Weekly News – May 9, 2017 - Population Sciences

EVENTS.
Monday-Tuesday, May 9-10. African athletes and migration to the European Union – Beyond Men’s Football: A Research Workshop. | 223 Moses Hall. Information: http://events.berkeley.edu/?event_ID=108973&date=2017-05-09&tab=academic.

Thursday, May 11 | 2-3:30 p.m. “Do Parents Care About School Effectiveness?” with Chris Walters, Economics. 648 Evans Hall.

Thursday, May 11, 6-7:30 PM. Beyond $15: Immigrant Workers, Faith Activists, And The Revival Of The Labor Movement. Book talk with Jonathan Rosenblum. Download the event flyer. Space is limited; please register for the event. IRLE: 2521 Channing Ave.

Thursday, May 11 | 2-3:30 p.m. “Do Parents Care About School Effectiveness?” with Chris Walters, Economics. 648 Evans Hall.

8th annual UC International Migration Conference on May 13^th (cosponsored by the California Immigration Research Initiative and Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society. You can access the detailed schedule and RSVP here: http://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/undocu2017.

SAVE THE DATE
July 23, 2017. “NIA Workshop on Innovative Issues in Minority Aging Research”: Reversibility and Mutability Research: Approaches to Reducing Health Disparities, a NIA/Resource Centers on Minority Aging Research (RCMAR) Workshop. The RCMAR National Coordinating Center invites you to register for the RCMAR workshop on July 23, 2017. It is held as a preconference session at the 21st IAGG World Congress of Gerontology and Geriatrics meeting located at the Moscone West 747 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94103. The workshop provides a forum for junior and senior researchers to discuss the complex issues and potential benefits of reversibility research. The keynote speaker is Andrea Danese, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and in the Medical Research Council (MRC) Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Other presenters include national leaders in the field. Visit http://www.rcmar.ucla.edu/content/rcmar-preconference for the workshop program and details, or go directly to IAGG’s Preconference Workshop webpage to register.

FUNDING
William T. Grant Foundation – Institutional Challenge Grant encourages research institutions to build sustained research-practice partnerships with public agencies or nonprofit organizations in order to reduce inequality in youth outcomes. To do so, research institutions will need to build the capacity of researchers to produce relevant work and the capacity of agency and nonprofit partners to use research. Equally important, research institutions will need to shift their policies and practices to value collaborative research. Applications are welcome from partnerships in youth-serving areas such as education, justice, child welfare, mental health, immigration, and workforce development. The online application will open on June 15, 2017. All applications must be received bySeptember 12, 2017, 3:00 PM EST. Visit the website for more information: http://wtgrantfoundation.org/grants/institutional-challenge-grant.

Special Issue and Conference on Using Administrative Data for Social Science and Policy – The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Science seeks to highlight the promise of analyzing administrative data for understanding issues around social, political, and economic inequalities, showcasing the unique insights that such data can provide in understanding the causes and consequences of these inequalities, and the effectiveness of programs and policies aimed at redressing these. Abstract Deadline: June 15, 2017. Link for Details.

ANNOUNCEMENTS
Wireless Only Households: The National Center for Health Statistics released updated national estimates of the size and characteristics of the population without landline telephones. In their last data collection (ending December 2016), 50.8% of American homes were wireless-only. Over half. Read the entire report at: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201705.pdf.

CONFERENCES/CALLS FOR PAPERS
The first International Forum on Migration Statistics (IFMS-2018), organized by the OECD, IOM and UNDESA, to take place at the OECD Headquarters in Paris from 15 to 16 January 2018, with a mix of plenary and parallel sessions. It aims to mobilise expertise from a wide range of disciplines – such as statistics, economics, demography, sociology, geospatial science, and information technology – that can contribute to improve global understanding of the migration phenomenon. It will explore innovative ways to measure population mobility and generate timely statistics and aims to create synergies between different actors and perspectives, with representatives from ‘origin’, ‘transit’ and ‘host’ countries of migrants. The Forum will also provide a unique opportunity for policy-makers to get in direct contact with migration data experts and to use their expertise to feed policy evaluations and identify best policy options. The Forum will be organized around the following five themes: (i) Migration measurement (ii) Innovation and synthesis of data sources, (iii) Understanding migration through data, (iv) Cooperation and data governance, and (v) Capacity building. Specific topics and applications could include inter alia (i) global, regional or national monitoring of migration flows and stocks, (ii) identification of migrants’ characteristics or behaviours, (iii) analysis of public opinion on migration, (iv) evaluation of the economic and social impact of migration and remittances in origin, transit or destination countries, (iv) the measurement of integration and well-being outcomes of immigrants and their children or (v) measurement of SDG indicators related to migration and migrants and contribution to the Global Compact on Migration. Proposals for papers and sessions are due 30 June 2017. For additional information on submitting proposals, please visit http://www.oecd.org/migration/forum-migration-statistics/IFMS-2018-Call-for-sessions-and-papers.pdf.

WORKSHOPS AND TRAINING
The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) will host the Health Disparities Research Institute (HDRI) from August 14 – 18, 2017. The HDRI aims to support the research career development of promising minority health/health disparities research scientists early in their careers and stimulate research in the disciplines supported by health disparities science. Applications accepted until May 12, 2017. See https://www.nimhd.nih.gov/programs/edu-training/hd-research-institute.

SPH-sponsored grant-writing workshop: May 9, 12:30pm-1:30pm. 401 University Hall. “Rigor and reproducibility: What does it mean for my proposal?” with Jennifer Ahern, Associate Dean of Research, SPH.

Berkeley Research Development Office workshop schedule for this spring. All sessions in 177 Stanley, 11:30am-12:30pm.
May 11 Session 6 Scientific Writing
May 18 Office hours/Consultations

DATA AND DATA COLLECTION
Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS). One way to gather data from a hard-to-reach population is through RDS, where one develops distributed ‘nodes’ and then through referrals and connections can pool together a sample population from disparate networks. Here are some resources to learn more about this method:
1. The current issue of the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology features a symposium on adaptive and network sampling, focused on a recent Morris Hansen lecture by Steven K Thompson: https://academic.oup.com/jssam/issue/5/1.
2. “Understanding Respondent Driven Sampling from a Total Survey Error Perspective” by Sunghee Leehttp://www.surveypractice.org/index.php/SurveyPractice/article/view/187/html.
3. NORC created an online resource: http://respondentdrivensampling.org/.

ON THE WEB
Congressional District Zip Codes. You can get district – zip code concordance tables by using the excellent, and free, geographic boundary engine “MABLE/Geocorr” at the Missouri Census Data Center: http://mcdc.missouri.edu/websas/geocorr12.html. The output is in easy-to-use plain text, csv, or tab delimited. You can request the proportion of residents in each zip code in each CD (list zipcode as the “Source”), or the percentage of residents in each CD who reside in each zip (list CD as the source). The output can be processed to extract PPS samples since it includes the number of residents. And it includes an allocation proportion so you do not have to calculate that 90% of the residents of a zip are in one CD, and 10% in another.

American Poverty and Inequality: Mark Rank (Washington University in St. Louis) and Thomas Hirschl (Cornell University) have created a new website and set of tools dealing with American poverty and inequality. The focal point of the website is a poverty risk calculator that estimates for the first time the likelihood that an individual will experience poverty at some point in the future. The idea is similar to the heart disease risk calculators that you can find on the Internet. In this case, the data is based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). There is also a discussion guide designed for various groups to further explore different issues around poverty and inequality. The link to the website is https://confrontingpoverty.org/.

GRADUATE STUDENTS
Fall Course Offering: Josh Cohen and Sarah Song will be co-teaching the Workshop in Law, Philosophy, and Political Theory in Fall 2017 ((LAW 210.2, PHILOSOPHY 290-6, POLITICAL SCIENCE 211) with a focus on issues of “citizenship, borders, and immigration.” The workshop has been running every Friday for the last two years and has drawn faculty, students, and visiting scholars from Law, Political Science, Philosophy, Goldman, and the Education School. https://philosophy.berkeley.edu/courses/detail/1067.

D-LAB
Once you’re done with the semester consider expanding your skill set. Dlab sponsors workshops and training in courses, one-on-one consulting for faculty, grad students and undergraduates, and working groups of focuses topics. For more information and registration, visit http://dlab.berkeley.edu.

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.