The Centre for Population Change at the University of Southampton is looking to recruit two researchers with interests in family demography and/or quantitative sociology. The project will explore factors associated with partnership formation, union dissolution, and childbearing.
One post-doc will work for 18 months under the direction of Dr. Brienna Perelli-Harris, who has been awarded an ESRC Secondary Data Analysis Initiative grant. You will undertake research on relationship quality and partnership transitions by analysing complex survey data from the UK Household Living Survey, and the European Generation and Gender Surveys.
The other post-doc will be funded for 27 months through the Centre for Population Change and supervised by Prof. Ann Berrington and Dr. Brienna Perelli-Harris. You will use the UK Household Living Survey to study partnership, fertility, housing, and labour market transitions across the lifecourse.
You will have a PhD* or equivalent in a quantitative social science and experience with advanced quantitative methods, excellent knowledge and solid practical experience in the use of STATA or a similar software program and good written and oral communication skills. Prior experience with analysing the UK Household Living Survey is desirable.
*Applications for Research Fellow positions will be considered from candidates who are working towards or nearing completion of a relevant PhD qualification. The title of Research Fellow will be applied upon successful completion of the PhD. Prior to the qualification being awarded the title of Senior Research Assistant will be given.
Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison seeks to support researcher-practitioner partnerships committed to analyzing existing program, administrative, and other data to inform the effectiveness of policies or programs targeted at or likely to affect low-income populations. This initiative has been generously funded by The JPB Foundation. Proposals are invited from researcher-practitioner teams in which at least one partner is an affiliate of a U.S. Collaborative of Poverty Centers (CPC; see sidebar) institution or a member of one of IRP’s Thematic Research Networks. IRP anticipates funding two to four projects, with total funding (including direct and indirect costs) ranging from $50,000 to $175,000 per project, over a one- to two-year award period beginning September 1, 2018. The proposal deadline is August 1, 2018.
The deadline for the Fall Edition of Applied Demography is August 6!
The Applied Demography Newsletter welcomes submissions of materials for publication in the Fall 2018 edition. Submissions may include book releases, recruitment with deadlines after September 1, 2018, or upcoming conferences. We would like to hear from the members of the State Data Centers (SDCs) and what is being done in your units. In addition, you may submit announcements about applied demography tools, future workshops/training/courses, jobs, and short essays about your applied demography research. These submissions should not exceed 250 words.
We are interested in two new types of submissions:
- Visualization Note: a chart, map, or visualization of data relevant to applied demographers with a 200 words explanation.
- Policy Impact Note: we are interested in items up to 750 words in which you discuss the policy implications of your research. You may include links to other materials (i.e. YouTube, SocArXiv, etc.).
Given the emergence of the #DemographersLaughToo hashtag, we will consider funny anecdotes or jokes that would make demographers laugh.
Due to space constraints and the productivity of our community, we will not publish lists of journal articles. If you have any question about the suitability of materials, feel free to contact the editor.
Please send your materials to Alexis R. Santos by August 6, 2018.
The Program in Neuroscience and Behavior at Mount Holyoke College invites applications for a full-time tenure-track assistant professor in systems neuroscience beginning July 1, 2019. The successful candidate will demonstrate the ability to build a rigorous program of high quality research that integrally involves the contributions of undergraduate students. Research interests across the discipline of neuroscience are welcome and may include vertebrate and invertebrate models, or computational approaches. We also seek candidates with a strong commitment to undergraduate education who will teach 4 courses per year, which may include an introductory course, the development of an intermediate neuroscience course, and upper-level laboratory and seminar courses in the candidate’s area of expertise.
Mount Holyoke supports faculty scholarship through competitive start-up funds, travel support, internal grants, and a generous sabbatical policy. Newly renovated laboratory spaces are available to accommodate mammalian and non-mammalian model organisms. Mount Holyoke also offers a comprehensive faculty mentoring program and invests in faculty across their career span. All candidates should have a doctorate at the time of application; postdoctoral experience is preferred.
The Department of Anthropology at Baylor University seeks to fill a post-doctoral fellowship focused on biomedical anthropology. This Fellow will join a growing department with interest in applied perspectives on the anthropology of health, broadly conceived. Candidates should have personal research interests that combine topics and tools from the social/behavioral and physical/life sciences to address problems relating to global/public health, human biology, and/or evolutionary medicine. The Fellow will work with Dr. Mark Flinn on ongoing projects related to child health and family relationships, and will assist with grant writing, database management and statistical analyses, and research project implementation, likely outside the United States. The Fellow will also be tasked with forming linkages among current faculty in Anthropology with those in related disciplines, including Biology, Psychology and Neuroscience, Environmental Science, Sociology, Education, Family Studies, Public Health, and the College of Medicine.
The successful candidate for this position will have high proficiencies in health-related research design, management, and analyses, with strong interests in combining field work with laboratory methods. Addressing global health issues using methods and perspectives from anthropology in international settings is critical.
We’re excited to announce that CSDE Affiliates Anjum Hajat, Assistant Professor in the Department of Epidemiology, Crystal Hill, Professor at the Evans School, and Marieka Klawitter, Professor at the Evans School, are the recipients of a Royalty Research Fund Award. Their pilot study will explore the connections between family finances, stress, and health for low wage workers.
Hall, Hajat, and Klawitter will implement financial coaching in a low wage workplace to assess its feasibility and the workers’ take up and satisfaction with the intervention. They also plan to will assess family finances and general and financial stress for workers through pre and post surveys. In future work, they will use multiple worksites and measure the impact of coaching on household finances and levels of stress, including physiological measures. Once fully realized, the study will strengthen the evidence about the links between financial stress and health and the importance of the social determinants of health.
Ultimately, Hall, Hajat, and Klawitter plan to build on this work, along with Karin Martin, to look at the impacts of criminal justice system involvement on health through the pathways of financial stress via legal financial obligations and employment impacts.
CSDE’s development core provided early input to the team as they developed their concept into a research proposal. You can learn more about the Royalty Research Fund here.
Story updated 7/22/2018 to reflect the addition of project team faculty.
Fellows identify and work with a Nature Conservancy mentor and a senior scholar (or scholars) from one of the NatureNet Partner Universities to develop a research program. Eligible individuals will not be employed as a postdoctoral student at the start of this fellowship. Applicants employed in non-postdoctoral positions that will continue into the fellowship period should address in their application how they will manage the responsibilities of both positions.
Each Fellow will receive a non-negotiable annual salary of $50,000 plus benefits and an annual research and travel budget of approximately $25,000.
University Partners (Full Postdoctoral Fellowship)
The program is run in partnership with universities that represent traditional and non-traditional disciplines relevant to conservation science. Applicants must identify one university as their home institution and may submit only one application, but are encouraged to suggest collaborations with additional universities and institutions. This year’s participating universities for the full fellowship are: the Institute at Brown University for Environment and Society; Columbia University’s Earth Institute*; Science for Nature and People Partnership; Stanford University; University of California – Los Angeles’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability; University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, University of Virginia, and the University of Queensland.
* For those applying for a fellowship through Columbia University, this must be the first post-doc position you will hold.
Seattle’s average household income has increased; however, one KUOW listener wanted to know just how many of those households fit into the nation’s top 1 percent income bracket.
KUOW turned to CSDE Affiliate Mark Long, Associate Dean for Research at the Evans School, for the answer. He reported that in 2016, 1 percenters earned more than $470,000. 9,245 Seattle households fit this description in 2016 – three times the national average.
Click below to learn more about Long’s analysis and to see accompanying data visualizations.
Are decades-long careers the norm for Major League Baseball pitchers – or is the true timeline shorter? CSDE Research Affiliate David Swanson, Professor of Sociology at the University of California Riverside sought to find out. Although estimating working life expectancies is typically seen as a labor-intensive task, Swanson and colleagues Jack Baker, Jeff Tayman, and Lucky Tedrow set out to find a more straightforward solution.
The group used cohort change ratios in their estimations, which enabled them to forecast using the same data used in working life expectancy. Explains Swanson: “We used pitchers in the 1980–1981 season because that gave almost everyone enough time to finish their careers. But we excluded those who had interrupted careers, such as those who played for a bit but might have been sent back down to the minor leagues for more training or because of injury. We wanted to look only at uninterrupted careers in the MLB, and it turns out that, on average, they’re really short.”
How short, though? Swanson and his colleagues estimate that the average professional working life of a baseball pitcher is just 3.99 years.
Swanson believes that this approach can be used to assess the working life of other sports by position: “We suspect we can do something similar with the types of positions that are in American football, other types of football, and basketball and see what happens. We suspect that most other Major League sports are not going to be too dissimilar. We don’t think there are really long careers in a lot of these sports where there’s much more contact than in Major League Baseball.”
CSDE Affiliate William Zumeta, Professor at the Evans School, researches the factors that shape state support for higher education. This summer, he presented on both the structural and political factors that impact financial support for higher education – and how they have changed over time.
In June, Zumeta was the keynote speaker at “Volatility in State Spending for Higher Education,” an AERA-sponsored conference held at the University of Illinois. In this address, he explained the structural and political factors behind both the volatility and the long-term decline in state support for higher education. He also assessed the merits and drawbacks of various proposals to mitigate volatility. In the end, dynamic political factors limit the extent to which volatility can be reduced.
In July, Zumeta and Dr. Alicia Kinne-Clawson coauthored “The State Higher Education Executive Officer and Higher Education Finance and Policy: Structure, Policy Orientation and Relationships Matter,” in a just-published book entitled The State Higher Education Officer and the Public Good: Developing New Leadership for Improved Policy, Practice and Research. The chapter reviews the recent empirical literature on the relationship between state higher education governance structural factors and financial support of higher education. Then, they provide case studies of State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) influence in Georgia, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Maryland. Their conclusion: that SHEOOS’ relationships with their governors are a critical factor in effectiveness.