Events

Seminar Series

The DuPRI Seminar Series, which meets weekly, is a format that allows the Duke community to hear cutting edge research from nationally and internationally renowned scholar and serves as a forum for interdisciplinary exchange.

There are no upcoming seminars at this time.

Past Seminars

Trade in Migrant Labor: Inter-Organizational Ties and Employer Recruitment During an Economic Downturn

SaunJuhi Verma, Duke University

ABSTRACT: To explain the pattern of labor migration to western nations research has examined supply side factors of migrant characteristics, their familial networks, and wage differentials of sending countries, these studies of immigration focus on periods of economic growth. However, my multi-site ethnography consisting of 97 interviews with U.S. guest workers, oil industry employers, and Indian labor brokers reveals that employer sponsored labor migration to the United States continues during the economic downturn. The study evaluates sponsorship of foreign workers in a period of high domestic unemployment to address the question: why does recruitment of low wage foreign labor continue during periods of economic stasis? Findings indicate industry-driven migration as the primary source of facilitating migrant entry into the U.S. labor market, in which the business interests of U.S. employers, in soliciting highly skilled, yet low-wage, manageable foreign workers, and migration industry service providers, in expanding market share by catering to employer demand, coalesce to establish business networks that reduce the costs of labor recruitment; in doing so these migratory circuits sustain transnational migration. Introducing the new empirical mechanism of industry-driven migration builds upon existing theories by highlighting the role of formal business ties in perpetuating migrant entry into western labor markets, particularly during economic downturns.
May 02, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library 218  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Inequality: Cooperation, Kinship and Witchcraft in Mpimbwe, Tanzania

Monique Borgerhoff Mulder, University of California-Davis

ABSTRACT: While the causes, transmission and consequences of material and social inequality are well studied in the social sciences, the ways in which people respond to inequality are less clear. As evolutionary social scientists we know that humans show a strong aversion to inequality, but we have little understanding of how individuals respond behaviourally to disparities in material, social and relational wealth. In this talk I present data from the Pimbwe, a Bantu forager-horticulturalist population in Tanzania undergoing rapid social change and escalating material inequality, to show how both witchcraft accusations and social networks of exchange are patterned by wealth differences. Specifically cooperation among unrelated and related individuals is least pronounced amongst the wealthiest individuals. This observation is used to start theorizing how inequities might favor or disfavour cooperation. A better understanding of such dynamics is important, given the escalating levels of inequality worldwide, consequential on the neoliberal policies associated with globalization.
April 18, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 139 LaBarre  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Increasing Inequality in Parent Incomes and Children's Completed Schooling: Correlation or Causation?

Greg Duncan, University of California-Irvine

ABSTRACT: It is well known that income inequality increased dramatically in the United States beginning in the 1970s. Reardon (2011) documents a correspondingly large increase - of close to .50 standard deviations - in the test score gap between children in low and high income families over the same period. This paper shifts the focus from achievement to attainment, as measured by years of completed schooling, and tracks changes in income inequality and educational attainment between children born into low- and high-income households in the U.S. between 1954 and 1985. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and concentrating on the cohorts whose adolescent family income were measured between the late 1960s and late 1990s, we find that the schooling gap between high and low income children grew by half a year (about one-quarter standard deviation). We attempt to account for the increase in the schooling gap by changing gaps in family income and other demographic factors (single parenthood, parent education, family size and age of mother at birth). We also estimate changes in the relative importance of income and these other demographic factors for children's completed schooling.
April 04, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Health Shocks and Natural Resource Management: Evidence from Western Kenya

Harsha Thirumurthy, Carolina Population Center at UNC

ABSTRACT: Poverty and altered planning horizons brought on by the HIV/AIDS epidemic can change individual discount rates, altering incentives to conserve natural resources. Using longitudinal data from household surveys in western Kenya, this paper estimate impacts of health status on labor productivity and discount rates. The findings indicate that household size and composition are predictors of whether the effect on productivity dominates the discount rate effect, or vice-versa. Since households with more and younger members are better able to reallocate labor to cope with productivity shocks, the discount rate impact dominates for these households and health improvements lead to greater levels of conservation. In smaller families with less substitutable labor, the productivity impact dominates and health improvements lead to greater environmental degradation.
March 28, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Approaches to Understanding the Impacts of Poverty Alleviation on Child and Adult Health

David Rehkopf, Stanford & UC Berkeley

ABSTRACT: Low income has long been associated with worse child and adult health for certain outcomes, but the extent and direction of causal association has been controversial, with many thorough analyses and reviews suggesting little to no true causal association. While progress on this topic has been made using some quasi-experimental studies and instrumental variables to estimate effects, many approaches have been limited in their generalizability to policy. The impacts of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which have been well characterized in terms of economic effects, offer a window into understanding how an actual anti-poverty and work policy impacts child and adult health. I will present results from two different approaches that seek to understand both long and short-term consequences of the income benefits and work incentives that have resulted from the Earned Income Tax Credit. The first approach utilizes lagged and fixed characteristics with longitudinal data to estimate impacts while avoiding bias due to selection into treatment. With the second approach I attempt to identify immediate and short-term impacts based on the fact that most recipients receive their credit soon after the first of the calendar year. Finally, I will also present more descriptive, exploratory evidence for heterogeneity of effects of the program based on individual demographic characteristics and contextual characteristics of region of residence.
March 21, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Using Twitter for Demographic and Social Science Research: Tools for Data Collection

Hedwig Lee, University of Washington

ABSTRACT: Despite widespread success in using Twitter data to explain what people are doing or talking about, little attention has been paid to developing systematic ways of gathering demographic information from this data source. This paper develops a scalable, sustainable toolkit for social science researchers interested in using Twitter data to examine behaviors and attitudes, as well as understand the populations expressing them. We begin by describing how to collect Twitter data on a particular population ¿ in this case, individuals who did not plan to vote in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. We then describe and evaluate a method for processing data to retrieve demographic information reported by users that is not encoded as text (e.g., details of images) and assess the reliability of these techniques. We end by assessing the challenges of this data collection method and discussing how large-scale social media data may benefit demographic researchers.
March 07, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Contraception and Demography: Strange but Productive Bedfellows

Amy Tsui, Johns Hopkins University

This is a jointly sponsored event with the Carolina Population Center. The seminar will be held at the University of North Carolina. It will be held at the Pleasants Family Assembly Room at Wilson Library, UNC-Chapel Hill campus.
February 28, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Chapel Hill N.C.  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Ambient Temperature During Gestation and Cold-related Adult Mortality in a Swedish Cohort, 1915-2002

Tim Bruckner, University of California-Irvine

ABSTRACT: For all climatic regions, mortality due to cold exceeds mortality due to heat. A separate line of research indicates that lifespan after age 50 depends on month of birth. This research as well as literature documenting developmental plasticity and culling in utero implies the hypothesis that ambient temperature during gestation may influence cold-related adult mortality. We use data on over 13,500 Swedes to test whether subjects whose mothers experienced unusually benign ambient temperatures during their gestation exhibit an elevated risk of cold-related mortality in adulthood. We linked instrument-based, daily temperatures to subjects beginning at their estimated date of conception and ending at death or the end of follow-up. We specified a counting process Cox proportional hazards model to analyze the two leading causes of cold-related death in adulthood: ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke. We find an increased risk of IHD death during cold spells among adults whose mothers experienced relatively warm ambient temperature during pregnancy. We, however, observe no relation for stroke mortality. The IHD findings indicate that ambient temperature during gestation¿independent of birth month¿modifies the relation between cold and adult mortality.
February 21, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Climate Variability & Migration: Some Evidence from Thailand

Sara Curran, University of Washington

ABSTRACT: In analysis of longitudinal data about migration behavior in rural northeastern Thailand, we examine the association of migration behavior with patterns of NDVI signals to estimate exposure to non-modal clusters over varying periods of retrospective time. Our hazard model approach indicates significantly different associations between rural out migration and return migration depending on the length of the temporal lens. We offer explanations for our findings in a review of literature about risk and rural livelihoods and evidence from several forays into the field to collect qualitative data.
February 14, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Educational Achievement in Comparative Perspective

Donald Treiman, UCLA

ABSTRACT: We carry out an analysis of societal variations in the process of educational attainment using a multilevel modeling strategy to assess how societal modernization, educational expansion, social inequality, a world-wide secular trend toward greater equality of opportunity, and communist educational policies affect the dependence of educational attainment on parental status and the gender gap in educational attainment. Using data from 541 sample surveys conducted in 54 countries, we define five-year birth cohorts ranging from the late 19th century through the late 20th century. We first estimate a micro-level model of the determinants of years of school completed in each of the 661 ¿contexts¿ (created by crossing cohort by country) for which we have adequate data. We then treat the coefficients derived from the micro-models as variables in a meta analysis, predicting variations in the size of the coefficients (the effects of social origins and gender and the size of the intercept) from macro-social features of each context. We test various hypotheses derived from arguments as to why educational reproduction and the effect of gender should be reduced by educational expansion but reinforced by educational inequality and as to why the level of education should increase and the gender gap diminish with societal modernization and over time, and we assess several claims regarding the impact of communism on equality of educational opportunity.
February 07, 2013  |  3:30 AM to 5:00 AM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Why People Migrate: The Diverse Mechanisms of Mexico-US Migration

Filiz Garip, Harvard University

* Note: Seminar will be in Soc / Psych 329 at 1:00pm on Friday.
January 25, 2013  |  1:00 PM to 2:30 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: None
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The Effects of Local Violence on Children's Cognitive Functioning and Academic Performance

Patrick T. Sharkey, New York University

ABSTRACT: How does living in a violent environment "get into the minds" of children to affect them as they engage in daily life at home and in school? The research I will discuss develops new methods to identify the causal effect of exposure to incidents of extreme violence in children's neighborhoods. By exploiting the timing of events that occur in children's neighborhoods, this research examines how violence affects children's cognitive functioning, their ability to maintain attention and control impulses, and their performance in school.
January 17, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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The Deterioration of Divorce Statistics, the Rise of Divorce, and the Impact of Cohabitation on Union Dissolution, 1980-2011

Steven Ruggles, University of Minnesota

ABSTRACT: This paper critically evaluates available data on divorce and the dissolution of cohabiting unions. We find that both vital statistics and retrospective survey data on divorce after 1990 are deeply flawed, and have greatly underestimated recent marital instability. These flawed data led many analysts to conclude that divorce risk has been stable or declining for the past three decades. Using new data from the American Community Survey and controlling for changes in the composition of the married population, we conclude that there was actually a substantial increase in divorce risk between 1990 and 2008. Divorce rates have declined over the past two decades among persons under 30, but have increased among those over age 35. The post-war baby boom generation has had consistently high divorce rates from the outset, and as this generation ages we expect that overall divorce rates will begin to decline in coming decades. Lower divorce among persons born since 1980 may reflect increasing selectivity of marriage. Even among the youngest cohorts, however, the decline in divorce risk is more than offset by the increasing number of dissolutions of cohabiting unions. Thus, divorce risk has risen sharply in recent years, but if current trends continue it will level off and begin to decline over the next few decades. Nevertheless, we expect that overall union instability will continue to increase because of the rise of cohabitation.
January 10, 2013  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Systems of Care and Systems of Corrections: Spillover Effects from Incarceration to Health Care

Jason Schnittker, University of Pennsylvania

Incarceration research catalogues its direct negative impact on former inmates and their families, though the effects of punishment clearly spill over to affect broader economic and political institutions as well. To further expand the scope of incarceration research, this study examines spillover effects between state-level incarceration rates and the functioning of the U.S. health care system. Using a large individual-level data set matched to state-level data, we find that individuals residing in states with a larger number of former prison inmates have diminished access to care, less access to specialists, reduced physician trust, and less satisfaction with the care they receive, net of a variety of individual-level control variables. These spillover effects are deep in the sense that they affect even those least likely to be personally affected by incarceration, including the insured, those over 50, women, non-Hispanic whites, and those with incomes far exceeding the federal poverty threshold. These effects establish the intersection of systems of care and corrections, linked by financial and administrative mechanisms. These intersections lead to spillover effects of unusually wide breadth.
December 06, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Health and Aging in Malawi: Evidence from the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health

Hans-Peter Kohler, University of Pennsylvania

Hans-Peter Kohler, Ph.D. is currently the Frederick J. Warren Professor of Demography in the Department of Sociology, and a Research Associate in the Population Studies Center at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focuses on fertility and health in developing and developed countries. A key characteristic of this research is the attempt to integrate demographic, economic, sociological and biological approaches in empirical and theoretical models of demographic behavior. Professor Kohler has widely published on topics related to fertility, health, social and sexual networks, HIV/AIDS, biodemography and well-being in leading scientific journals, and his work has had substantial influence on policy and media discussions related to demographic change. He is currently the principal investigator of the Malawi Longitudinal Study of Families and Health and the Chair of the Graduate Group in Demography at the University of Pennsylvania.
November 29, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Early-Life Poverty and Awakening Cortisol in Adolescence: Examining Cumulative Exposure and Timing

Michael McFarland, Princeton University

The deleterious effects of poverty vis-à-vis mental and physical health are routinely argued to operate, at least in part, via dysregulation of the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis; although empirical examinations connecting poverty with HPA axis functioning are rare. The timing of poverty represents a particularly neglected aspect of this relationship. This study utilizes prospective data from the Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to test how the timing of and cumulative exposure to poverty are associated with awakening cortisol (N=826). I found that among females, poverty exposure in both infancy and adolescence was negatively associated with awakening cortisol. Moreover, while cumulative exposure was initially found to be negatively associated with awakening cortisol, its effects were explained by the timing of exposure. Poverty exposure was unrelated to cortisol among males. The implications regarding cumulative exposure and timing as well as windows of vulnerability to poverty are discussed.
November 15, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini

Linear Social Networks Models

Steven Durlauf, University of Wisconsin

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social networks models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise in that it links identification analysis to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop a Bayes-Nash equilibrium analysis for interdependent decisions under incomplete information in networks that produces linear strategy profiles of the type conventionally used in empirical work and which nests linear social interactions models as a special case. We consider identification of both contextual and endogenous social effects under alternative assumptions on the a priori information on network structure available to an analyst and contrast the informational content of individual-level and aggregated data.
November 01, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Understanding Heterogeneous Effects of Health Policies Using a Gene-Environment Interaction Framework

Jason Fletcher, Yale University

This paper describes how using a gene-environment interaction framework may allow us to understand why health policies often work on some people but not others. A motivating example focuses on tobacco taxation policies in the US. The reduction in tobacco use as a result of taxation has been considered one of the most important public health successes in the past century. However, individuals continue to smoke at high rates and there is evidence of substantial heterogeneity in the responses to taxation. One of the key determinants of tobacco use is genetic susceptibility, yet important policies to reduce tobacco use have not successfully merged this risk factor in targeting interventions. I extend the standard economic framework that has evaluated tobacco taxation effects by presenting the first evidence in the literature that specific genetic polymorphisms moderate the effects of taxation on tobacco consumption. The evidence suggests that taxation only affects smoking participation decisions of individuals with a specific genotype¿a polymorphism of a nicotinic receptor gene¿and has no effect on others.
October 25, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Informing Public Health Approaches to Obesity and Smoking with Genome-Wide Association Studies: Genetic Epidemiology Affirms the Importance of Early Prevention

Daniel Belsky, Duke University

Rapid advances in technology and scientific methods stimulated by the sequencing of the human genome have yielded discoveries that begin to uncover the genetic roots of common chronic health conditions. The implications of these discoveries for population health science remain unclear. Three questions central to translating genetic discoveries to population health research are (1) What are the magnitudes of risks that can be predicted using genetic information? (2) Do genetics provide new information over and above family history? And (3) When in the life course do genetic risks become manifest? We address these questions for the cases of obesity and smoking. We use data from the Dunedin Study, a 4-decade longitudinal study of a population-representative birth cohort, along with public-access GWAS databases from studies of cardiometabolic disease and addiction. Results reveal novel insights into the meaning of genetic risk for population health research and bring genetics to bear on policy approaches to intervention in public health.
October 18, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Estimating Second Order Probability Beliefs from Subjective Survival Data

Robert Willis, University of Michigan

Based on subjective survival probability questions in the Health and Retirement Study, we use an econometric model to estimate the determinants of individual-level uncertainty about personal longevity. This model is built around the Modal Response Hypothesis (MRH), a mathematical expression of the idea that survey responses of 0, 50 or 100 percent to probability questions indicate a high level of uncertainty about the relevant probability. We show that subjective survival expectations in 2002 line up very well with realized mortality of the HRS respondents between 2002 and 2010. We show that the MRH model performs better than typically used models in the literature of subjective probabilities. Our model gives more accurate estimates of low probability events and it is able to predict the unusually high fraction of focal 0, 50 and 100 answers observed in many datasets on subjective probabilities.
October 04, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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New Estimates of Mortality Trajectories at Extreme Old Ages

Leonid Gavrilov & Natalia Gavrilova, NORC-University of Chicago

A growing number of persons living beyond age 85 underscore the need for accurate measurement and modeling of mortality at advanced ages. This is also very important issue for making correct forecasts of population aging and related demands for medical services and social support. Earlier studies indicate that exponential growth of mortality with age (Gompertz law) is followed by a period of mortality deceleration with slower rate of growth. This study challenges earlier conclusions with new data and estimates. In this study we used U.S. cohort survival data for people born in the same calendar year. For this purpose we obtained data from the U.S. Social Security Administration Death Master File to estimate hazard rates for 15 single-year extinct birth cohorts born in 1881-1895. We found that mortality deceleration is far less pronounced when it is measured for shorter monthly age intervals rather than for traditional annual intervals. To find out why does it happen we have made a simulation study and found that traditional measures of hazard rate (like the Nelson-Aalen hazard rate estimate) underestimate mortality force at extreme old ages (underestimation bias) when death rates are exceptionally high. We also found that mortality deceleration is far less pronounced when datasets with higher data quality (age reporting) are analyzed.
September 27, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Foreclosure Rates, Neighborhood Disorder, and Health

Kate Cagney, University of Chicago

Little is known about the health effects of the economic downturn, with foreclosure one of its most visible signs. Research in economics suggests that the impact of an economic downturn is first felt through emotional well-being. Hence we explore onset of depression over the interval of the economic downturn with a unique data source, the National Social Life Health and Aging Project (NSHAP). Fortuitously NSHAP wave 1 was collected in 2005-2006 and wave 2 in 2010-2011, bounding the economic downturn and foreclosure crisis. We link these data with national foreclosure data to examine the effect of neighborhood foreclosure rates on depression onset. We observe a dramatic uptick in reports of depressive symptoms among older adults who were exposed to communities most severely impacted by the foreclosure crisis. Older residents in neighborhoods with high rates of foreclosure may need additional supports to maintain community residence and withstand the effects of the economic downturn.
September 20, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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The Paradoxical Origins and Radical Consequences of America's War on Immigrants

Douglas Massey, Princeton University

In a very real way, the rise of undocumented migration and the growth of America's undocumented population are a product of poorly conceived immigration and border policies, which in the course of a few decades transformed Mexico-U.S. migration from a stable, circular flow of male Mexican workers going to three states into a much larger settled population of Mexican families living in 50 states. During the late 1950s the United States was providing opportunities for half a million Mexican migrants to enter the United States legally each year, 450,000 as temporary workers and 50,000 as permanent residents. In 1965, however, the temporary worker program was eliminated and permanent resident visas were capped, ultimately at just 20,000 per year by 1976. The resultant rise of illegal migration offered political and bureaucratic entrepreneurs an opportunity to frame Mexican migration as a threat to American society and the immigrants themselves as lawbreakers, criminals, and most recently terrorists. The demonization of Mexican immigrants set off a chain reaction of events that ultimately yielded a massive increase in both border and internal enforcement, which transformed the circularity, demography, and geography of Mexico-U.S. migration.
September 13, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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PAA Annual Meeting: Practice Presentation Session

Sarah Fuller (PubPol), Sowmya Rajan (Soc), and Poh Lin Tan (PubPol)

We have reserved the last DuPRI slot on Thursday, April 26 for a practice session for students presenting at PAA this year during the regular DuPRI time slot. We hope there will be a critical mass of faculty in addition to other students to provide feedback on the presentation. For all three students, this will be the first PAA presentation.
April 26, 2012  |  3:00 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Rubenstein Hall 200  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Throwing the Baby out with the Drinking Water: Unintended Consequences of Arsenic Mitigation Efforts in Bangladesh

Erica Field, Duke Economics

The 1994 discovery of arsenic in ground water in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health effort to test all tubewells in the country and convince nearly one-quarter of the population to switch to arsenic-free drinking water sources. According to numerous sources, the campaign was effective in leading the majority of households at risk of arsenic poisoning to abandon backyard wells in favor of more remote tubewells or surface water sources, a switch widely believed to have saved numerous lives. We investigate the possibility of unintended health consequences of the wide-scale abandonment of shallow tubewells due to higher exposure to fecal-oral pathogens in water from arsenic-free sources.
April 19, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Building Healthy Communities: The Built Environment and Social Relations

Katherine King, Duke Sociology

TBA
April 12, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Credit Constraints and the Racial Gap in Post-Secondary Education in South Africa

David Lam, University of Michigan

This paper analyzes the impact of baseline household income and scholastic ability on post-secondary enrollment in South Africa. Using longitudinal data from the Cape Area Panel Study (CAPS), we analyze the large racial gaps in the proportion of high school graduates who enroll in post-secondary education. Our results indicate that baseline income and ability (measured in CAPS¿ literacy and numeracy evaluation) are strong predictors of post-secondary enrollment and statistically account for all of the black-white difference in enrollment.
April 05, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Exploring the Construct of Allostatic Load within a Social/Psychological Model of Health

Teresa Seeman, UCLA

This presentation will focus on a program of research that seeks to identify and better understand the multiple biological pathways through which social factors impact on trajectories of aging. Major social factors of interest include the broad impact of socio-economic status as well as the influence of patterns of social interaction with others (including both the positive and negative features of such interactions and their respective impacts on physiology). Drawing on data from both population-based studies as well as laboratory-based research, the presentation will illustrate the cumulative body of evidence supporting a model wherein such social factors impact major health outcomes not via one or another specific biological pathway but rather through their cumulative influence on multiple biological regulatory systems ¿ consistent with the model of allostatic load.
March 29, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Weathering the Storm: The Effects of Hurricanes on Birth Outcomes in Texas

Janet Currie, Princeton University

A growing literature suggests that stressful events in pregnancy can have negative effects on birth outcomes. Some of the estimates in this literature may be affected by small samples, omitted variables, endogenous mobility in response to disasters, and errors in the measurement of gestation, as well as by a mechanical correlation between longer gestation and the probability of having been exposed. We use millions of individual birth records from Texas to examine the effects of exposure to hurricanes during pregnancy. The data allow us to measure outcomes precisely and to follow the same mother over time; we also suggest estimation methods that correct for omitted unobserved fixed characteristics of the mother, endogenous moving in response to storms, and the above mentioned correlation between gestation length and exposure. We find that exposure to a hurricane during pregnancy increases the probability of complications of labor and delivery, and of abnormal conditions of the newborn such as being on a ventilator more than 30 minutes and meconium aspiration syndrome. Although we do not directly measure stress, our results are supportive of the idea that stressful events in pregnancy can damage the health of the fetus. However our results suggest that the effects may be subtle and not readily apparent in terms of widely-used metrics such as birth weight and gestation.
March 22, 2012  |  3:25 PM to 4:55 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Population Change and Economic Inequality: Theory and Evidence on Two Proximate Influences

Parfait Eloundou, Cornell University

Past macro-level research linking population and economic development has emphasized national averages. Studies in this vein focus on national fertility rates and age structure (on the population side) and average per capita incomes or national school enrollments for instance (on the economic side). As a complement to this literature, our research draws attention to population influences on economic differentiation, both within and between countries.
March 15, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Endogenous Selection Bias

Felix Elwert, University of Wisconsin

Selection bias is a central problem for causal inference in the social sciences. Quite how central a problem it is, however, is often obscured by ambiguous terminology, needlessly technical presentations, and narrow rules of thumb. This paper uses directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) to advance a precise yet intuitive global definition of endogenous selection bias and argue its theoretical and practical centrality for causal inference. The paper clarifies the fundamental structural difference between confounding and endogenous selection, shows that nearly all non-parametric identification problems relate to either confounding or endogenous selection, and argues that the problem of endogenous selection is indifferent to timing. Perhaps most importantly, we illustrate the importance of endogenous selection bias with numerous and varied examples from empirical research in sociology.
March 01, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Climate Change and Local Environmental Stress on Migration in Nang Rong, Thailand

Sara Curran, University of Washington

Scholars point to climate change, often in the form of more frequent and severe drought, as a potential driver of migration in the developing world, particularly in populations that rely on agriculture for their livelihoods. To date, however, there have been few large-scale, longitudinal studies that explore the relationship between climate change and migration. This study significantly extends current scholarship by evaluating distinctive effects of slow onset climate change and short-term extreme events upon different migration outcomes. Our analysis models the effect of the environment--as measured by Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and the occurrence of El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events¿on labor and return migration to Nang Rong. Our preliminary findings indicate that reduced vegetation health is associated with higher rates of labor migration and lower rates of return migration. Dry El Nino periods have the same effects on migration as NDVI, whereas wet La Nina periods are associated with lower labor migration and higher return migration.
February 24, 2012  |  1:00 PM to 2:30 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Exposure to Violence During Childhood is Associated with Telomere Erosion from 5 to 10 Years of Age: A Longitudinal Study

Idan Shalev, Duke Psychology and Neuroscience

There is increasing interest in discovering mechanisms that mediate the effects of childhood stress on late-life disease morbidity and mortality. Previous studies have suggested one potential mechanism linking stress to cellular aging, disease, and mortality in humans: telomere erosion. We examined telomere erosion in relation to children¿s exposure to violence, a salient early-life stressor which has known long-term consequences for well-being and is a major public health and social-welfare problem.
February 16, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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The Relationships between Work, Retirement, Health, and Private Insurance in Later Life

Ben Kail, Duke Center for Population Health & Aging

Since the twilight of the 20th century, the era of a normative, discrete, and permanent retirement at age 65 has begun to wane. For many, it has been replaced with heterogeneous pathways to final retirement. In this emergent retirement life course, the relationships between work and health have important implications for the lives that older workers and retirees are able to live. One factor that may play an important role in this process is access to private insurance coverage. In this talk, Kail will review findings from his recent work on the relationships between work, retirement, health, and insurance coverage during this emergent landscape of work and retirement.
February 09, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Duke Doctoral students Ryan Brown and Wendy Brynildsen share presentations

Ryan Brown & Wendy Brynildsen

This seminar will be co-presented by two Duke Doctoral students. Ryan Brown (Economics) will present his talk titled "The Intergenerational Impact of Terror: the Extended Reach of the 9/11 Tragedy", and Wendy Brynildsen (Sociology) will be presenting her talk "The Structure of Support: How Social Convoys Shape the Mental and Physical Health of U.S. Women and Men".
February 02, 2012  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Social Networks & Health: The Power of Connectivity

Tom Valente, USC

Dr. Valente will discuss the field of social network analysis and introduce several key hypotheses that show how networks influence behavior. He will present data from individual and community level studies on adolescent smoking, substance use, community coalitions, physician behavior, and transnational policy change among others. He will also present a taxonomy of network-based interventions and explore the utility of using social network data for accelerating the diffusion of innovations.
December 08, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Mortality Attributable to Obesity: Controversies, Evidence, and Challenges

Neil Mehta, Emory University

Prior estimates of the magnitude of the association between obesity and mortality have varied widely and have been a source of ongoing debates and controversies. Some prior studies have indicated that mortality attributable to obesity rivals that of cigarette smoking, while other research points toward a more modest role for obesity. In my talk, I will review prior controversies and discuss relevant methodological challenges pertinent to estimating obesity risks. I will present selected evidence from my prior work on this topic. I will also discuss new collaborative research on measuring the contribution of obesity to international differences in longevity.
December 01, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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CANCELLED: Linear Social Networks Models

Stephen Durlauf, Univ. of Wisconsin

This paper provides a systematic analysis of identification in linear social networks models. This is both a theoretical and an econometric exercise in that it links identification analysis to a rigorously delineated model of interdependent decisions. We develop a Bayes-Nash equilibrium analysis for interdependent decisions under incomplete information in networks that produces linear strategy profiles of the type conventionally used in empirical work and which nests linear social interactions models as a special case. We consider identification of both contextual and endogenous social effects under alternative assumptions on the a priori information on network structure available to an analyst and contrast the informational content of individual-level and aggregated data.
November 16, 2011  |  3:45 PM to 5:15 PM  |   Social Sciences 111  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini

The Final Inequality: Variance at Age of Death

Shripad Tuljapurkar, Stanford University

There has been great interest in one dimension of mortality change, aggregate human life expectancy. I focus on a distinct dimension, the variance in the age at adult death. I explain why this measure matters, discuss historical trends in this variance, and compare trends across countries. I discuss the relationship between the pattern of adult death and socioeconomic inequalities, in factors such as education and income, using data from the US. Finally I examine the sources of variance in the context of models of the life cycle.
November 10, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Rubenstein Hall 200  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Lasting Welfare Effects of Widowhood in a Poor Country

Dominique vandeWalle, World Bank

Little is known about the situation facing widows and their dependent children in West Africa especially after the widow remarries. Women in Malian society are vulnerable to the loss of husbands especially in rural areas. Households headed by widows have significantly lower living standards on average than male or other female headed households in both rural and urban areas; this holds both unconditionally and conditional on observable household and individual characteristics including age. Furthermore, the adverse welfare effects of widowhood appear to persist even after widows are absorbed into male headed households. An examination of individual measures of well-being further reveals that, relative to other women, worse outcomes for ever-widowed women persist through remarriage. These detrimental effects are passed on to children, indicating an intergenerational transmission of poverty stemming from widowhood.
November 03, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Rubenstein Hall 200  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

On Presenting and Interpreting a Response Rate: Lessons from Double Samples of Non-respondents

Herbert Smith, Univ. of Pennsylvania

Good survey practice requires the computation and presentation of the response rate for the realized sample. The response rate is an indicator of the potential bias associated with sample-specific estimates of population parameters, but it is only an indicator, since the extent of bias due to non-response also hinges on the differences in the population between respondents and non-respondents. This latter quantity is oft-surmised but rarely known, and in practice reactivity to response rates is generally a gestalt, with summary assessments on the order of "too low" or "good enough". Following a survey with any degree of non-response, a second (double) sample can be taken from among the initial non-respondents, and used to measure and/or adjust for bias.
October 27, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Birth Spacing and Sibling Outcomes

Kasey Buckles, Univ. of Notre Dame

A large body of work in economics and other disciplines has investigated the relationship between family structure- including birth order, family size, and sibling composition- and children's outcomes. However, the age difference between siblings (spacing) has received much less attention in the economic literature, despite the fact that child spacing "may well be the most important aspect of fertility differentials in low-fertility societies" (Wineberg and McCarthy 1989). In this paper, we investigate the effects of birth spacing on one important later-life outcome: academic achievement as measured by performance on the Peabody Individual Achievement Tests for math and reading.
October 20, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Perkins Library 217  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Forms and Dynamics of Religiosity in the U.S. Adolescent Population

Lisa Pearce, UNC

In this talk, Pearce will highlight key findings from her book A Faith of Their Own: Stability and Change in the Religiosity of American Adolescents, coauthored with Melinda Lundquist Denton (Clemson). Drawing on debates over the definition and operationalization of religiosity in the sociology of religion, Pearce and Denton offer a revised view of religiosity as a person-based, or categorical variable, rather than a low-to-high continuous concept. Using survey and semi-structured interview data from the first two waves of the National Study of Youth and Religion, Pearce and Denton describe five general forms of religiosity in the U.S. adolescent population, and track transitions between these forms during adolescence.
October 13, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
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Why Do Women Live Longer Than Men? An Integrative Social and Biodemographic Approach to Explaining Sex Differences in Longevity

Yang Yang

That women live longer than men may be a well-known phenomenon. But why women live longer than men is much less well understood. I first briefly review the state of knowledge about sex differences in mortality and identify gaps in this knowledge. It is useful to revisit the old but powerful hypothesis that biology plays a role. The question is how. I lay out a framework of research that integrates biology into social demographic models and population research. I focus on an initial set of questions in this framework concerning the physiological mechanisms underlying sex differences in mortality and their interconnections with social processes and present findings from three studies, including sex differences in the age trajectories of physiological dysregulation, post-reproductive change in sex mortality gap, and social relations, physiological pathways, and mortality.
September 30, 2011  |  1:00 PM to 2:30 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Multiphasic Responses to Environmental Change in the Amazon: A Case Study of Fertility, Migration and Land Use Change

William Pan, Duke University

In this presentation, the Multiphasic Response model is used as a foundation for understanding the relationship between land use change (agricultural development), fertility and human migration in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Davis' 1963 Theory of Multiphasic Response proposed that individuals and households recognize the need to change demographic behavior to avoid declines in standards of living and to take advantage of economic opportunities. Novel to Davis' argument was that people will respond to external economic dynamics both sequentially and simultaneously, hence the term multiphasic.
September 22, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Diverging Longevity: the Relative State of U.S. Health and Mortality

Eileen Crimmins, Univ. of Southern California

In 1950 men and women in the United States had a combined life expectancy of 68.9 years, the 12th highest life expectancy at birth in the world. Today, life expectancy is up to 79.2 years, yet the country is now 28th on the list, behind the United Kingdom, Korea, Canada, and France, among others. This presentation examines patterns in international differences in life expectancy above age 50 and assesses the evidence and arguments that have been advanced to explain the poor position of the United States relative to other countries. Gaps in measurement, data, theory, and research design and pinpoint areas for future high-priority research in this area will be discussed along with health factors and life-style choices commonly believed to contribute to the observed international differences in life expectancy.
September 15, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

Immigration Enforcement Policies, the Economic Recession, and the Size of Local Mexican Immigrant Populations

Emilio Parrado, Univ. of Pennsylvania

There is growing evidence that local conditions, particularly economic considerations, shape the geographic dispersion of immigrant groups. Yet our understanding of the impact of local variation in public policies on immigrants internal settlement patterns remains rudimentary. This paper takes advantage of local area variation in immigration policies and economic conditions to estimate their unique impact on changes in the size of local Mexican immigrant populations between 2007 and 2009. Specifically, we relate the implementation of the 287(g) program, which involves local authorities in immigration control and changes in employment patterns by industry and education level to changes in the size of the Mexican immigrant population after the 2007 recession.
September 08, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Brian Vicini
For more info on this speaker and/or to schedule a meeting click HERE

The Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign and Russia's Mortality Crisis

Grant Miller, Stanford University

Political and economic transition is often blamed for Russia's 40% surge in deaths between 1990 and 1994 (the "Russian Mortality Crisis"). Highlighting that increases in mortality occurred primarily among alcohol-related causes and among working-age men (the heaviest drinkers), this paper investigates a different explanation: the demise of the 1985-1988 Gorbachev Anti-Alcohol Campaign. We use archival sources to build a new oblast-year data set spanning 1970-2000 and find that: (1) The campaign was associated with substantially fewer campaign year deaths, (2) Oblasts with larger reductions in alcohol consumption and mortality during the campaign experienced larger transition era increases, and (3) Other former Soviet states and Eastern European countries exhibit similar mortality patterns commensurate with their campaign exposure.
April 14, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"The Limits of Genocide: An Attempt at a Credibility Interval on the Khmer-Rouge Death Toll"

Patrick Heuveline, UCLA

Extant estimates of the number of deaths that resulted from the Khmer-Rouge ruling of Cambodia range from half a million to over three million excess deaths--a huge range considering that the country's total population size was about 8 million at the outset of the Khmer-Rouge regime. In this presentation, I describe this unsatisfactory range and investigate whether it can be narrowed with either new data or a better approach. I introduce three new sources of data and discuss uses of the demographic reconstruction method, which several researchers have already applied to this estimation problem. In particular, I explore the uncertainty inherent to the estimates derived by this method and suggest using it in a stochastic framework to generate a distribution of death toll estimates and credibility intervals around the median or "best" estimate.
April 07, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

Measuring Meaningful and Predictive Cognitive Functions: Can Cognitive Neuroscience Help?

Margaret Sheridan, Harvard Medical School

Executive functions are a suite of related cognitive functions that allow one to hold in mind goal relevant information and exclude from mind goal irrelevant information. Based on clinical and neuroimaging studies cognitive neuroscientists believe that these functions are central to the performance of goal directed behavior. In this talk I will describe my research investigating the assessment of these abilities in the laboratory and associations with individual difference variables during development and preliminary evidence that these abilities may be shaped by the developmental environment.
March 17, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Network Sampling with Memory" - Co-Sponsored with Duke Network Analysis Center (DNAC)

Ted Mouw, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Sampling from a network using a random walk based approach such as Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) is difficult because the sample can get stuck in isolated clusters of the network, reducing precision. In this paper we propose an alternative strategy Network Sampling with Memory (NSM) that uses social network data collected from respondents to increase the efficiency of the sampling process. The approach is simple: rather than interviewing a friend of the current case as in RDS or a random walk, NSM randomly selects the next person to interview from among the individuals who have been nominated once¿and only once by the most recently interviewed cases. We test our approach on simulated data and on 30 large, university-based social networks from Facebook. While RDS has an average design effect of 2.3 for these 30 university networks, NSM has an average design effect of 1.01 i.e., the same standard error as random sampling when network data is collected on 20 friends per respondent.
March 03, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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"The Health impact of workplace policies related to work/family demands: the interaction of demographic change and labor policy "

Lisa Berkman, Harvard University

Populations across the globe are experiencing demographic transitions related to aging, migration and women joining the paid labor force. In spite of these major demographic transitions, work places policies and practices have not often been responsive to such demographic changes, especially in the United States. Health may be impacted by the mounting demands experienced by many workers, especially among women in low wage occupations. Findings related to these demographic transitions are presented. In addition, recent findings from a study of low wage employees are discussed. The findings from this study indicate there may be a link between workplace organization and health especially as it relates to cardiovascular and metabolic disease risk.
February 24, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Rubenstein Hall 200  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"How Genes Influence Life Span: The Biodemography of Human Survival"

Anatoli Yashin, Duke University

The results of recent evaluations of genome wide association (GWA) studies of complex phenotypic traits, including age at disease onset or life span, showed that such traits are typically affected by a large number of "small-effect-low-significance" alleles, which were excluded from further analyses in traditional GWA studies. In this talk we show that the joint influence of such genetic variants on human life span can be substantial and highly statistically significant. The dependence between life span and the number of such genetic variants can be approximated by "genetic-dose life span response" relationship. The results are replicated in independent populations. This new finding encourages revision of current methods of genetic analyses of life history traits.
February 17, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"The 1918 U.S. Infuenza Pandemic as a Natural Experiment, Revisited"

Ryan Brown, Duke University

"Douglas Almond's use of the 1918 U.S. influenza pandemic as a natural experiment led to the seminal works on the subject of in utero health's impact on later life outcomes. The identification strength and clarity of his work, though, is driven by the inherent natural experiment supposition of random assignment. By using data from the 1920 and 1930 U.S. census, this study investigates this keystone assumption and shows that the families of the "treatment" cohort used by Douglas Almond were significantly less literate and economically prosperous than the families of the "control" group. The first order effect of parents' education and wealth on a child's long-run SES and health conditions eliminates Almond's ability to make direct inference on fetal health's impact on one's long-term well being using the 1918 U.S. influenza pandemic."
February 10, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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"Quantifying the role of sexual selection and kin selection in the evolution of aging"

Jacob Moorad, Duke University

Aging is an evolutionarily labile trait that is likely shaped by a diversity of sources of natural selection. Two such mechanisms are sexual selection, or selection caused by competition among members of one sex for reproductive access to members of the other, and kin selection, which can be thought of selection arising from associations between fitness and social interactions. While various models have been used to argue for (or against) their importance in the evolution of aging, strategies for direct measurements of these selective forces are lacking. I will discuss my efforts to extend phenotypic selection methods to study populations with age structure. I will illustrate my findings thus far by describing sources of selection that have acted to promote post-reproductive female survival in a 19th century population of humans from the Western United States.
February 03, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Homeownership, Race, and Socioeconomic Inequality: Trends in the Tenure Divide"

Ryan Finnigan, Duke University

There are indications that the mean difference in socioeconomic status between homeowners and renters has been increasing in recent decades, and that these trends vary by race and ethnicity. This paper examines the roles of changes in the distribution of household demographic characteristics, the effects of those characteristics on the probability of being a homeowner, and local housing market characteristics in producing this apparent growth in inequality. The paper focuses on racial/ethnic differences in these trends, and concludes with theoretical implications for homeownership as a salient dimension of social stratification.
January 27, 2011  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lectures/Conferences  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

Parental incarceration, child homelessness, and the invisible consequences of mass imprisonment

Christopher Wildeman, Yale

The share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since the early 1980s, but the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in these shifts by considering the effects of recent paternal and maternal incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These are the only data that simultaneously (1) represent a contemporary cohort of the urban children most at risk of homelessness, (2) establish appropriate time-order between recent parental incarceration and child homelessness, and (3) include information about prior housing. Results show substantial effects of recent paternal (but not maternal) incarceration on the risk of child homelessness. Furthermore, these effects are concentrated among black children.
December 02, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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"Gender, Bargaining Power, and Migration Decisions in Mexican Families"

Jenna Nobles, University of Wisconsin

The prevailing model of migration in transitioning countries conceives of a risk-diversifying household in which members share a coherent set of preferences about the departure of one or more members to work elsewhere. Several decades of ethnographic research have questioned the applicability of this model by revealing the importance of gender hierarchies in family decisions. Some scholars argue that, in many contexts, women have little role in determining the migration behavior of spouses and other family members. We reconsider both models using data from two longitudinal surveys collected in Mexico. We show that Mexican households are heterogeneous in terms of women's decision-making authority and control over resources and that this variation is correlated with the emigration of household members to the United States. Further, a randomized, policy-related increase in women's control over household resources is negatively correlated with the migration of her spouse and children.
November 18, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Evaluation: Lessons Learned for the Uncontrolled World"

Siân Curtis, UNC

The Global Health Initiative (GHI), President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI) and other global health programs are putting increasing emphasis on evaluation and learning to ensure that investments in global health are effective and achieve desired outcomes. At the same time, there is a growing debate in the evaluation literature on the most appropriate methods to assess the effectiveness, efficiency and impact of health interventions in real world situations. There are significant methodological, logistical, and political challenges to implementing evaluations of programs in practice that limit design options and mean that traditional experimental or quasi-experimental designs often are not feasible resulting in a need for alternative practical yet scientifically rigorous approaches.
November 11, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"The Multigenerational Demography of Social Mobility"

Rob Mare, UCLA

Most demographic research on intergenerational processes focuses on the associations between the numbers and characteristics of individuals in successive generations, and ignores multigenerational (Non-Markovian) aspects of intergenerational mobility. These aspects include both the net effects of grandparents and early ancestors on individuals and also other types of path-dependent sequences of family characteristics. The importance of multigenerational effects may be greatest among the very poor and the very wealthy, and raises the possibility that our standard approaches to the study of social mobility are excessively governed by the perspective of the late 20th Century middle class. Both Markovian and Non-Markovian views of social mobility are further complicated by the interdependence of mobility and differential fertility, mortality, migration, and marriage.
November 04, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Know Your Network: A concurrency reduction intervention"

Martina Morris, University of Washington

There is now consensus that concurrent partnerships increase transmission of infectious diseases in sparse networks -- like HIV in sexual partnership networks. Empirical research is accumulating that supports the hypothesis that concurrent sexual partnerships are one of the key drivers of the hyper-epidemics of HIV in some populations in Eastern and Southern Africa. The next step is intervention developmnet. This presentation reports on an NIH-funded pilot project of a concurrency reduction intervention. The project employed community based participatory research methods, and was demonstrated to be feasible and acceptable. It is also inexpensive and easily brought to scale. The plans for a community randomized trail will be discussed.
October 28, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

Group Based Trajectory Modeling Extended to Account for Non Random Subject Attrition

Dan Nagin, Carnegie Mellon

This paper reports on an extension of group-based trajectory modeling to address non-random subject attrition or truncation due to death that varies across trajectory groups. The effects of the model extension are explored in both simulated and real data. The analyses of simulated data establish that estimates of trajectory group size as measured by group membership probabilities can be badly biased by differential attrition rates across groups if the groups are initially not well separated. Differential attrition rates also imply that group sizes will change over time which, in turn, has important implications for using the model parameter estimates to make population-level projections. Analyses of longitudinal data on disability levels in a sample of very elderly individuals support both of these conclusions.
October 21, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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"Bio-Ancestry and Social Construction of Racial Identity"

Guang Guo, UNC

We have demonstrated a close match between self-reported race and bio-ancestry estimated from survey responses and 162 genetic ancestral informative markers drawn from 2,065 racially and ethnically diverse U.S. college students. Allowing each individual to belong to one and only one ancestral population, 99.3%, 94.7%, and 97.7% of self-reported whites, blacks, and East Asians, respectively, were classified into the white, black, and East Asian categories. The STRUCTURE algorithm, which assumes up to three ancestries for each individual, extends the close match to self-reported multi-racial individuals.
October 14, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Racial and Ethnic Diversity, Immigration, and Changing Interracial Marriage, 1980-2008"

Zhenchao Qian, Ohio State

This paper uses newly-released data from 2008 American Community Survey (ACS), along with the similar microdata from the 1980 decennial census, to examine recent changes in interracial marriage. The 1980-2008 period brought rapid increases in interracial marriage between whites and African Americans, slower increases in observed marriages between whites and Hispanics, and an end to the long-term rise in marriages between whites and both Asian Americans and American Indians. Marriages between natives and the foreign-born, however, increased dramatically over 2000-2008, especially among U.S. born Asians and Hispanics. The empirical results also are consistent with the paradoxical conclusion that group boundaries are nevertheless breaking down.
October 07, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

"Early origins of disadvantage: Maternal stress, birth weight and educational outcomes"

Florencia Torche, NYU

A growing body of research highlights that in-utero conditions are consequential for individual outcomes throughout the life cycle, but research assessing causal processes is scarce. This paper examines the effect of one such condition "prenatal maternal stress" on birthweight, an early outcome shown to affect cognitive, educational, and socioeconomic attainment later in life. Exploiting a major earthquake as a source of acute stress and a difference-in-difference methodology, I find that maternal exposure to stress results in a significant decline in birthweight and an increase in the proportion of low birthweight. This effect is focused on the first trimester of gestation, and it is mediated by reduced gestational age rather than by factors affecting the intra-uterine growth of term infants. The findings highlight the relevance of understanding the early emergence of unequal outcomes and of investing in maternal wellbeing since the onset of pregnancy.
September 30, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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"Insiders and outsiders: Does forbidding sexual harassment exacerbate gender inequality?"

Daniel Chen, Duke University Law School

This paper tests an insider-outsider model of harassment and involuntary unemployment. We exploit random assignment of appellate judges to three-judge panels and the fact that a judge's gender and party of appointment predict outcomes in sexual harassment litigation to demonstrate a causal relationship between appellate decisions creating precedent in sexual harassment law and subsequent labor market outcomes. Consistent with an insider-outsider model of involuntary unemployment, forbidding sexual harassment encouraged entry of outsiders and reduced gender inequality along the dimensions of quantity, price, and quality, but these ameliorative effects on gender inequality are reduced for women previously in the labor force.
September 23, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea
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Kick-Off Meeting with Graduate Students Interested in Population

DuPRI Faculty

DuPRI Seminar Kick-Off. Reception to announce upcoming seminars which will allow the Duke community to hear cutting edge research from renowned scholars and will serve as a forum for interdisciplinary exchanges.
September 16, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:00 PM  |   Social Sciences 113  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Jean Bethea

Early Life Family and Socioeconomic Conditions and Cause-Specific Mortality in Finland

Irma Elo, University of Pennsylvania

We studied the relationship between early life socioeconomic status, household structure and adult all cause and cause-specific mortality in Finland among cohorts born in 1936-1950. We found significant associations between early life social and family conditions on all cause mortality as well as mortality from cardiovascular diseases, lung cancer and alcohol related diseases, accidents and violence, with protective effects of higher childhood SES varying between 10% and 30%. These associations were mostly mediated through adult educational attainment and other socio-demographic characteristics, suggesting that the indirect effects of childhood socioeconomic and family conditions were more important than their direct effects. The results imply that long-term adverse health consequences of disadvantaged early life social circumstances may be mitigated by investments in educational and employment opportunities in early adulthood.
April 22, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Erwin Square Mill 103  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Young all their lives? Aging in wild primates

Susan Alberts, Duke University

The pace of aging in human societies has been of considerable interest to scientists and social scientists, and although some captive animal models for aging have been developed, no comprehensive studies of aging in wild animals have ever been conducted. Here we use data for both sexes from a 37-year longitudinal study of a wild baboon population to document patterns aging and place them within a life history context for this species, a primate relative of humans that evolved in the same savannah habitat as humans did. We examine the patterns and pace of reproductive aging, including birth rates and reproductive hormones for both sexes, and compare reproductive aging to age-related changes in several other traits. Reproductive senescence occurs later in baboon females than males. Delayed senescence in females relative to males is also found in several other traits, such as dominance status and body condition, but not in molar wear or glucocorticoid profiles.
April 08, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"What should statisticians be saying about Respondent Driven Sampling?

William Whipple Neely, University of Washington

Respondent-Driven Sampling is an innovative sampling technique that has recently gained considerable popularity as a method for studying "hidden" and "hard-to-reach" populations. Furthermore, the RDS methodology comes with strategies that, it is claimed, make it possible to compute estimates of population-level characteristics and for constructing confidence intervals for such estimates. Yet despite the widespread use of RDS, there remain serious questions about the statistical validity of the methodology. This talk will explore the kinds of assumptions made in order to justify the claims of the current RDS methodology and the scientific issues that the method raises. In particular we will discuss the risks of drawing population-level inferences when these assumptions fails and whether or not there are better options for studying hidden and hard-to-reach populations.
April 01, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Investigating the role of stress and immune function in health disparities"

Jennifer Beam Dowd, Hunter College (CUNY)

While socioeconomic gradients in health are well established, the biological mechanisms underlying these associations are not well understood. This talk will provide an overview of recent work investigating how latent infections may link social factors, stress, and disease.
March 25, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning
View Paper 1  |  View Paper 2

"The Impact of Regulations on the Supply and Quality of Care in Child Care Markets," co-authored with Mo Xiao

Joe Hotz, Duke University

One of the most notable and consequential recent trends in the U.S. labor force has been the rise of the labor force participation of women, especially women with young children, rising from 33.2% of mothers with children under age of 6 in 1977 to 58.3% in 2005. The increasing use of nonparental child care has led to a policy interest in insuring the quality and safety of these market-supplied services. One response has been for government to regulate the market for nonparental child care services. In particular, states impose standards on aspects of the production of child care services that are thought to improve their quality. In this study, we estimate the impact of child care regulations on the supply side of the child care mar¬ket. We find that the imposition of regulations that establish minimum standards on the inputs of child care centers reduces the number of center-based child care establishments operating in local markets, especially in lower income markets.
March 18, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Manoj Mohanan, Duke University

The first project develops and implements an innovative method of measuring quality of care in a developing country context by using Simulated Standardized Patients. The second project is a recently funded impact evaluation of state-run voucher programs for obstetric care in India.
March 04, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Yong Cai, UNC

This study challenges the conventional wisdom that attributes fertility and its local variation in China as functions of government's birth planning policy. The study compares fertility in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, two of the most developed provinces in China, to examine the relationship between socioeconomic development and low fertility in a global context. My analysis demonstrates that although low fertility in China was achieved under the government's restrictive one-child policy, structural changes brought by socioeconomic development and ideational shifts accompanying the new wave of globalization must have played important roles in China's fertility reduction.
February 25, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Michael Kremer, Harvard University

This paper provides experimental evidence on the relationship between education and early fertility in a developing country. We exploit experimental variation in the cost of education for a cohort of 18,000 students in Western Kenya. In 163 schools randomly selected from among 328, students enrolled in grade 6 at baseline (2003) received free uniforms for the last three years of primary schools (from 2003 to 2005). We find that girls in those schools were 2.4 percentages point less likely to drop out of primary school by 2005, and 4.5 percentage points more likely to have graduated from primary school by 2007. The effects persisted after the end of the education subsidy: at the end of 2007, when most of these adolescents had left school, girls in the treatment group were still 2.6 percentage points (8 percent) less likely to have started childbearing.
February 18, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Amar Hamoudi, Duke University

(joint work with Jennifer Beam Dowd) We proceed to analyze relationships between individuals' health status in 2006 on the one hand, and the run-up in housing values in their communities over the previous decade or more. The outcomes we analyze include stress-related indicators like blood pressure and incident cardiovascular disease, as well as weight-for-height and waist circumference, measures of emotional and psychological well-being, expectations for the future, self-reported generalized health status, performance on cognitive tests, health-seeking behavior, and specific disease conditions. Subject to our identifying assumption, the observed relationships can be interpreted as "causal" in the sense that nearby communities experiencing slower run-ups in housing prices represent a valid counterfactual comparison group for communities that experienced more rapid run-ups.
February 11, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Bob Hauser, University of Wisconsin

Many studies have found a positive relationship between cognitive ability, as measured in childhood or youth, and subsequent survival, and several explanations of this have been offered, ranging from the idea that low ability is an indicator of adverse systemic events in infancy or childhood to the idea that high cognitive functioning is required continuously to maintain health and reduce threats to survival. The Wisconsin Longitudinal Study reproduces the basic finding that adolescent cognitive ability (IQ) is positively correlated with survival from ages 18 to 69, but there is a straightforward explanation of the relationship: High school grades account completely for the relationships between IQ and survival and have a much larger effect on survival than does IQ. That is, higher cognitive functioning improves the chances of survival because it leads to behaviors that are well organized, timely, and situationally appropriate.
February 04, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Biodemography of Human Ageing"

James Vaupel, Duke University

Mortality is being postponed at older ages. This finding, documented in 1994 and bolstered since, is a fundamental discovery about the biology of human ageing, a discovery with profound implications for individuals, society and the economy. Remarkably, the rate of deterioration with age seems to be constant across individuals and over time: it appears that death is being delayed because people are reaching older ages in better health. Research by demographers, epidemiologists and other biomedical researchers suggests that further progress is likely to be made in advancing the frontier of survival (and healthy survival) to higher and higher ages.
January 21, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Sanford Rhodes Conference Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Add Health Grows Up: Social, Behavioral, and Biological Linkages Across the Life Course"

Kathy Mullan-Harris, UNC

This talk will present the theoretical foundations, study design, and research findings of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, or Add Health. Add Health is a national representative study of more than 20,000 adolescents in 1995 who have been followed over time through their transition to early adulthood. The most recent wave of data collection in 2008 expanded collection of biological data to study social, behavioral, and biological linkages in health and developmental trajectories in young adulthood. Based on the new data, a profile of the current health and social status of young adults in their 20s and early 30s in America will be presented, as well as preliminary results on how health tracks from adolescence to adulthood and is a marker for social stratification in adulthood.
January 14, 2010  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Maximizing the Effectiveness and Efficiency of HIV and STI Interventions"

Geoffrey Garnett, Imperial College London

(joint with DGHI) - Garnett is Professor of Microparasite Epidemiology at Imperial College London. His main area of research is the epidemiology and control of sexually transmitted infections. His recent work has focused on the potential impact of HPV vaccines, the epidemiological consequences of antiretroviral treatments and the evaluation of HIV Prevention programs. As Chair of the UNAIDS Reference Group on Estimates, Models and Projections, Professor Garnett played a part in developing the methods used in HIV surveillance globally.
December 03, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   John Hope Franklin Center 240  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Family Disruption in Sweden: New Possibilities and Preliminary Results from Administrative Registers"

Elizabeth Thomson, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Nordic data registers are a source of longitudinal life histories for entire populations. Particularly problematic for family scholars is the fact that no register exists for cohabiting partnerships. A new database, Sweden in Time: Activities and Relations (STAR), includes information to estimate cohabitation, and thus separation of cohabiters, when partners have a child together. Although the registers have some gaps and inconsistencies, they provide estimates of non-union and non-marital births, as well as parental separation, that are reasonably consistent with estimates from survey data. Preliminary analyses show the well-established negative association between maternal education but provide little evidence of increasing educational differentials in the context of the 1990s economic crisis.
November 12, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Consider the Possiblities!" Ethnography and Collaborative Family Research Opportunities at DuPRI

Linda Burton, Duke University

SSRI at Duke University currently houses two of the largest longitunal ethnographic datasets on poverty and family life in the country: Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-City Study and the Family Life Project. In this presentation, I will describe the datasets in great detail and discuss opportunities for secondary analysis of these data and for research collaborations which might involve integrating ethnographic and survey data analysis.
November 05, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Extended Cohort-Component Approach for Households Projection at Sub-National Levels

Yi Zeng, Duke University

This paper discusses the five core ideas of the extended cohort-component method known as ProFamy for simultaneously forecasting of family households, living arrangements and population. Employing the ProFamy method, this paper demonstrates that household forecasting at the state (or provincial) level requires: (1) a census or a large survey micro data file, (2) national standard schedules of the age-sex-specific demographic rates, and (3) projected summary measures of fertility, mortality, marriage/union formation and dissolution, and migration. After the forecasts for the parental state wherein the sub-state area is located are done, forecasts of households of various types and sizes for a sub-state area can be produced based on a census or a large survey micro data file and the widely recognized ratio trend extrapolation methods.
October 29, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"The Great Migration and Mortality of African Americans"

Magda Muszynska and Seth Sanders, Duke University

Two inextricably linked phenomena lie at the heart of African American social history in the twentieth century: The first is "black-white economic convergence" that accompanied the decline in discriminatory barriers and narrowing of the black-white gap in human capital. The second is "the great migration" - the movement of millions of African Americans from the South to the North, Midwest, and West. This talk will examine Black white differences in earnings within specific locations. It will also look at how place of birth effects black-white differences in mortality.
October 22, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"An NICHD Perspective on the Development of Research Linking the Population Sciences to Global Health Issues"

Susan Newcomer, NIHD

(joint with DGHI and CFAR0) - The Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of SSRI, is dedicated to the conceptual unification of the demographic sciences. We host a regular Thursday afternoon speaker series presenting innovative research during the academic year that all members of the Duke community are invited to attend.
October 08, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Neighborhood Gentrification"

Terra McKinnish, University of Colorado Boulder

(joint talk with Economics) - The Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of SSRI, is dedicated to the conceptual unification of the demographic sciences. We host a regular Thursday afternoon speaker series presenting innovative research during the academic year that all members of the Duke community are invited to attend.
October 01, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Social Sciences 139 LaBarre  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Seeing or Believing: 1st vs. 3rd Person Perspectives on Racial Identification

Anthony Perez, UNC-Chapel Hill

(joint talk with Sociology) - Race is most often conceptualized as a characteristic that defines populations based on shared physical appearance, but in social research, race is measured by self-reported identities, which are subject to political and cultural forces as well as personal preferences. Since external measures of race are not included in most observational data sets, the consequences of relying on self-reported data to determine the size and characteristics of race/ethnic sub-populations remain unexamined. This paper take steps to address these limitations by exploring findings from a recently collected, first-of-its-kind data set containing independent, third-person measures of "observed race" for nearly 10,000 high school seniors in Washington State.
September 18, 2009  |  1:00 PM to 2:00 PM  |   Sociology-Psychology 329  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

"Causes of Lagging Life Expectancy at Older Ages in the United States"

Sam Preston, University of Pennsylvania

Life expectancy in the United States fares poorly in international comparisons, primarily because of high mortality rates above age 50. One explanation is a poor performance by the health care system. We find that, by standards of OECD countries, the US does well in terms of screening for cancer, survival rates from cancer, survival rates after heart attacks and strokes, and medication of individuals with high levels of blood pressure or cholesterol. We conclude that the low longevity ranking of the United States is not likely to be a result of a poorly functioning health care system. In the second part of the paper, we argue that the history of heavy cigarette smoking in the United States is a major factor in its poor ranking.
September 10, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning

Assessing the Significance of Period and Cohort Effects in Hierarchical Age-Period-Cohort Models, with Applications to Trends in Verbal Ability, Voting in Presidential Elections, and Health

Ken Land, Duke University

The Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), an affiliate of SSRI, is dedicated to the conceptual unification of the demographic sciences. We host a regular Thursday afternoon speaker series presenting innovative research during the academic year that all members of the Duke community are invited to attend.
September 03, 2009  |  3:30 PM to 5:30 PM  |   Perkins Library Breedlove Room  |   Lecture/Talk  |  Contact: Courtney Packard Orning