Tuesday, December 20, 2016

IPUMS Research Award

From IPUMS
We are pleased to announce the 9th annual competition for the best research papers using the IPUMS microdata collection. Papers or publications submitted should utilize IPUMS-USA, IPUMS-CPS, IPUMS-International, NAPP, or IHIS to study social, economic, and/or demographic processes. We are looking particularly for papers that use innovative approaches, comparative analyses, interesting variables, or multiple IPUMS datasets.

Cash prizes will be awarded in two categories:
  • Best published work
  • Best work by a graduate student (published or unpublished)
The deadline for submitting papers or publications is Monday, February 13, 2017Visit the IPUMS Award page for full submission information. 

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

New free resource: IPUMS Higher Ed

From the Minnesota Population Center:
The Minnesota Population Center has released a new data project: IPUMS Higher Ed. IPUMS Higher Ed offers harmonized versions of the surveys incorporated into the NSF Scientists and Engineers Statistical Database (SESTAT).
IPUMS Higher Ed is composed of three National Science Foundation surveys of college degree holders in the United States: the National Survey of College Graduates, the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, and the National Survey of Recent College Graduates. Only the respondents who have a degree in science or engineering (or related fields) or work in a science or engineering occupation are included in the SESTAT file for that year. 
The surveys in IPUMS Higher Ed collect data on education history, labor force status, employer and academic institution characteristics, income, and work activities. SESTAT data have been used previously to study a wide variety of topics, including gender differences in the labor force and the presence of immigrants in the U.S. science and engineering workforce. 
The data can be accessed at no cost at highered.ipums.org.

Monday, November 28, 2016

Census Bureau's My Tribal Area

Preview a new Census Bureau tool called My Tribal Area and give feedback!

The U.S. Census Bureau is excited to release a preview of a new data tool called My Tribal Area. This Web application provides easy access to estimates that detail characteristics of the people, jobs, housing, economy, and educational levels in America's tribal areas and reservations. The estimates come from responses to the American Community Survey over a five-year period, from 2010 to 2014.

My Tribal Area was designed to give you quick and smooth access to information. For example, you can search for tribal areas using a type-ahead search by tribal area name or a drop-down menu to select a particular area in a state. A glossary is available to help you understand how the application defines the types of reservations and tribal areas.

We encourage you to explore this preview of My Tribal Area, and we welcome your comments and suggestions. You can use the feedback form that's available in the app. An updated release scheduled for this winter will make My Tribal Area even more comprehensive, with map images and descriptive legends for each tribal area, as well as estimates that include the years 2011 to 2015.   Be on the look out for our announcement when the full My Tribal Area application is released.
Lumbee SDTSA
Data for the Lumbee SDTSA in North Carolina

Monday, November 7, 2016

Data USA - Visualizing the American Community Survey

Deloitte, Datawheel, and Cesar Hidalgo, Professor at the MIT Media Lab and Director of MacroConnections, have created a Data USA to provide accessible visualizations of American Community Survey, Census data, and other sources of government data. Check out the profile for Greensboro!


Monday, October 31, 2016

Who votes for mayor? Short answer ... very few people

Portland State University has just released a new website called Who Votes for Mayor. Based on a pilot study involving Charlotte and three other cities, it has recently been expanded to 46 cites. Check out their current resources and follow their progress: http://whovotesformayor.org/

Friday, October 28, 2016

Tool for Tracking Federal Agency Article and Data Sharing Policies

From SPARC:

SPARC just released a new resource for tracking, comparing, and understanding U.S. federal agencies’ article and data sharing policies. This free tool combines a new analysis of federal public access plans for sharing peer-reviewed research articles with the federal data sharing policy resource that SPARC launched earlier this year in partnership with Johns Hopkins University Libraries. The resource is available at http://researchsharing.sparcopen.org/

The new article-sharing analysis provides a tool for tracking practical information that can be used by active or prospective grant awardees to understand when, how, and where they need to make their manuscripts accessible, including links to each agency’s submission portal. As with the data-sharing resource, it will be updated as additional federal agency plans are released and analyzed and as current plans are revised.

Friday, October 21, 2016

UNC Dataverse Webinar


Date: Tuesday, October 25, 2016
Time: 11:00 - 12:00pm

As recently announced, the Odum Institute archive has recently upgraded to Dataverse 4. The newly launched University of North Carolina Dataverse offers vast improvements to the user interface, including faceted search and browsing, additional data handling capabilities to ensure long-term data preservation, access and re-use, expanded metadata to support a broader array of disciplinary domains, and integration of innovative data analysis and visualization tools using new API functionality.

The Odum archivists will be hosting a free webinar on October 25th from 11:00am to 12:00pm, which will introduce users and anyone else interested to these new advanced capabilities and the ways in which UNC Dataverse now caters to a greater diversity of researchers seeking data management and sharing solutions.

To join the Webinar, click on this link:  https://global.gotomeeting.com/join/897843805. The webinar will be hosted using GoToMeeting.  Please be sure to download/launch the application prior to the webinar start time.

For more information please contact the Odum Institute archive at odumarchive@unc.edu.

Tuesday, October 4, 2016

Census Workshops at Davis Library, UNC - Open to all!

On November 16th (GIS Day), the Davis Library Research Hub will be hosting Jonathan Schroeder from the Minnesota Population Center (MPC). Attendance is free and open to the UNCG community. See the links below for times and more information.

Attendees will need to pay for parking. There are two visitor parking lots near Davis Library likely to have spaces at the times of these workshops:  the Raleigh Road Lot and the Rams Head Parking Lot.  The rate in these lots is $1.50 / hour.  In addition there are metered spaces along Raleigh Road, South Road and Country Club Drive with two-hour (or more) limits.  

Morning workshop
The National Historical Geographic Information System (www.nhgis.org) provides free online access to summary tables and GIS boundary files for U.S. censuses and surveys going back to 1790. In addition to historical county and state data, NHGIS provides more recent data for all levels of census geography down to tracts and blocks. This workshop will familiarize participants with the breadth and depth of NHGIS resources and demonstrate how to use the NHGIS Data Finder to explore what’s available and download customized extracts.

Afternoon talk
In recent years, NHGIS (www.nhgis.org) has begun releasing time series tables, which link together comparable statistics from multiple censuses in customized downloadable bundles. There are now thousands of time series available, organized into hundreds of tables, mainly covering statistics from the 1970-2010 censuses and the 2012 American Community Survey. The newest tables provide 2000 and 2010 statistics for 2010 census units at 10 geographic levels, including census tracts, block groups, ZIP Code Tabulation Areas, and census places. These tables use an advanced interpolation method to produce high-quality 2000 estimates where boundaries changed between censuses. Work is also underway to provide 1990 estimates for 2010 units. In this talk, I present an overview of current and planned NHGIS time series features, highlighting how they can simplify the measurement and mapping of changes in census data, demonstrating advantages of our interpolation approach relative to others in use, and previewing how we are addressing new estimation challenges as we extend tables to cover more years and subjects.

Thursday, September 29, 2016

Open Data Flint


Open Data Flint
Open Data Flint (ODF), as part of the Healthy Flint Research Coordinating Center (HFRCC) is an open access repository for all kinds of data and data-related resources about the Flint community within the state of Michigan. It is a place to both find data to use and share data for others to use.
Open Data Flint is an open-to-the-community data repository whose aim is to assist the community of Flint, Michigan to:
  • Bring together data to help build the evidence base to achieve a healthier Flint community.
  • Gain a deeper understanding of the far-reaching impact of the water crisis on the Flint population.

Friday, September 16, 2016

New Data and New Features from IPUMS

IPUMS-USA released full count population data sets from the 1930 and 1920 censuses.

Terra Populus launched TerraScope, a new map-based portal for exploring the data in the TerraPop collection. TerraScope lets you see where variables are available, display color-coded maps of area-level data, preview raster data, and more. Read more about this feature on our blog Use it for Good

IHIS released the 2015 NHIS data, along with a new function to attach the characteristics of other family members. IHIS has also released more than 1,000 variables from historical supplements on disability, polio, AIDS, and more.

IPUMS-CPS released revised family interrelationship variables that now identify cohabiting and same-sex partners.

IPUMS-Time Use released 2015 ATUS data via ATUS-X and now makes international time diary data available via MTUS-X.

Monday, August 29, 2016

Free Mapping Online for the US and China - ICPSR Webinar

Free Mapping Online for the US and China
Join ICPSR for a webinar on Sep 19, 2016 at 1:00 PM EDT.
Register now!
This webinar will introduce “Free Mapping Online”, a new online map service distributed by the University of Michigan's Spatial Data Center and the China Data Center as a promotion for the spatial study of the US and China. This web-based spatial system offers tens of thousands of free live maps with data from US and China, including census data, business data, land use data, and nighttime data.

This workshop will discuss the data sources, data access, and options for mapping and outputs. It will show how users can make maps online with their own data (in Excel file) by uploading the data to the server without any GIS tools and experience. It will also discuss future directions for data expansion and sharing.

This webinar is free and open to the public.

Wednesday, August 24, 2016

Quantitative Methodology Series - R workshop at UNCG

The Department of Mathematics & Statistics' Quantitative Methodology Series is kicking off this fall with an Introduction to R workshop. It will be offered Friday, Sept. 2 from 2:00-5:00 pm. For more information and to register: https://www.uncg.edu/mat/qms/  All UNCG faculty, staff, and student researchers are welcome to attend.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

New ICPSR project: Civic Learning, Engagement, and Action Data Sharing (CivicLEADS)

ICPSR is proud to announce the launch of Civic Learning, Engagement, and Action Data Sharing (CivicLEADS). Funded by a grant from the Spencer Foundation, CivicLEADS provides a centralized repository for data produced by the multi-disciplinary research surrounding civic education and action. Beyond facilitating the sharing and discovery of data, CivicLEADS seeks to create a learning community around civic education and engagement research.

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Free webinars through the Center for Open Science

Center for Open Science
Did you know the Center for Open Science offers free, regularly scheduled webinars on open, reproducible research practices?  Some upcoming topics include:
  • How to use the OSF to increase reproducibility and transparency
  • Using open statistical tools like JASP for reproducible analyses
  • Licensing your open content to enable reuse and get credit
  • New statistical practices to increase research rigor and replicability
Our next webinar: OSF 101
Tuesday, August 9, 2016 – 1p - 2p EST

Monday, July 25, 2016

Webinar on The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP): Overview and selected findings about olfaction and sleep

ICPSR is offering the following webinar in August:

The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP): Overview and selected findings about olfaction and sleep
Join us for a webinar on Aug 11, 2016 at 2:00 PM EDT.
Register now!
The National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP) is a longitudinal study of health and social factors among community-dwelling Americans born between 1920 and 1947 as well as a cohort comparison of baby-boomers born 1948-1965. Two waves (2005 and 2010) of data have been collected, with a third wave (2015) currently in the field. In 2005-06, 3,005 in-home interviews were collected, and in 2010-11, the initial respondents were reinterviewed, along with their spouses or cohabiting romantic partners, 3,377 interviews. When completed in 2015-16, the surviving participants and their partners will have been reinterviewed, and the new “baby boomer” cohort added (individuals born 1948-1965 and their spouses or partners), about 4,600 interviews.

NSHAP data enables the study of a wide range of health and social measures, including physical health and illness, frailty, cognitive and sensory function, emotional health, health behaviors, social connectedness, sexuality, and relationship quality. Novel measures include olfactory function, and objective sleep measures for a third of respondents.

Olfactory decline in aging is a prevalent sensory impairment, and our longitudinal data show for the first time in a representative population, that olfactory decline strongly predicts 5-year mortality in older US adults, which is not explained by cognitive decline, physical health, comorbid diseases, or health behaviors.

Sleep data collected in 2010-11 are the first objective sleep data available for a nationally representative sample of the population in the United States. Here we present data that explore the associations between the most commonly reported sleep problems: insomnia symptoms and actigraph sleep features.

Attendees of this webinar will receive an overview of the NSHAP dataset, learn about the power of a decline of sense of smell, and learn about the sleep substudy and how actigraph and survey measures of sleep relate to each other and health.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Tuesday, July 19, 2016

Roper Center's Convention and Elections Resources!

Excited about the upcoming conventions?!  Roper Center has some great polling data about conventions and party issues, especially historical data! Anyone can read their recent articles about public perceptions of conventions over time and the 1968 Democratic Convention. We subscribe to this wonderful resource at UNCG and you can find much more data through our database access.


Friday, April 29, 2016

What's in There? Searching by Variable at ICPSR


Free webinar from ICPSR on Jun 14, 2016 at 12:00 PM EDT.


Register now!
George Alter, Director of ICPSR, will demonstrate strategies for searching more than 4.5 million variable descriptions in ICPSR's Social Science Variables Database, including our new crosswalk between the American National Election Study and the General Social Survey. 

The ICPSR Website allows users to search for variables singly or in groups. The "Compare Variables" feature brings up question text, frequencies, universe and other information, and all searches are linked to ICPSR's dynamic online codebooks. 

The ICPSR variable search, supported by its thorough methods documentation, is an effective tool for those that are: 

• Searching for data with particular questions/content for analysis (for research papers/publishing) 
• Desiring to compare or harmonize data across projects 
• Mining for questions to design research surveys and/or to teach survey design 
--Including the demonstration of the effect of question wording and answer categories on variable distributions and the changes (evolution) in question wording/response categories over time 
• Desiring to deposit research data for curation to enhance data discovery, increase research impact, and demonstrate that federal data sharing requirements have been met. 

This webinar will benefit research scientists, teaching faculty, students, and those assisting these individuals. 

This webinar is free and open to the public. Please share this invitation! 
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.