UW Leading Lights Speaker Series: Karen Fredriksen Goldsen
PAA Congressional Briefing on ‘Living, Working, Dying: Demographic Insights into COVID-19’
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.
Fredriksen Goldsen to Headline Leading Lights Speaker Series (04/01/2021)
CSDE Affiliate Karen Fredriksen Goldsen will provide a keynote lecture on Science to Impact: Linking Lives to Disrupt the Cycle of Social Isolation in the Midst of COVID-19, as part of the UW School of Social Work’s Leading Lights Speaker Series on April 1st, 1:30-4:30pm. To learn more and to register, click here.
Join PAA Congressional Briefing on ‘Living, Working, Dying: Demographic Insights into COVID-19’ (04/23/2021)
PAA members will virtually brief congressional staff on “Living, Working, Dying: Demographic Insights into COVID-19” on April 23rd at 12:00pm ET. The COVID-19 pandemic has made clear that factors such as age and pre-existing conditions intersect with socioeconomic and demographic characteristics—such as race-ethnicity, gender, and income—to influence both the onset and severity of the disease, as well as its trajectory. In this briefing, population scientists will share research findings on the disparate impacts of COVID and what additional research and data are needed to understand and address its far-reaching effects. Panelists include Dr. Caitlyn Collins, Dr. Marc A. Garcia, and Dr. Anna Gassman-Pines. Dr. Noreen Goldman will moderate the panel. To register, click here.
7th Annual Measuring Development Conference: Emerging Data and Methods in Global Health Research
MPI and IOM Host Event: A Year of Pandemic – the State of Global Human Mobility (04/08/2021)
A free event on Thursday, April 8 with the Migration Policy Institute will feature the Director General of the IOM and focus on the state of human mobility, as a result of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed mobility and cross-border movement in 2020, decimating tourism and business travel, severely curtailing labor migration, and dampening all forms of migration, including refugee resettlement. Since the onset of the public health crisis, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has tracked the hundreds of travel restrictions, border closures, and health-related travel requirements imposed by governments globally. A new IOM-Migration Policy Institute report draws from the IOM database to sketch the state of mobility across world regions in 2020, and the range of mobility-related strategies used to contain and mitigate the spread of the virus. Register for the webinar here.
Join MPI for a two-panel discussion, featuring introductory remarks by IOM Director General António Vitorino, to examine how the pandemic reshaped border management and human mobility in 2020 and what the lasting impacts may be throughout 2021 and beyond.
The first panel will examine the government actions and regional and international coordination undertaken in 2020, including “travel bubbles” and immunity passports. Behind the sharp decline in global mobility lies a complex story of travellers stranded abroad, migrant workers locked out of destination countries where they might have performed seasonal or temporary work, displaced people facing severe difficulty in fleeing conflict and disaster zones, and asylum seekers struggling to apply for international protection. Speakers will focus on how policymakers balanced health and economic concerns and the needs of vulnerable populations, along with capacity-building and unprecedented logistical issues in their responses to each phase of 2020—mobility lockdowns, phased reopening, and responses to new outbreaks and virus mutations. They will offer analysis of what has proved effective for both migration management and public health.
The second panel will explore what policymakers should consider as the world enters into a new, uneven phase marked on the one hand by rising vaccinations, but on the other the spread of new COVID-19 variants and additional mobility restrictions as caseloads rise in some regions. Speakers will tackle questions surrounding emerging trends in migration, such as the widening gulf between those who may have the resources to travel freely and access to vaccinations versus vulnerable populations who may be unable to escape conflict or seek economic opportunities through migration. They also will discuss what it may take to reopen fully, a possible new border infrastructure focused on public health, which regional and international coordination efforts are showing promise, and a look ahead to major decisions that will need to be made in 2021.