Seminars
- CDE - Demography Training Seminar (Dem Sem)
- CDHA - Population, Life Course and Aging Seminar
- Population Health Monday Seminar
- This week's CDE ANNOUNCE List
- CDE-ANNOUNCE is a weekly one-stop announcement list for seminars, lectures, and brownbags. This list showcases events of interest to demography researchers.
News
Dana Garbarski was recently awarded a grant from the Charles Cannell Fund in Survey Methodology from the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research. Garbarski's research seeks to learn more about how interviewers and respondents interact when faced with sensitive questions during survey interviews. The link above describes more about Garbarski's work.
Felix Elwert has received a Vilas Associate award from the UW-Madison Graduate School. The Vilas Associates Competition recognizes new and on-going research of the highest quality and significance. Elwert's award honors his work on statistical methods for causal inference from observational data with applications to neighborhood effects and the determinants of educational outcomes.
Alberto Palloni's work as part of a panel of experts was recently published in the study "U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health" and has received extensive media coverage in The New York Times, USA Today, and National Public Radio among other outlets. Palloni and graduate student James Yonker gathered and analyzed the information in Chapter 2 and wrote sections on health status across the life cycle that are included in the report.
CDE grad Dana Garbarski (now a postdoc at the Health Disparities Research Scholars training program at UW-Madison) received an award from The Charles Cannell Fund in Survey Methodology of the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. This award is granted to junior researchers to examine interviewer-respondent interaction during the survey interview and its effects on the validity and quality of survey data. Dana will use her award to study interviewer and respondent interactional rapport during the end-of-life planning section of the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. The purpose of this study is to address two overarching goals: to investigate how interviewers and respondents interactionally deal with potentially sensitive or threatening topics, and to explore the interactional cues associated with concordant and discordant proxy reports of the end-of-life treatment preferences of one's spouse.
CDE graduate student Anna Haskins wins best student paper award
Sociology graduate student Anna Haskins just won the ASA Population Section's grad student paper award for her paper "Unintended Consequences of Mass Imprisonment: Effects of Paternal Incarceration on Child School Readiness." Congratulations, Anna!
CDE affiliates among 9 winners in RTI's 2012 Research Challenge
A proposal to study the "Measurement of Self-Reported Health," submitted by Dana Garbarski, Nora Cate Schaeffer, and Jen Dykema was among the winning entries in RTI's 2012 Research Challenge. The research team will have their questions included as part of an in-person survey of Chicago residents this summer. The goal of their proposal is to examine whether the validity of self-reported health is improved by varying question context and the ordering of the response options. The intent of their experiment is to make important contributions to research on survey methodology, health outcomes and disparities, and any field interested in capturing indicators of health in their surveys.
UW Global Health Institute awards seed grants to eight, including two CDE affiliates
The UW-Madison Global Health Institute has awarded start-up funding to eight research projects on the UW-Madison campus. The Institute, a merger of the Center for Global Health and Global Health Initiative, awards the two year, $40,000 grants to enable researchers to flesh out their ideas and give them a leg up in securing more substantial funding. The two CDE researchers receiving GHI grants this year are:
Monica Grant, Population Health, "Mobile Phone-Disseminated Health Information"
Alberto Palloni, Sociology, Early-Life Health, "Economic Growth and Inequality in Human Capital Formation"New book addresses human sexuality from a life course perspective
Sex for Life: From Virginity to Viagra, How Sexuality Changes Throughout Our Lives. Edited by Laura M. Carpenter and John DeLamater. NYU Press, 2012.
Sexual beliefs, behaviors and identities are interwoven throughout our lives, from childhood to old age. An edited collection of original empirical contributions united through its use of a distinctive, cutting-edge theoretical framework, Sex for Life critically examines sexuality across the entire lifespan. Rooted in diverse disciplines and employing a wide range of research methods, the chapters explore the sexual and social transitions that typically map to broad life stages, as well as key age-graded physiological transitions, such as puberty and menopause, while drawing on the latest developments in gender, sexuality, and life course studies. Co-author John DeLamater is a CDE affiliate.Cash incentives can increase survey response rates
Making stronger connections between data collection methods and survey measures is an important step in helping identify factors associated with infant mortality and low birth weight. Toward that end a prepaid cash incentive was found to increase response rates by 10 percentage points or more compared to a coupon for diapers or no incentive among African American mothers in Wisconsin PRAMS (Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System). This research was published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal. Jennifer Dykema, CDE affiliate, is the study's lead author.
Growing up in bad neighborhoods has a devastating impact
Growing up in a poor neighborhood can have a devastating impact on the chance of graduating from high school. A new study by CDE affiliate Felix Elwert with Geoff Wodtke and David Harding from the University of Michigan (links and pdf below) is the first to investigate the effect of spending the entire childhood in a disadvantaged neighborhood and finds that children who grew up in the most (compared to the least) disadvantaged quintile of U.S. neighborhoods have a 20-percentage point lower high school graduation rate. The study was published in the American Sociological Review.
A study led by CDE affiliate Whitney Witt found that, by the time their children reached age 5, mothers of babies born at very low birth weight suffered much worse health than mothers of normal birth-weight children. The research was published in the journal Quality of Life Research.
Poor mental health before pregnancy increases risk for pregnancy complications and low birth weight
Poor mental health before pregnancy predicts which pregnant women are most likely to have a pregnancy complication and give birth to a low birth weight baby, a new nationwide survey reveals. This research was published in the Maternal and Child Health Journal. Whitney Witt, CDE affiliate, is the study's lead author.
According to the New York Times, the percentage of the nation's black population living in the South has hit its highest point in half a century, as younger and more educated black residents move out of declining cities in the Northeast and Midwest in search of better opportunities. Katherine Curtis, CDE affiliate is quoted in the article.
Families whose children have serious health problems spend a much higher percentage of their incomes, averaging nearly $600 more a year, on out-of-pocket health care costs than families of healthy children, a new national study reveals. This new research was recently published in the Journal of Family and Economic Issues. Whitney Witt, CDE affiliate, is the study's lead author.