Ghana, based on UN-Habitat slum criteria. Those neighborhoods are then classified on the basis of their slum profile and I examine the extent to which the neighborhood context associated with varying levels of “slumness” might promote or retard fertility levels at the neighborhood level. The results suggest that the slumness of a neighborhood has an effect on fertility levels that is independent of other sociodemographic characteristics of the neighborhood and of individuals.
No Seminar Today
Tuesday, 02/24/2008
12:30 - 1:30
243 JR
The Growing Female Advantage in U.S. Higher Education: What do we know? What do we need to know?
Claudia Buchmann - Sociology, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 02/19/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
One of the most striking recent features of American higher education is the growing education gap between men and women. Young women now outperform young men with respect to high school graduation, college entry, and persistence to a four year college degree. Trend statistics in the United States reflect a striking reversal of a gender gap in college completion that once favored males. This research considers a range of explanations for this trend, including gender differences in academic performance and behaviors, gender differences in the pathways from high school to completing college, and gender-specific changes in the returns to higher education. Analyses of National Educational Longitudinal Survey data indicate that women’s superior academic performance plays a large role in producing the gender gap in college completion, but this effect remains latent until after the transition to college. For NELS cohorts, who were born in the mid 1970s, the female advantage in college completion remains largest in families with a low-educated or absent father but now extends to all family types. In conjunction with women’s growing incentives to attain higher education, gender differences in resources related to family background and academic performance largely explain the growing female advantage in college completion. The study concludes with a discussion of promising avenues for future research.
Somatic Growth and Age at Menarche
Pamela J. Salsberry - Nursing, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 02/12/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
The relation between body fatness over the life course and age of maturation among girls has been the subject of debate for many years. There is evidence from a variety of data sources that accelerated growth in childhood, in terms of height, weight, and measures of fatness, is associated with earlier menarche. Other studies have found that earlier maturing girls are fatter in young adulthood. Neither of these relations is necessarily causal. The same confounding factors, both observed and unobserved, may be associated with both fatness and age of menarche. This study is designed to answer three questions about potential differences in somatic growth curves as a function of age of menarche. First, do somatic growth curves, measured by BMI as a function of chronological age, differ by age of menarche; and if so, at what ages do the differences start to appear. Second, do somatic growth curves, measured by BMI as a function of age in months relative to age of menarche, differ by age of menarche; and if so, are there somatic differences at the time of menarche. Finally, the study examines whether there are race/ethnic differences in these patterns between white, African-American and Hispanic girls in the US. Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 Child/Young Adult files, a large U.S. based longitudinal dataset containing information on children from birth through late adolescences, were used to answer these questions.
Accessing and Using Confidential Census and Public Health Micro-data
Margaret Levenstein - Executive Director, Michigan Census Research Data Center
Tuesday, 02/05/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
The Michigan Census Research Data Center is a joint project of the University of Michigan and the U.S. Census Bureau. It provides access to confidential U.S. Census Bureau, National Center Health Statistics, and Agency for Health Care Research and Quality micro-data for approved research. Learn about the types of data available in the MCRDC, the process for gaining access to the data, and ongoing research in the MCRDC
Methods Workshop - Analysis of Recurrent Events with a Terminal Event
Zhangsheng Yu - Biostatistics, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 01/22/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Event history data arise frequently in longitudinal studies. One special type of survival data is the event history with multiple disease events followed by a terminal (death) event subject to right censoring. In family demography, this type of data exists when premarital cohabitation episodes are followed by a first marriage. In this talk, I will introduce marginal hazard models and random effect models to analyze these data. And then I’ll focus on the random effect models for joint analysis of recurrent events followed by a terminal event. Time-dependent coefficient for the recurrent event hazard is introduced to model the covariate effects varying over time. Smoothing spline method using a penalized likelihood is proposed for nonparametric estimation. I’ll use a kidney transplant study to illustrate this method. Hospitalizations of kidney disease patients are the recurrent events and death is the terminal event. The effect of receiving kidney transplant on the risk of hospitalization and death are of the interest.
The Effect of Early Childhood Stressors on Age of Menarche: A Comparison of White and African-American Girls
Patricia B. Reagan - Economics, The Ohio State University
Tuesday, 01/15/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
The two most common theories about environmental factors affecting age of menarche focus on the nutrition transition and exposure to psychosocial stress during early childhood. The nutrition transition has been hypothesized to reduce age of menarche through increased in rates of preadolescent overweight (Must, Naumova, Phillips, Blum, Dawson-Hughes and Rand (2005)). The Psychosocial Acceleration Theory proposed that exposure to stress during early childhood signals a reduction in reproductive opportunity, necessitating early maturation for species survival. One suggested pathway is through a heightened stress response that facilitates the deposition of body fat resulting in early menarche (Belsky, Steinberg and Draper (1991) and Ellis and Essex (2007)). Much of the research that supports these hypotheses has been completed on cross sectional samples composed primarily of white girls from middle to upper social classes. However, it is well-established that African-American girls have an earlier mean age of menarche, higher rates of childhood obesity, and are more frequently raised in environments that are economically disadvantaged. Therefore, we can speculate that the theories presented above may not apply to African-American girls. In this study, we extend the current literature on the effects of early childhood stressors in a large population-based cohort of African-American and white adolescent girls. The existing literature has focused on the link between early childhood stressors and age of menarche. We include measures of child health at two additional points in time in the development process. First, we control for observable measures of the intrauterine environment. These controls are important because the psychosocial stressors that occur prior to birth are highly correlated with those found in early childhood. Research has shown that markers for the intrauterine environment are associated with body mass index (BMI) through preadolescence (Salsberry and Reagan (2005)). Failure to control for the intrauterine environment could lead to spurious correlation between early childhood stressors and age of menarche. Second, we examine an important intervening outcome, namely preadolescent BMI, which may mediate the effects of early childhood stressors on age of menarche. We use the method of instrumental variables (IV) and test statistics developed for IV to address the question of how to measure the causal effect of preadolescent BMI on age of menarche. Our major findings are that indicators for early childhood stress have an effect on age of menarche independently of the effect of preadolescent BMI for white girls. Preadolescent BMI mediates the effect of some measures of early childhood stressors on age of menarche for African-American girls. The relation between early childhood stressors, preadolescent BMI and age of menarche appears to be more complex for African-American than white girls.
Population Aging, Intergenerational Flows, and the Economy: Introducing Age in National Income Accounts
Andrew Mason - Economics and Population Studies, University of Hawaii
Tuesday, 01/08/2008
12:00 - 1:30
243 Journalism
Intergenerational flows are a pervasive feature of all economies that arise, in part, as a consequence of the economic lifecycle. In all societies, these flows are large but the direction of the flows and their magnitudes vary with demography, institutions, and policies. The flows have potentially important implications for generational equity, macroeconomic performance, and birth rates. National Transfer Accounts (NTA) are being developed and constructed, currently in 23 countries, to provide comprehensive measures of intergenerational flows distinguishing the role of governments, financial markets, and families. The seminar will provide an overview of National Transfer Accounts and present preliminary results based on estimates for both industrialized and developing countries.
Partial Residential Integration: Suburban Residential Patterns of New Immigrant Groups in a Multiethnic Context
Eric Fong - Sociology, University of Toronto
Tuesday, 11/27/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
We explore the residential patterns of new immigrant groups in suburban neighborhoods in the multi-ethnic context. Given that suburbanization is viewed from the spatial assimilation perspective as an indicator of residential integration, we argue that immigrant groups experience lower level of segregation in suburban neighborhoods compared to those in city neighborhoods. In addition, we suggest that the pattern of sharing neighborhoods with other groups is less elastic in suburban neighborhoods compared to city neighborhoods. However, drawing from the place stratification perspective, we expect groups to avoid sharing neighborhoods with new immigrant groups. Thus, these factors contribute to the creation of partial residential integration of recent new immigrant groups in suburban areas. Using 1996 Canadian census data for Toronto, we show various levels of support for these patterns for three new immigrant groups included in the study.
Changes in Contraceptive Method Mix 1980-2005 -What does it matter for international health policy?
Eric Seiber - Public Health, Division of Health Services Management and Policy, Ohio State
Tuesday, 11/20/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) remain an under-utilized resource for informing international health policy. Collected every five years with core modules interviewing 5,000 to 12,000 women from almost 100 countries, many of these surveys remain untapped by academic researchers. To highlight the potential of the DHS data, Dr. Seiber will present a study examining global changes in contraceptive method mix from 1980 to 2005. Although contraceptives remain a fundamental element of foreign assistance in international health, few studies estimate changes in contraceptive demand across the full range of developing countries. This study utilizes 310 Demographic and Health Surveys, Reproductive Health Surveys and other nationally representative surveys from 104 countries to estimate shifts in method mix among married women of reproductive age from 1980 to 2005. The presentation will examine this application of the DHS surveys to contraceptive method mix, will cover the limitations of how these surveys have traditionally been applied, and will discuss their potential for producing globally representative estimates in development and health policy. Finally, the presentation will cover the challenges deriving from multi-country study designs.
Patterns of Union Formation and Dissolution in Rural and Urban Areas: A Comparison Across Recent Cohorts of American Women
Tasha Synder- Education and Human Ecology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 11/06/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
This study examines contemporary patterns of family formation and dissolution among rural and urban American women. Numerous recent studies have examined family structure and formation differences among recent cohorts of rural and urban populations (Snyder & Brown; 2004; Snyder & McLaughlin, 2004; Brown & Snyder, 2006). This study will add to this important research area by providing a more comprehensive overview of family formation and dissolution patterns in rural and urban America in recent decades. Data from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth will be used to examine union formation and dissolution patterns. Analyses will examine entrance into unions by union type, survival time, exits from unions, and time until recoupling or remarriage. Discrete time event history models will predict transition pathways among American women paying particular attention to rural and urban differences. This study will help us understand contemporary union formation and dissolution patterns, and changes across cohorts and residence areas.
Neighborhood Context, Time Use, and Children's Health
Rachel Dwyer and Liana Sayer- Sociology, Ohio State
Tuesday, 10/30/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
1st Annual Joan Huber Population Lecture
Dr. Judith A. Seltzer
Friday, 10/26/2007
3:30p.m. - 5:00p.m.
040 Scott Laboratory (SO)
The Impact of Social and Economic Policy on the Family Structure Experiences
David Blau - Economics, Ohio State
Tuesday, 10/16/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
We use panel data from the 1979 cohort of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79) to estimate the effects of policy, labor market, and marriage market contextual variables on the fertility, union formation, union dissolution, type of union (cohabiting versus married), and father identity (biological versus step) choices of women born from 1957 to1964. We follow these women from the early 1970s as they enter adolescence through 2004, when they are in their 40s. We specify a model that can be used to trace through the consequences of these demographic behaviors for the family structure experiences of children. We allow the effects of several of the contextual variables to differ for whites, blacks, and Hispanics. The evidence presented suggests that the family structure experiences of the children of the NLSY79 cohorts of women have been influenced by the tax gains associated with childbearing, welfare reform, unilateral divorce laws, and the wage rates available to men and women in the labor market. The results suggest that other contextual variables such as child support enforcement efforts, the level of welfare benefits, the tax gain to marriage, the sex ratio, and the unemployment rate had little impact on the family structure experiences of these children.
Fare Thee Well: Human Capital and African American Migration Before 1910
Trevon Logan - Economics, Ohio State
Tuesday, 10/09/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
Political Instability, Social Crisis and Migration Outcomes in Oaxaca, Mexico
Jeffrey Cohen - Anthropology , Ohio State
Tuesday, 10/02/2007
12:00pm - 1:00pm
243 Journalism Building
Meet and Greet
Randy Olsen and Elizabeth Cooksey
Tuesday, 09/25/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 Journalism Building
Individual Outcomes with Group Effects: The Impact of Gaming on Employment of American Indians
Tuesday, 05/29/2007
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
243 JR
American Indians, who live on reservations, have substantially lower levels of employment and income than co-resident non-Indians. Gaming has emerged as an attempt by tribes to improve the socio-economic status of their members. Since passage of Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, the number of tribes opening gaming facilities has increased. This paper develops and implements a maximum likelihood estimator of the effect of the tribal decision to open a gaming facility on the individual employment outcomes of its members. This estimator provides an alternative to the widely used difference-in-differences (DID) estimator as a means to evaluate policy interventions where policy is set at a more aggregate level than the outcomes that it affects. Unlike DID estimators that examine policy effects on aggregate outcomes, the approach described in this paper provides consistent estimates of policy effects on individual outcomes.
Optimal Propensity Score Matching in Complex Designs
Tuesday, 05/15/2007
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
243 JR
Consequences of Unwanted Childbearing: A Study of Child Outcomes in Bangladesh
Tuesday, 05/08/2007
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
243 JR
The prevention of unwanted births has long been a fundamental justification for investment of public and private resources in family planning services. Unwanted childbearing is assumed to have detrimental consequences – for the child and for its family and larger community. There is, however, surprisingly little empirical research that offers a solid scientific basis for this assumption, especially in low-income non-Western societies. We analyze longitudinal data from rural Bangladesh collected in the period 1982-2002 that are unusually well-suited to address the issue of the consequences of unwanted childbearing. Two child outcomes are examined: mortality before age 5; and educational attainment. We employ two analytical strategies to remove confounding effects of unmeasured factors: models with fixed effects for sibset; and a “natural experiment” provided by the random assignment of child sex. Estimation employing both of these strategies yields significant effects of child wantedness. Large effects on infant mortality (both neonatal and post-neonatal) emerge under the fixed effects approach, with odds ratios on the order of 2.0. Corresponding effects on mortality are not evident in the natural experiment analysis, however. The estimated effects on schooling are more consistent across the two approaches: unwanted children attain on average 7%-9% fewer years of schooling than wanted children.
A Global History of Health: Progress Report on a Research Agenda
Tuesday, 04/17/2007
12:30 p.m. - 1:30 p.m.
243 JR
The vast laboratory of human experience since the Neolithic Revolution has been largely ignored by social scientists, in part because they know little about the types of evidence that are available and methods suitable for its study. Over the past 15 years a widening circle of collaborators have undertaken a sequence of comparative studies to measure and analyze health as can be learned from skeletal remains of people who lived across the globe over the past 10 millennia. Dr. Steckel will provide background on studies completed, those in progress and design aspects of the one on the drawing board.
The Role of Population in Integrated Environmental Modeling and Decision Support
Tuesday, 04/10/2007
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 JR
Demographic data and modeling are essential components of integrated environmental modeling and decision support. New knowledge is created as sciences are linked with one another in new ways and with decision makers. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) was founded in 2004 to develop scientifically-credible support tools to improve water management decisions in the face of growing climatic uncertainty and rapid population growth in metropolitan Phoenix. At the center of DCDC’s effort is WaterSim, a systems dynamic model that integrates sub-models dealing with population, land use, and climate to simulate future water supply and demand conditions. Decision levers enable users to experiment with different climate futures, population growth rates, land use changes, and policy conditions. This paper provides a conceptual framework for the process of linking science and policy and discusses WaterSim as a vehicle for integrating sciences, as a decision support tool, and experimental environment in which to study decision making. Also included is a brief discussion of larger lessons learned from integrated modeling and decision support from the perspective of population and urban geography.
PAA Practice Presentations
Tuesday, 03/27/2007
12:30pm - 2:00pm
243 JR
Testing a Structural Model of Credit Constraints Using a Large-Scale Quasi-Experimental Microfinance Initiative
Tuesday, 02/13/2007
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
243 JR
This paper develops a structural model of credit constrained household consumption, indivisible investment, and savings behavior, andtests the model using a major government microfinance program as an exogenous quasi-experimental injection of credit. After estimating using pre-program data, the estimated model is evaluated using the Thai Million Baht Village Fund Program. Simulated predictions from the model mirror actual data in reproducing a greater increase in consumption than credit, which is interpreted as evidence of credit contraints. A cost-benefit analysis using the model indicates that the program cost just 66 percent what a transfer program providing an equivalent benefit would cost.
Harmonizing Aging Surveys and Cross-National Studies on Aging
Tuesday, 01/16/2007
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
243 JR
A great deal of harmonization efforts have occurred among the existing aging data sets; however, the comparability of these aging surveys has not been fully articulated, calling for more deliberate efforts to establish the ex post comparability of existing aging surveys. Moreover, several countries are currently in the process of developing similar aging data sets, which creates urgency in the discussion of harmonization-what should be harmonized at the international and/or regional levels and what needs to be localized. It is increasingly recognized that cross-national comparative studies will bring new insights to our understanding of the impact of policy and institution on aging, yet only few such studies have been conducted. Therefore, Dr. Lee proposed (1) a scientific meeting to enhance the ex ante comparability by bringing together the principal investigators of aging surveys who are directly connected to the creation of these data; (2) a special issue of Population Development Review to facilitate cross-national comparative studies on aging; and (3) a library of resources integrating information about aging surveys. Two grants, U13 and R01, were awarded in support of (1) and (3), and an arrangement was made with Population Council for (2).
When Father Doesn't Know Best: Parent's Management and Control of Money and Children's Food Insecurity
Tuesday, 01/09/2007
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
243 JR
Department of Sociology and Gender and Women's Studies, The University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign
Dr. Pat Reagan
Department of Economics, Ohio State University
Tuesday, 11/28/2006
12:30 - 1:30
243 JR
Dr. David Weir
"Putting More Health into the Health and Retirement Study"
Tuesday, 11/21/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building
Dr. David Barker
University of Southampton, Epidemiology
Tuesday, 11/14/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
302 Pfahl Hall
**Please note this seminar will be taking place at Pfahl Hall, in the Fisher College of Business.
Dr. Ibrahim Sirkeci
European Business School London
Tuesday, 11/07/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building
"International migration of minority ethnic groups have often been overlooked in the migration studies. However, our understanding will remain incomplete with a national migratory regimes focus. Turkish and Kurdish populations have different international migration patterns. The Kurds from Turkey have been more likely to migrate abroad at least during the last few decades. This difference is to some extent attributable to the ethnic tensions in Turkey and armed ethnic conflict in parts of the country. Transnationalism of Turkish Kurdish migration is evident in their migration mechanisms, ethno nationalism, and survival through migration. While socioeconomic deprivation played a significant role in triggering migration of the Kurdish, non-material environment of insecurity felt differently by ethnic and religious segments appeared with a sound explanation potential. The environment of insecurity may also serve as an opportunity framework."
Dr. David Murray
Design and Analysis of Group-Randomized Trials
Tuesday, 10/31/2006
12:30pm - 1:30pm
243 JR
Group-randomized trials are comparative studies characterized by the allocation of identifiable groups instead of individuals to study conditions. Members of those groups are then observed to assess the impact of an intervention. Examples include school-, worksite-, and community-based intervention studies. Such studies are increasingly common in public health and medicine, in education, and in sociology and criminology. Group-randomized trials pose a number of design and analytic problems not found in the usual randomized clinical trial and have much in common with surveys based on cluster sampling designs. Dr. Murray will discuss these problems and their solution in his presentation.
Julie Zissimopoulos
Tuesday, 10/24/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building
Inter-vivos cash transfers and bequests between family members total hundreds of billions of dollars each year. They may equalize resources within a generation of a family as well as across family generations. Transfers delayed to the end of life may represent a significant motive for saving. Our analysis is motivated by a dynamic, life-cycle model with inter-vivos transfers as an argument in the utility function. We use longitudinal data from the Health and Retirement Study on inter-vivos transfers that span up to twelve years to describe financial transfers made by parents to children and their correlation with donor characteristics at a point in time and over time. We examine if age patterns in giving behavior and the effects of mortality risk, risk aversion and economic resources are consistent with the predictions of a life-cycle model.
Human Subject Review Process
Karen Hale and Judith Neidig, Office of Responsible Research Practices, Ohio State University
Tuesday, 10/03/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building
Social and Behavioral Science Funding from NIH: Perspectives from NICHD
Dr. Rebecca Clark, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
Tuesday, 09/29/2006
12:30 - 1:30 p.m.
243 Journalism Building
PAA Practice Presentations
Tuesday, 03/27/2006
12:30pm - 2:00pm
243 JR
TBA
Tuesday, 01/30/2006
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm
243 JR
Lazarus Professor, Department of Sociology, The Ohio State University
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