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Center for Demographic and Social Analysis (C-DASA)

Founded in 2007, the campus Center for Demographic and Social Analysis formalizes a decade of highly productive collaboration between researchers in a dozen departments. With nearly 50 faculty affiliates and 30 associated graduate students, C-DASA is the focal point for a host of population-related research activities at UCI. Expertise in child and youth outcomes; demographic, spatial and social network methodologies; social inequality; and health and well-being make C-DASA a leading center for research on the well-being of local, national, and global populations. C-DASA provides small seed grants to encourage multi-disciplinary projects, collaborative studies, grant proposals, and research by junior faculty. Support for C-DASA comes from the Office of Research. The weekly Population, Society and Inequality Seminar Series fosters dialogue on current research, funding opportunities, analytic approaches, and new data sets.

--Judith Treas, Director

Events

Fall Quarter, 2011


Unless otherwise indicated, seminars are held Tuesdays, 12:30-1:30, in Social Science Plaza B 4206. The Population, Society, and Inequality Series is held in cooperation with the Center for Economics of Public Policy, the Center for Research on Immigration, and the Sociology Department Gender-Work-Family Group.


Tuesday, October 4
Julie Ohlander (Visiting Lecturer, Sociology)
The Decline of Suicide in Sweden,
1950-2000


Tuesday, October 11
Sean Fitzhugh ( Sociology PhD student)
Shared Spells: The Effect
of Co-participation on Differences between Life Histories


Tuesday, October 18
Julie Ohlander (Visiting Lecturer, Sociology)
Learning to Become a Lawyer...of Color: How Asian American and Latino Law Students Navigate Professional and (Pan)ethnic Identities


Tuesday, October 25, 2011
Greg Duncan (Distinguished Professor, Education)
Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances


Friday, Saturday, October 28-29, 2011
Institute for Mathematical and Behavior Sciences conference
“Mathematical Modeling of Infectious Diseases: Bridging Data and Models,” SSPA 2112


Tuesday, November 1
Maria Rendon (Assistant Professor in Planning, Policy and Design)
"Second Generation Optimism and the Social Mobility Patterns of Latino Young Men"


Tuesday, November 8
Marc Schenker (Prof., Public Health, UC-Davis)
Immigrant Workers--Where the Hazardous Jobs Are


Tuesday, November 15
Tim Bruckner (Asst. Prof., PPD & Public Health)
The Cohort Consequences of 9-11: Culled or Damaged Males?


Tuesday, November 22
Andrew Penner (Asst Prof., Sociology)
Engendering Racial Perceptions: An Intersectional Analysis of How Social Status Shapes Race


Announcements

Greg Duncan, Distinguished Professor of Education, and an interdisciplinary team of 10 UCI faculty won a $4.7 million grant from the National Institute on Child Health and Development to investigate why programs and policies directed at children and adolescents have the effects, non-effects and, in some cases, perverse effects that they do. Focusing on programs ranging from Head Start to state-mandated health education curricula to high-stakes testing for graduation, the Irvine Network on Interventions in Development advances cutting edge methods to study the “fit” between programs to raise children’s competencies, the child’s developmental stage, and other factors (e.g., socio-economic disadvantage) that determine program impact. Participating in the project are C-DASA affiliates George Farkas, Deborah Vandell, Thad Domina, Anne-Marie Conley (Education); Marianne Bitler (Economics); Kitt Carpenter (Business); Sara Wakefield (Criminology, Law & Society), Andrew Penner (Sociology), Tim Bruckner (PPD & Public Health), and Candice Odgers (Psychology & Social Behavior).


Christopher Marcum, DASA grad and Sociology Ph.D candidate, developed the gooJSON package for R, a new software tool from Networks, Computation, and Social Dynamics Lab research on social networks and geography (NSF BCS-0827027). A suite of helper functions for obtaining data from the Google Maps API, gooJSON is the first R package to return JSON data from geocode queries (place names, accuracy codes, coordinates, etc.) directly into R matrices. Also by Chris, the lab offers the informR package for R to create sequence statistics for UCI sociologist Carter Butts's egocentric relational events model. Supporting informR development are NSF (CMS-0624257) and DOD Office of Naval Research (MURI N00014-08-1-1015). Chris has just accepted a two-year National Institutes on Aging post-doc at the RAND Corporation.


The Metropolitan Futures Initiative in the School of Social Ecology aims to improve understanding of communities and their potential for integrative and collaborative planning and action to ensure a bright future for the region. With initial focus on Orange County and its location within the larger Southern California area, The Metropolitan Futures Initiative is a commitment to build communities that are economically vibrant, environmentally sustainable, and socially just by partnering world class, boundary-crossing scholarship with expertise throughout Southern California. C-DASA faculty affiliate John Hipp directs the initiative.


Sociology Ph.D. student Zack Almquist, a DASA grad, published "US Census Spatial and Demographic Data in R: The UScensus2000 Suite of Packages," in the Journal of Statistical Software. The suite allows for convenient handling of 2000 Census data. With spatial and demographic data for 50 states and DC at four different geographic levels, it selects and aggregates specific geographies, (e.g., metropolitan statistical areas). This introduction showcases the packages, describes their data, and demonstrates helper functions. Zack won the UCI A. Kimball Romney award for his paper, "Predicting Regional Self-identification from Spatial Network Models.”


C-DASA’s 5 Broadcomm servers are now available for population-related research. Click here to learn how to apply for access and more.