The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) is excited to announce the winners of its annual IPUMS Research Awards. The awards honor the best of 2015’s published research and self-nominated graduate student papers that used MPC data to advance or deepen our understanding of social and demographic processes.
IPUMS, developed by and housed at the MPC, 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 not cost. IPUMS USA provides data from the U.S. decennial censuses, the American Community Survey, and the Current Population Survey from 1850 to the present. IPUMS International harmonizes data contributed by more than 100 national statistical office partners; it currently includes information on 500 million people in more than 200 censuses from around the world, from 1960 forward. The Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) makes available the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, from the 1960s to the present.
Over 1,900 publications based on MPC data appeared in journals, magazines, and newspapers worldwide last year. From these publications and from self-nominated graduate student papers, the award committees selected the 2015 honorees.
2015 IPUMS International Research Award
Both IPUMS International award-winning papers focus on fertility patterns in Latin America, using cross-national and cross-temporal data while bringing a unique and creative approach to the topic. Laplante et al. examine fertility patterns in the dual nuptiality environment of Latin America, assessing the role of marital and cohabitation arrangements conditioned by educational and economic status. They provide evidence that marital and cohabitation patterns previously tied closely to particular educational or socioeconomic class conditions have shifted over time, disrupting expectations about fertility outcomes.
Castro Torres innovatively applies sociological theory and a non-traditional method to the investigation of class and status influences on changing fertility trends in Latin America. He leverages information available in the census records to investigate the way that fertility is both an outcome of socioeconomic change as well as a foundation of class differences.
Faculty:
Childbearing within Marriage and Consensual Union in Latin America, 1980-2010
Benoît Laplante, Teresa Castro-Martín, Clara Cortina and Teresa Martín-García
Graduate Student:
Social Structure, Social Class and Fertility Decline in Latin America between 1950 and 2000
Andres Castro Torres
2015 IPUMS Health Research Award
Golberstein, Gonzales, and Sommers used information on health insurance, health care, and income from the public use version of the NHIS in combination with geographic information from the restricted access NHIS to evaluate the impact of the ACA expansion on health care-related outcomes for California's low-income population. For low-income non-elderly residents of California, they found an increase in rates of having both public insurance and any insurance, as well as reductions in the likelihood of reporting any out-of-pocket spending or incurring $500 or more in out-of-pocket spending in the previous year.
In their study of the effects of interracial marriage on health, Yu and Zhang took advantage of the large sample sizes and unique combination of information on family composition and health found in the NHIS data. They found that being interracially married is significantly associated with worse health for white spouses relative to their peers in non-interracial marriages.
Faculty:
California's Early ACA Expansion Increased Coverage and Reduced Out-of-Pocket Spending For the State's Low-Income Population
Ezra Golberstein, Gilbert Gonzales, and Benjamin D. Sommers
Graduate Student:
Interracial Marriage and Self-Reported Health of Whites and Blacks in the United States
Yan-Liang Yu and Zhenmei Zhang
2015 IPUMS-USA Research Award
This year we had a record number of submissions for the IPUMS-USA research award and many were of excellent quality. In the end, the selection committee chose two winners in each category. The winning submissions study novel topics, use many years of either integrated census data or full count historical census data, and will likely all have an impact in their respective fields.
Faculty Co-winners:
Lynched: The Victims of Southern Mob Violence [Book]
Amy Kate Bailey and Stewart E. Tolnay
Ethnic Names and Occupational Success in the Last Era of Mass Migration
Joshua R. Goldstein, Guy Stecklov
Graduate Student Co-winners:
The Effect of Municipal Water Filtration on Children’s School Enrollment and Employment in American Cities
Chon-Kit Ao
The Historical Demography of Racial Segregation
Angelina Grigoryeva and Martin Ruef
About the Minnesota Population Center
The Minnesota Population Center (MPC) is a University-wide interdisciplinary cooperative for demographic research. The MPC serves nearly 100 faculty affiliates spread over 26 departments in nine colleges at the University of Minnesota. As one of the world’s leading developers and disseminators of demographic data, the MPC also serves a broader audience of some 70,000 demographic researchers, policymakers, teachers, and students worldwide.
All MPC data are available at no cost via ipums.org. For more information about the MPC, visit pop.umn.edu.
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