Weekly News - June 10, 2019 - Population Sciences

EVENTS
No Demography Brown Bag Seminars till the Fall. To view past brown bag presentations: http://www.vimeo.com/berkeleypopscience.

FUNDING
PIVOT: The University of California offers a database for the use of faculty and staff to find suitable grant funding opportunities:https://spo.berkeley.edu/fund/pivotguide.html. You have to create an account at https://pivot.proquest.com/register, with UC Berkeley as you Affiliated Member Institution.
Pivot is a funding opportunity and expertise database system that combines a funding database of over 20,000 opportunities with a database of over 3 million researcher expertise profiles. Along with powerful search features, the system provides tools for individuals to save searches and opportunities, explore possibilities for collaboration, share opportunities with colleagues, and choose to receive email alerts when records are added or changed. Pivot is available at UC Berkeley, based on the campus subscription provided by the Sponsored Projects Office.

EVENTS
No Demography Brown Bag Seminars till the Fall. To view past brown bag presentations: http://www.vimeo.com/berkeleypopscience.

CONFERENCES
Western Economic Association 94th Annual Conference, San Francisco, June 28-July 2. https://weai.org/conferences/view/2/94th-Annual-Conference.
CALL FOR PAPERS
International Workshop on Health Recommender Systems, to be held in Copenhagen (Denmark) co-located with ACM RECSYS 2019 (https://recsys.acm.org/).Recommendations are becoming ever more important in health settings with the aim being to assist people live healthier lives. Three previous workshops on Health Recommender Systems (HRS) have incorporated diverse research fields and problems in which recommender systems can improve our awareness, understanding and behaviour regarding our own, and the general public’s health. At the same time, these application areas bring new challenges into the recommender community. Recommendations that influence the health status of a patient need to be legally sound and, as such, today, they often involve a human in the loop to make sure the recommendations are appropriate. To make the recommender infallible, complex domain-specific user models need to be created, which creates privacy issues. While trust in a recommendation needs to be explicitly earned through, for example, transparency, explanations and empowerment, other systems might want to persuade users into taking beneficial actions that would not be willingly chosen otherwise. Multiple and diverse stakeholders in health systems produce further challenges. Taking the patient’s perspective, simple interaction and safety against harmful recommendations might be the prioritized concern. For clinicians and experts, on the other hand, what matters is precise and accurate content. Healthcare and insurance providers and clinics all have other priorities. This workshop will deepen the discussions started at the three prior workshops and will work towards further development of the research topics in Health Recommender Systems. Website: https://healthrecsys.github.io/2019
Important Dates:
** July 1st, 2019, Paper submission deadline
** July 29th, 2019, Author notification
** August 27th, 2019, Camera-ready version deadline
** September 20th, 2019, HealthRecSys workshop
** September 16-20, 2019, RecSys conference

Registration Open! October 2019 Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science Conference Local, national, global impacts on population health convenes October 1-4, 2019 in Seattle, Washington. Co-chairs Theresa Osypuk and Elizabeth Boyle have assembled a great program featuring: interdisciplinary panels, abstract contributed sessions, and poster sessions on population health science. Don’t miss the plenary sessions to hear from IAPHS President Ana Diez-Roux, 2019 IAPHS award winners, and invited panel presenters. Register on-line before July 1 for early-bird rates. In addition, IAPHS members with memberships current through December 2019 enjoy deep discounts. Visit the conference websitefor details on registration, hotels, travel, and other meeting information. Visit the membership page to learn more about IAPHS membership.

OPPORTUNITIES
Population Research and Policy Review (PRPR) welcomes proposals from expected guest editor(s) for its Special Issue 2020. PRPR intends to publish one Special Issue (SI) each year. This SI will include around five empirical papers together with an introductory editorial that provides a more overarching (theoretical) synthesis of the individual contributions. The deadline for proposals is July 1, 2019. More information can be found at this link: http://sda-demography.org/news/7292546

RSF Accepting Visiting Scholar Applications for 2020-2021 Academic Year: The foundation’s visiting scholar program, established over thirty years ago, is a unique opportunity for social scientists to pursue research projects that investigate essential questions on social, economic, and political life in the U.S. while in residence at RSF. The program fosters the exchange of ideas in a vibrant interdisciplinary environment and promotes collaborations between researchers. Applications are reviewed by outside experts; final selections are made by RSF trustees. Applications for the 2020-2021 academic year will be accepted until June 27, 2018. View further information on the program, including eligibility requirements and application guidelines.

DATA
Roper Center to Archive Non-Probability Polls, Other Methods. The Board of Directors of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University is pleased to announce that the archive will expand its acquisitions policy to include recently developed survey methods including online non-probability samples. The addition of a Recently Developed Methods collection will result in a major expansion to the world’s largest public opinion database. At the same time, the Roper Center is also introducing the Roper Center Transparency Project aimed at increasing disclosure and data sharing in the field of public opinion polling. The Recently Developed Methods Collection will include nonprobability online panels, interactive voice response polls and other approaches. This new collection will complement the Longstanding Methods Collection, allowing users to analyze both types of data while the Center preserves more data for future generations. The Roper Center’s many data providers have always followed rigorous disclosure standards. With the Roper Center Transparency Project, starting in 2019, the Roper Center will keep track of even more methodological information that experts have identified as key to understanding polls. This information will allow researchers, news organizations and members of the public to identify critical methodological information that will enhance their understanding of polling and their use of the database. This Project builds on expansions to the data collection and improvements to the user interface that Roper Center has undertaken at Cornell University. The number of ongoing data providers to Roper Center has doubled since 2015, and includes major media, nonprofit and academic pollsters. The Roper Center has also improved the user experience by enhancing search capabilities and on-line data analysis tools. . On the web athttps://ropercenter.cornell.edu/. Inquiries to media@ropercenter.org.

IPUMS DHS: IPUMS DHS has released new data for Jordan (7 samples), Nepal (5 samples), South Africa (2 samples), plus the 2017 Pakistan survey. Also new are data for men, available for 120 samples. IPUMS DHS now includes data from 156 samples from 38 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

IPUMS CPS: April 2019 basic monthly variables are now available along with unharmonized basic monthly variables for January-April of 2019. Visit cps.ipums.org to get started.

IPUMS NHGIS: Coming soon to NHGIS: a new dataset that provides counts of marriages and divorces by county for a selection of years from 1867 to 2010. We thank our partners at the National Center for Family and Marriage Research (NCFMR) at Bowling Green State University for compiling and sharing this valuable resource.

New data is available from the Healthy Cognitive Aging Project (HCAP), a major data resource for cognitive epidemiology. For more about this supplement to the HRS, see https://www.nia.nih.gov/research/blog/2019/05/healthy-cognitive-aging-project-major-data-resource-cognitive-epidemiology.

WORKSHOPS
BITSS will hold its next Research Transparency and Reproducibility Training (RT2) in Washington DC, September 11-13, 2019. This RT2 is organized in partnership with the World Bank’s Development Impact Evaluation (DIME) group. Supported by the National Institutes for Health (NIH), RT2 is a 3-day training targeted at graduate students in the social sciences who are interested to learn about cutting-edge tools and best practices for transparent, reproducible and efficient research. The curriculum is developed and delivered by academic leaders in the open science movement and there is space for collaborative work and hands-on skill building. Learn more about previous RT2 events here. BITSS will consider applications for self-funded participants on a rolling basis through 11:59 pm PT August 28, 2019. Reach out to BITSS Senior Program Associate Aleksandar Bogdanoski (abogdanoski@berkeley.edu) with any questions about RT2 DC.

Workshop on Ego Networks: Research Design and Analysis. This 3-day workshop will be taught by Professor Brea L. Perry on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University from Wednesday, 7/24/19 to Friday, 7/26/19. Workshop cost is $900 and does not include housing or transportation. To register, please go to the following link: https://indianauniv.ungerboeck.com/prod/emc00/PublicSignIn.aspx?&SessionID=ej5fh6fc4fdlfb4fdofgn&Lang=*. Course Description: Ego network analysis (i.e., personal social network analysis) focuses on the structure, function, and composition of network ties surrounding individuals to examine how behaviors, beliefs, attitudes, and outcomes are shaped through contact and communication with others. Though tools and techniques for studying ego networks are distinct from whole network analysis, few resources provide a “deep dive” into this popular method. While no single course could cover the entire breadth of the field, we will examine the most fundamental methodological issues and practical concerns that arise in egocentric network research. This course requires no prior knowledge of egocentric SNA. We will begin with an introduction to the foundational concepts of egocentric SNA, highlighting linkages to theories commonly used in the social and health sciences (e.g. social capital). The rest of the course will cover methodological considerations and statistical techniques for egocentric SNA. In addition to covering data collection strategies (e.g. name generators, name interpreters), measures, and modeling in a lecture format, participants will learn to use Stata software to code and analyze data in daily lab sessions. These sessions will primarily focus on interactive use of Stata in a computer lab, providing hands-on practice exercises using a range of substantive topics. R code will also be provided. Please feel free to contact me (amccrani@indiana.edu) or Brea Perry (blperry@indiana.edu) if you have any questions about the workshop or registration.

ON THE WEB
A Resource for Researchers Using Differences-in-Differences Analysis: The use of difference-in-differences analysis (“diff-in-diffs”) has grown over the past decade – in part because it offers a way to estimate the effect of a policy or intervention that affected some people and not others, so long as it’s possible to observe both groups before and after the event of interest. The method seems ready-made for “natural” experiments, such as when some states instituted a policy change while other states did not. But diff-in-diffs analyses require strong assumptions. If the assumptions do not hold, researchers may believe they have estimated a causal effect of an intervention or event when the relationship is an association or is not present at all. A new, user-friendly website, compiled by Bret Zeldow and Laura Hatfield, biostatisticians in the Department of Health Care Policy, Harvard Medical School, presents the fundamental basics (with dynamic illustrations of assumptions) and recent method developments for using diff-in-diffs. It includes several interactive apps for readers – for example, time points needed to test parallel trends, and how correlation structures in longitudinal data affect the stability of trends over time.

GRADUATE STUDENTS
Family Strengthening Scholars Grant: The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) in the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has recently published a discretionary research funding announcements titled “Family Strengthening Scholars.” OPRE intends to award up to three grants to support dissertation research on healthy marriage/responsible fatherhood (HM/RF) policy issues. Read the full announcement. If you have questions regarding this grant announcement, please email the OPRE grant review team at FSScholars@icfi.com or call 1-877-350-5913.

Bar Ilan University – one-year research fellowship as part of their PhD studies. See the flyer for more information. The deadline is pretty soon (June 23^rd).

RELATED LISTS
JOBS
All jobs and postdoctoral fellowships are posted as we receive them on the Demography Department Jobs Listserv, http://lists.demog.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/jobs. This list advertises positions of all sorts relevant for social and behavioral scientists with advanced degrees.

MIGRATION MAILING LIST
Berkeley Interdisciplinary Migration Initiative (BIMI.berkeley.edu) is a research center for the study of immigrants and immigration. BIMI has a mailing list (immigration_group@lists.berkeley.edu), which is where a good deal of immigration and migration announcements are posted, and not all of that material is posted on the PopSciences Weekly News.

SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH MAILING LIST
Tue$day Top Tip$ for SPH Research is a listserv with research funding opportunities and other information pertinent to public health researchers who are not necessarily population researchers. To subscribe, write to Dr. Lauren Goldstein, lhg@berkeley.edu.