Benjamin Hartman is a 2016 Summer Diversity Fellow at the MPC. As part of his fellowship, he learned how to take unprocessed data to produce harmonized IPUMS-I data and documentation, make GIS maps, and conduct his own case study investigating the spatial dimensions of internal migration using the Cambodian census. Hartman worked with his colleagues in IPUMS International to create this blog post.
TerraPop recently launched TerraScope, a map-based portal for exploring the data in the TerraPop collection. The TerraPop collection includes census data from over 160 countries around the world, as well as environmental data describing land cover, land use, and climate. With such a broad range of data available, selecting a study area for which data are available to study a particular question or, conversely, determining the types of research questions that can be studied within an area of interest can be challenging.
If you are a student, faculty member, or researcher in the United States, you can learn about IPUMS data through an exhibit or workshop at professional conferences held on multiple occasions each year. Thousands of U.S. demographers, geographers, sociologists, economists, ecologists, health researchers, and others have learned about IPUMS through these events. But what if you are student, teacher, or researcher in Africa, where resources are far less plentiful?
Migration is a valuable adaptation strategy under certain conditions, but when the world’s poorest regions experience crop failures from drought or other climate events, international migration decreases. Why do climate events lead to increased migration in some places, but decreased migration in others?
Over 100 students, faculty, and researchers gathered June 27 and 28, 2016 at the University of Maryland, College Park, for a conference on Time Use Across the Life Course, funded by the Maryland Population Research Center at the University of Maryland and organized by Liana Sayer. Conference attendees came from the United States, Australia, Singapore, England, and Belgium.
An enormous amount of information about the characteristics and activities of ordinary people is just waiting to make its debut for researchers to analyze — two billion people and their households, spanning over 100 countries, from 1703 to the present day. All these data will be available for computer analysis by the general public, for free, by 2018.
As of May 2016, IPUMS-DHS includes over 2000 integrated variables from 90 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 21 countries, and allows researchers to select women, children, or births as their unit of analysis.