IPUMS Announces 2020 Research Award Recipients

IPUMS research awardsIPUMS is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. These awards honor the best-published research and nominated graduate student papers from 2020 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.

There are six award categories, and each is tied to the following IPUMS projects:

  • IPUMS USA, providing data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and IPUMS CPS from 1850 to the present.
  • IPUMS International, providing harmonized data contributed by more than 100 international statistical office partners; it currently includes information on 500 million people in more than 200 censuses from around the world, from 1960 forward.
  • IPUMS Health Surveys, which makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey (MEPS).
  • IPUMS Spatial, covering IPUMS NHGIS and IPUMS Terra. NHGIS includes GIS boundary files from 1790 to the present; Terra provides data on population and the environment from 1960 to the present.
  • IPUMS Global Health: providing harmonized data from the Demographic and Health Surveys and the Performance Monitoring and Accountability surveys, for low and middle-income countries from the 1980s to the present.
  • IPUMS Time Use, providing time diary data from the U.S. and around the world from 1965 to the present.

Over 2,500 publications based on IPUMS data appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide last year. From these publications and from nominated graduate student papers, the award committees selected the 2020 honorees.

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New survey data from IPUMS PMA allows for exploration of factors in child nutrition status

By Devon Kristiansen

Last month, when IPUMS PMA released data from nine countries, including the most recent person level and service delivery point level surveys on family planning, we also released data on a new topic for Performance Monitoring for Action (PMA) – nutrition.  PMA conducted two survey rounds each in Burkina Faso and Kenya (2017 and 2018) in both in people’s homes (households) and where they received care and medical services (service delivery points).  Household surveys contained questions about the diet and nutritional status of children under 5 and women between 10 and 49 years, antenatal care and advice received by currently or recently pregnant women, and other household and demographic questions.  Service delivery points were surveyed for medical equipment and services relating to malnutrition and anthropometric monitoring.

A key factor for nutrition status of young children in the low and middle-income country (LMIC) context is incidence of diarrhea.  Diarrhea prevents the uptake of nutrients into the child’s body and causes dehydration. According to the World Health Organization1, diarrhea is the leading cause of malnutrition and second leading cause of death for children under 5 globally.  A well-established association in the nutrition literature is the presence of livestock on the homestead and incidence of diarrhea in young children, due to fecal contamination of water and food sources2, 3.

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