2008-09 Friday Seminars, Research Methods Workshops, and Research Ethics Seminars

All seminars are held from 12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m. unless otherwise noted.

Spring 2009

**CPC Research Ethics Seminar**
January 23
Overseeing Data Editing: Diversity, Deference, and the Division of Labor
Dr. Erin Leahey, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Arizona
Room 405 CPC East

January 30
Coupled Human-Natural Systems along the Equator: Examples from the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Galapagos Islands
Dr. Stephen Walsh, UNC-CH Professor of Geography and CPC Faculty Fellow
Room 405 CPC East

February 6
Aggregation Problems
Dr. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, Associate Professor of Demography, University of California Berkeley
Room 405 CPC East

Abstract: The 19th century astronomer and population scientist Adolphe Quetelet famously quipped: "all across France women think that they are making free choices about when to marry. And they all marry at age 21." Of course, Quetelet was exaggerating the degree of uniformity in marriage, but like all exaggerations, this one had a kernel of truth. Vital rates—rates of birth, death, and change in civil status—are remarkably stable within given populations from year to year, and startlingly different between populations, a fact that Durkheim made famous. No one commits suicide because fewer people than average have done so in this calendar year; no one has an unwanted pregnancy in order to offset the thwarted intentions of the infertile. And yet, rates of suicide remain flat, and (at least in some countries) observed births match the desired number of births almost exactly. How does this aggregation happen? This paper explores the seeming emergence of population regularities out of individual variability through two analyses. First, I examine fertility intentions and birth rates across 30 countries with a recent DHS. I will argue that fertility is indeed high in countries where women want many children, but that this association is not the result of individual women achieving specific high-fertility intentions. Instead, there are systematic forces—institutional, discursive, and sometimes coercive—that act to synchronize aggregate intentions with aggregate outcomes. Second, I examine the inversion of the gradient of diabetes and asthma on income moving from within-country to across-country analyses. Within countries, it is the most disadvantaged who have the highest rates of diabetes and asthma; however, it is the richest countries that have the highest rates of these same diseases. Here the issue is not that a correlation appears at the aggregate level out of non-correlation, but rather that its direction is reversed. Also, individual intentions are not at issue here. For these reasons, the gradient of diabetes and asthma on income provides an alternative way of thinking through and against Quetelet’s famous dictum.

**CPC Research Ethics Seminar**
February 13
Striving for Central IRB Support for Multisite Studies
Dr. Debbie Gipson, UNC-CH Associate Professor of Medicine and Pediatrics
Room 405 CPC East

February 20
From Middle to Upper Class Sprawl: Changing Patterns of Suburbanization in the United States
Dr. Thomas Rudel, Professor of Human Ecology, Rutgers University
Room 405 CPC East

February 27
Tsunami-Induced Displacement in Sumatra, Indonesia: Were Older Adults More Vulnerable?
Dr. Clark Gray, CPC Postdoctoral Scholar
Room 405 CPC East

March 20
Modeling Food-Sharing Networks in Lamalera, Indonesia: Distance, Kinship, and Reciprocity
Dr. David Nolin, CPC Postdoctoral Scholar
Room 405 CPC East

Abstract: Seemingly altruistic behaviors such as food sharing pose an evolutionary conundrum: they benefit the recipient at the expense of the donor. Behaviors like food sharing are therefore of interest to evolutionary anthropologists because of what they can tell us about the nature of human cooperation more generally. This paper presents a social network analysis of between-household food-sharing relationships in a fishing and whaling village in southeast Indonesia. Exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) was used to test hypotheses derived from evolutionary ecology about the adaptive nature of human food sharing. The results show that kinship, residential propinquity, and reciprocal sharing from a potential recipient household all strongly increase the probability of sharing to that household. Controlling for network density, reciprocal relationships between households explain almost three times the variance in the sharing network that kinship and residential distance explain individually, and all three together account for over half the residual variance in the network. Reciprocity is more common among residentially and genealogically close households. The results show support for two hypotheses (reciprocal altruism and kin selection) though additional patterns of sharing remain to be explained.

March 27
Popularity Trajectories and Substance Use in Early Adolescence
Dr. James Moody, Associate Professor of Sociology, Duke University
Room 405 CPC East

**Carolina Population Center Special Lecture Series on Global Population Aging Issues**
April 3
Families, Households, and Health and Well-being in Later Life: European Perspectives
Dr. Emily Grundy, Professor of Demographic Gerontology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, University of London
Room 405 CPC East

**CPC Research Methods Workshop**
Tuesday, April 14
Models for the Analysis of Spatial Temporal Data
Dr. C. Suchindran, UNC-CH Professor of Biostatistics and CPC Faculty Fellow
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Room 405 CPC East

**Carolina Population Center Special Lecture Series on Global Population Aging Issues**
April 17
Late Life Urban Versus Rural Health Discrepancies in China's Beijing Municipality: An Active Life Expectancy Approach
Dr. Zachary Zimmer, Professor of Sociology, University of Utah
Room 405 CPC East

**Carolina Population Center Special Lecture Series on Global Population Aging Issues**
April 24
Transfers of Money and Time Among Adult Family Generations: Patterns across European Welfare Regimes
Dr. Martin Kohli, Professor of Sociology, European University Institute
Room 405 CPC East

The fall 2009 series will begin on September 11.

Fall 2008

September 5
Genetic Propensities, Social Contexts, and Health Behaviors
Dr. Guang Guo, UNC-CH Professor of Sociology and CPC Faculty Fellow
Room 405 CPC East

September 12
Add Health Design and New Data from Wave IV
Dr. Kathleen Mullan Harris, UNC-CH James Haar Distinguished Professor of Sociology and CPC Faculty Fellow
and
Dr. Carolyn Halpern, UNC-CH Associate Professor of Maternal and Child Health and CPC Faculty Fellow
Room 405 CPC East

September 19
Cumulation Processes in the Life Course
Dr. Angela O'Rand, Duke University Professor and Chair of Sociology
Room 405 CPC East

CPC Research Ethics Seminar
September 26
Navigating the Perils of Plagiarism, Copyright and Fair Use: Academic Integrity and Intellectual Property
Dr. Ruth Walden, UNC-CH James Howard and Hallie McLean Parker Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication
Room 405 CPC East

October 3
GIS in Civil Rights Litigation: Three Cases
Dr. Allan Parnell, CPC Training Program Alumnus and Vice President, Cedar Grove Institute for Sustainable Communities
Room 405 CPC East

CPC Research Methods Workshop
Tuesday, October 7
A Different Type of Measurement: Causal Indicators
Dr. Kenneth Bollen, UNC-CH Professor of Sociology, CPC Faculty Fellow, and Director, Odum Institute for Research in Social Science
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Room 405 CPC East

CPC Research Ethics Seminar
October 10
The Power of Place: Mapping your Data Responsibly
Brian Frizzelle and John Spencer, Carolina Population Center, Research Services - Spatial Analysis Unit
Room 405 CPC East

Wednesday, October 22
2008-09 Carolina Population Center Distinguished Lecture
The Spread of Health Phenomena in Complex, Longitudinally Resolved Social Networks
Dr. Nicholas Christakis, M.D., Ph.D., M.P.H., Harvard Medical School
3:30 p.m. - 4:30 p.m.
Dey Hall, Toy Lounge

October 24
Health and Health Inequalities in Cross-national Comparative Perspective
Dr. Arjumand Siddiqi, UNC-CH Assistant Professor, Health Behavior and Health Education and CPC Faculty Fellow
Room 405 CPC East

October 31
Social Context, Attitudes, and Fertility Behaviors in Nepal
Dr. Sarah Brauner-Otto, Sociologist and CPC Postdoctoral Scholar
Room 405 CPC East

CPC Research Methods Workshop
Thursday, November 6
Introduction to Spatial Regression
Dr. Paul Voss, Visiting Scholar, Odum Institute for Research in Social Science
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Room 405 CPC East

November 7
Ubiquitous Differences or Patterned Variations? A Cross-National Comparison of the Marriage Earnings Gap for Men and Women
Dr. Claudia Geist, Sociologist and CPC Postdoctoral Scholar
Room 405 CPC East

November 14
Race Disparities in Early Marriage and Health in the Transition to Adulthood
Dr. Felicia DeLeone, Policy Analysis and Management; CPC Postdoctoral Scholar
Room 405 CPC East

CPC Research Methods Workshop
Tuesday, November 18
Instrumental Variables Methods for Dynamic Panel Data Models
Dr. David Guilkey, Cary C. Boshamer Professor of Economics and CPC Faculty Fellow, UNC-CH
3:00 - 4:30 p.m.
Room 405 CPC East

November 21
Intergenerational Coresidence and the Northwest European Family System
Dr. Steven Ruggles, Distinguished McKnight University Professor of History, University of Minnesota; Director, Minnesota Population Center
Room 405 CPC East