As a Fellow with the Global Alliance for Training in Health Equity Research (GATHER) at the Drexel Dornsife School of Public Health (DSPH), you will be supported while conducting health equity research in the United States and around the world.

Fellows will partner with mentors (DSPH faculty and GATHER advisory committee members), receive intensive skills-based research training, and have an opportunity to travel to one of four research sites in Brazil, Kenya, Mexico and Burkina Faso.

Becoming a GATHER Fellow offers doctoral students and postdoctoral trainees a chance to advance their careers and develop expertise in global health equity issues, while joining the DSPH’s extensive international network of public health scholars across Latin America and Africa.

GATHER Fellowships include:

• Coverage of travel, housing and living expenses while at a global research site
• A stipend and mentorship throughout the 6-9 month fellowship

UPDATE: Position should post on USAJOBS in mid to late August.

The Northwest Federal Statistical Research Data Center (NWFSRDC) at UW is starting a search for an Administrator with a research background.

The NWFSRDC lab, located next to UW Seattle’s campus in the U District, provides a secure environment where qualified researchers conduct approved statistical research using restricted micro-level data collected by the Census Bureau, the National Center for Health Statistics, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and other federal agencies.

The NWFSRDC is part of the FSRDC network administered by the Center for Economic Studies at the US Census Bureau.   Further details on the network, data available, and research conducted in FSRDCs can be found here: https://www.census.gov/ces/index.html .  The NWFSRDC website has some local details:  https://depts.washington.edu/nwfsrdc/

Primary responsibilities for this position include:

1. a)   Assisting researchers from many disciplines, including economics, geography, health services, epidemiology, sociology, demography, social work, urban planning, business, environmental science and data science in developing successful proposals and conducting research at the NWFSRDC;
2. b)   Overseeing daily operations of the NWFSRDC lab;
3. c)    Serving as a liaison between the Census and the NWFSRDC;
4. d)   Assisting the Executive Director in marketing the center to the research community at UW and beyond.

The NWFSRDC administrator will be a part-time (75%) U.S. Census Bureau employee who will receive federal benefits.   The ideal candidate will have a M.A. in a social science field, which may include working toward a Ph.D., or a recent Ph.D. in a social science field, a background in statistical methods and strong organizational skills.

Pay will be at GS-11 or GS-12 Seattle rates (75%) depending on qualifications and experience.

This position has not been formally announced yet.   Please email Mark Ellis, Executive Director of the NWFSRDC (ellism@uw.edu) if you are interested in the position or if you would like more information.

Call for Papers:

International Seminar: Looking backward, looking forward: African demography in historical perspective
Nairobi, Kenya 2-3 April 2020

Organized by the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography and held at the British Institute in Eastern Africa.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 30 September 2019

Organizing Committee: Sarah Walters (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), Martin Dribe (Lund University), Shane Doyle (University of Leeds), Stephen O. Wandera (Makerere University), Jeanne Cilliers (Lund University).

Please read the full announcement for this seminar.

We invite submissions on historical or long-term, interdisciplinary, perspectives on demographic change in Africa. The aims of the seminar are to review the state of the field of African population history, to consider the role of the past for understanding the present, and to facilitate partnerships and future comparative work on African historical demography.

There is a resurgence of interest in Africa’s demographic pasts. Evidence on past population trends is essential to respond to core questions in African history, such as the human cost of the slave trade; the impacts of colonialism on health, wellbeing and the family; the effects of post-colonial policies on households and livelihoods; long-term trends in mortality and migration; and the influence of religion, education and employment on intergenerational relations and the social organisation of reproduction. Improving the evidence on Africa’s past populations will illuminate how people have managed their resilience and reproduction over time, in the face of environmental, epidemiological, political and economic change.

Understanding the historical origins of African demographic regimes may also help to influence current and future population trends. This is important given Africa is projected to account for more than half of all global population growth by 2050, with implications for both demographic dividend and migration. In particular, contemporary demographers have called for interdisciplinary and historical approaches to improve understanding of the contexts of fertility transition in the region, including its stalls, reversals and exceptional age- and parity-specific dynamics, as well as the historical context of the AIDS pandemic. Papers which seek to situate current population trends in historical perspective are encouraged.

The seminar will showcase the growing availability of historical demographic micro-data through new digitisation projects. Alongside the substantive research papers, the seminar will include a data workshop in which scholars who have collected new datasets will have the opportunity to present their databases and to consider scope for future comparative work and collaborations. We will review the potential of new digital methods for widening historical micro-data collection in Africa and seek the experience of previous comparative demographic projects in achieving data harmonisation.

Online Submissions:
The IUSSP Panel on Historical Demography invites researchers to submit online by 30 September 2019 a short 200-word abstract AND an extended abstract (2 to 4 pages, including tables). To submit an abstract please fill out the online submission form: ONLINE SUBMISSION FORM.

If you would also like to contribute to the data workshop, please also send an email to sarah.walters@lshtm.ac.uk with a 200-word description of your dataset at the same time as your main submission.

The working language of the seminar is English: abstracts and final papers should be submitted and presented in English. If the paper is co-authored, please indicate the names of co-authors. Submission should be made by the author who will attend the seminar. We aim to publish suitable papers in a journal special issue or an edited volume.

Applicants will be notified whether their paper has been accepted by 15 October 2019. Authors of accepted papers must upload the full paper on the IUSSP website by 28 February 2020.

Funding is available to cover the cost of the seminar venue, airport transfers, accommodation and meals for speakers for two days. We are seeking further financial support for travel, but the outcome is uncertain, and participants should seek their own funding for flights, additional accommodation and other expenses. Priority will be given to African scholars, early career researchers and those from developing countries in awarding travel support.

For further information: Please contact Seminar Organizer Sarah Walters (sarah.walters@lshtm.ac.uk).

IUSSP Scientific Panel on Historical Demography
Chair: Martin Dribe (Lund University, Sweden)
Members: Lisa Dillon (Université de Montréal, Canada), Hao Dong (Peking University, China), J. David Hacker (University of Minnesota, USA), Lionel Kesztenbaum (Institut national d’études démographiques, INED, France), Ana Silvia Volpi Scott (Universidade Estadual de Campinas, UNICAMP, Brazil) and Sarah Walters (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK).

This panel brings together researchers from around the world to discuss theories and explanations for changes in family behaviours. The panel’s second workshop, in Manila, will focus on consequences of new family formation behaviours, for individuals, families, and society. We are interested in a range of living arrangements, including cohabitation, living-apart-together relationships, and repartnering, as well as same-sex partnerships, multi-generational families, and living alone. Studies should be underpinned by demographic data and analysis; however, we encourage novel explanations, cross-cultural comparisons, and theory-building.

We aim to have wide global representation as well as regional expertise. We are applying for funding to help pay for travel and accommodation, particularly for participants from low-income countries, but we will not know the outcome of our application for some time.

Some of the papers from this seminar and the previous seminar held in 2018 will be selected for publication in a special issue devoted to the topic.

Over the last decades, family structure and family dynamics have undergone tremendous changes. In family demography, these changes are typically interpreted as the consequences of deep transformations in values, attitudes and norms. These are defined and measured at the level of the individual, typically using a questionnaire, and, when aggregated, they are usually interpreted either as characteristics of a population – for instance in cross-national comparisons – or as characteristics of different groups within a country, say men and women, the less educated and the well-educated, and so on.

Although these approaches have proven fruitful, they leave aside the formal context within which actors must make the decisions and the choices that will lead to demographic events such as entering in a conjugal relationship, leaving one or having a child. Although these choices and decisions are without any doubt rooted in economic contexts, influenced by individuals’ values and attitudes, and conditioned by what they perceive as norms, the range of what is possible and the “cost” of any specific decision or choice are largely an institutional matter and are shaped by law.

The diffusion of unmarried cohabitation would probably not have occurred if the millennia-old distinction between legitimate and illegitimate children had not been abolished in many countries through a combination of legislative changes and court decisions. The postponement of fertility would not have occurred the way it did, if contraception and abortion had remained illegal. Divorce, separation and step-families would not be as common as they are today if most jurisdictions in the West had not, willingly or not, come to terms with unilateral divorce.

As the last example suggests, the relationship between the changes in the demography of the family and the changes in family law is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Changes in law occur because of changes in behaviour as much as changes in law may favour changes in behaviour.

The purpose of the IUSSP Scientific Panel on Family Demography and Family Law is to foster the study of the connection between changes in family law and changes in family structure and family dynamics while assuming as little as possible about the specifics of the connection.

The purpose of the seminar is to gather together people who are working on relevant topics but are not yet meeting in seminars or meeting sessions devoted to the field. Members of the panel consider the seminar as an opportunity to prepare an edited book that would help set the field.

For the purposes of the Panel and of this seminar, family law is mainly private law, i.e. what is normally regulated by the Civil Code of a country, or its laws on marriage, divorce, separation, filiation, maintenance between relatives and inheritance. These matters are commonly intertwined with matters of “social law” (Sozialrecht, derecho social, droit social) and proposals that deal with matters of private law and social law will be welcome, but the focus of the seminar is not on the relationship between the social provision of welfare and demographic behaviour.

Introduction to R using Rstudio

Description:
This class will teach you how to get started
with R using the free integrated development environment called Rstudio. The
course will cover the basic organization of R and RStudio, where to find good
help references, and how to begin a basic analysis. This class is ideal for
users who have little or no experience with R.

Instructor: Jasmine Jiang, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Tuesday, July 9, 2019
Time: 11:30am- 12:30pm
Place: Savery 121
Register here.

Introduction to Python

Description:
This class will provide you the basics of PYTHON
for both gathering data from public sources and providing analyses.

Instructor: Mike Babb, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Monday, July 15, 2019
Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
Place: Savery 117
Register here.

Introduction to GIS/ArcGIS

Description:
This course will provide students with a broad overview of what geographic
information systems (GISs) are and how social scientists can benefit from using
them in their research. Students will explore basic GIS concepts through
hands-on exercises using ArcGIS, a widely used GIS software package, as well as
freely available data sets.

Instructor: Aya Masilela, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Time: 10:30am – 11:30am
Place: Savery 117
Register here.

Introduction to R using Rstudio

Description:
This class will teach you how to get started
with R using the free integrated development environment called Rstudio. The
course will cover the basic organization of R and RStudio, where to find good
help references, and how to begin a basic analysis. This class is ideal for
users who have little or no experience with R.

Instructor: Yunkang Yang, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Thursday, July 18, 2019
Time: 12:00pm- 1:00pm
Place: Savery 117
Register here.

Introduction to STATA

Description:
This course will introduce you to the basic Stata statistical package including
reading in STATA datasets, basic data manipulation in Stata, and common
statistical procedures.

Instructor: Anwesha Pan, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Tuesday, July 23, 2019
Time: 2:30pm – 3:30pm
Place: Savery 121
Register here.

Data Wrangling in R

Description:

This course will cover some of R’s useful
tools for data management and exploration. Most of class will be devoted to
learning Hadley Wickham’s excellent “tidyr” and “dplyr”
packages. Attendees are assumed to have basic familiarity with R/Rstudio.

Instructor: Yuan Hsiao, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Time: 1:30pm – 2:30pm
Place: Savery 117.
Register here.

Introduction to Qualitative Research and ATLAS.ti

Description:
This course provides a brief, practical introduction to working in ATLAS.ti,
covering basic terminology and functionality of the program. This will include
importing text documents, coding and annotating documents, and exploring
relationships through analysis and query tools. Time permitting, we may also
briefly discuss best practices for data management. The course assumes no prior
use of Atlas-ti.

Instructor: Riddhi Mehta-Neugebauer, CSSCR Consultant
Date: Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Time: 12:30pm – 1:30pm
Place: Savery 121
Register here.

Again to register for any of the above workshops follow this link.