Bethel University Professor of History Diana L. Magnuson is documenting the growth of the Minnesota Population Center. Believing that preserving institutional memory is vital, the Center is supporting Magnuson’s work to capture oral histories of past and present MPC faculty and staff. This is the third in a three-part series of oral histories. This post features several senior research staff: Trent Alexander, Sarah Flood, Ron Goeken, Patricia Kelly Hall, Monty Hindman, and David Van Riper.
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.
The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. The awards honor the best published research and best self-nominated graduate student papers of 2015 that used MPC data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.
Associate Professor of History and MPC Faculty Member J. David Hacker made headlines in 2011 when he published a groundbreaking study of the total number of U.S. Civil War dead. Hacker argued that the widely-accepted figure of 620,000 was far too low. Using IPUMS, Hacker showed that the number of dead was at least 750,000—if not more. His article, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War,” published in Civil War History, was introduced by the editors in the issue as “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages.”
Few demographic historians expect attention from mainstream press when they publish their research, but Hacker’s study attracted national interest, including interviews with the New York Times and National Public Radio.