mpcblog The Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation hosted its first ever Student Poster Extravaganza of May 1.
This poster session featured research from two MPC faculty-led courses that trained graduate and undergraduate students in quantitative analysis, MPC’s College of Liberal Arts Freshman Interns, and MPC Graduate Trainees in Population Studies (who come from PhD programs in several colleges and departments).
Don’t be a square—rectangularize!
Introducing…the option to rectangularize down for extracts in IPUMS Time Use and IPUMS MEPS.
What do we mean by “rectangularize”?
When reading the newspaper, you may come across articles discussing U.S. housing, the labor market, family structure, the life course, or population change. Chances are good that IPUMS provided the data underlying these stories. Consider the following stories, published in the Washington Post in March 2019.
IPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best published research and self-nominated graduate student papers from 2018 that used IPUMS data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.
IPUMS, developed by and housed at the University of Minnesota, is the world’s largest individual-level population database, providing harmonized data on people in the U.S. and around the world to researchers at no cost.
You may have noticed that the search tool for all IPUMS microdata projects has a new look.
If not, you might also be the kind of person who doesn’t notice when your significant other gets a major haircut. Really, it’s fine. You are probably so busy admiring our dazzling data that you can barely notice the search tool. Now, however, is the time when we point out that we do have a new search tool, and you can fawn over it while we enthusiastically gush about the new options for basic or advanced search!
Professor Kathryn Grace (geography) is providing a unique opportunity for students to conduct independent research this semester through a brand-new course, “Applied Quantitative Methods Using Survey Data.” In the course, which is open to both graduates and undergraduates, students develop a research question related to global health and, using IPUMS PMA or IPUMS DHS data, learn the steps for answering it.
As some of you may have noticed, the IPUMS Forum just had a major reimagining. Maybe it was the cabin fever of a particularly snowy Minnesota February, or maybe it was the faceless stare of our old forum’s default avatar, but something was telling us it was time for a change. And this is a big change. Not only does the forum have a snazzy new look, but it also comes with a new set of features. No more struggling to attach documents and images, no more accidentally submitting a question twice, no more faceless avatar judging you with their perfect side-part and prominent jaw line, and did I mention emojis!?!?! Best of all, this new forum is built with discussion in mind (the company that built the platform is even called Discourse). Where the old forum was a fairly rigid, question/answer framework, this new forum encourages conversation by allowing follow-up replies, relating topics to one another, and did I mention EMOJIS??!!!
Seriously haunting.