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Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology

Partnering with a Global Platform to inform Research and Public Policy-making: What needs to be in place to make a Global COVID-19 Survey work?

At the CSDE seminar on April 2nd, Dr. Frauke Kreuter will present “Partnering with a Global Platform to inform Research and Public Policy-making: What needs to be in place to make a Global COVID-19 Survey work?”. CSDE Training Core Director Zack Almquist will moderate the discussion. Dr. Kreuter will discuss a partnership between Facebook and academic institutions to create a global COVID-19 symptom survey available in 56 languages. Dr. Kreuter is a Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) and co-director of Data Science Centers at the University of Maryland (USA) and Mannheim (Germany). 

Register for Dr. Kreuter’s Zoom seminar here. This quarter, CSDE is recording the seminar series and posting the links on its website. Visit our site here.

Before the seminar, UW Geography PhD student Aja Sutton will facilitate a graduate student discussion with Dr. Kreuter. RSVP by emailing her at amsutton@uw.edu.

Join One or More of CSDE’s Spring 2021 Workshops!

Each quarter, CSDE offers workshops on data sources, statistical methodology, introductions to analysis programs, and more, all given by CSDE staff and faculty affiliates. Students, faculty, and staff are all welcome to register for our workshops and we welcome registrants from outside the University of Washington as well. If you miss a workshop, recordings will be available on our website for 3 months after the workshop. Our Spring 2021 workshops include Preventing and Identifying Fraud in Survey Data Collection (04/06), Introduction to the Use of R with Relational Databases (04/19) and Understanding Lab Methods and Data (04/28).

CSDE Training Director  and Research Scientist Dr. Christine Leibbrand will lead the workshop on April 6 on preventing and identifying fraud in survey data collection. This workshop will serve as an introduction to ways in which your survey may be hacked, factors that increase your risk of experiencing fraud in your results, and strategies for preventing and identifying fraud in your data. This workshop is especially suited to researchers who are interested in fielding surveys through online platforms.

CSDE Research Scientist Phil Hurvitz will lead the workshop on April 19 on the use of R with Relational Databases.The workshop will  provide a broad overview of using R to interface with relational databases. By the end of the course you will be able to make connections with PostgreSQL/PostGIS and SQLite/GPKG databases, pull tables from the database into R as data frames, perform basic SQL operations on tables and return results as R data frames, and perform spatial queries within the database and return results as R data frames.

CSDE’s Biodemography Director Eleanor Brindle will lead the workshop on April 28 on lab methods and data. This workshop, intended for those with little or no experience working in laboratories, will focus on how to evaluate strengths and weaknesses of biomarker data, discuss principles of commonly used lab methods in biodemographic research, reliability and standardization issues, and how to interpret or write lab methods sections to convey the most important information for evaluating lab data.

 

Liu and Raftery Publish New Findings about Education and Fertility Trends

UW Statistics Doctoral Student Daphne Liu and CSDE Affiliate Adrian Raftery recently published new research in Population and Development Review showing how education may accelerate fertility decline. They examine the relative influence of several different mechanisms including women’s education, children’s school enrollments, contraceptive prevalence, and unmet need. They find that women’s educational attainment is far more influential than children’s school enrollment in accelerating fertility declines.  They also find that increasing contraceptive prevalence is more important than decreasing unmet need. To read more about the research, please see the article.  They recently also published a short research note through N-IUSSP that summarizes those findings and the policy implications.