Catherine Fitch Lynn A Blewett Michael Davern Thomas Homes Steven Ruggles
This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This grant establishes a Census Bureau Research Data Center (RDC) at the University of Minnesota. The goals of the Minnesota RDC are twofold. First, the RDC will help Minnesota researchers, working in collaboration with the Census Bureau and the National Center for Health Statistics, to support and improve basic data infrastructure for economic, demographic, and health research. Second, the RDC will stimulate new academic research that capitalizes on powerful restricted-access datasets to advance understanding of the sources and consequences of change in American society. The Minnesota RDC will be housed in the Minnesota Population Center (MPC), an organization with a tradition of collaboration with the Census Bureau on projects to improve and disseminate Census data products. The Minnesota RDC will serve researchers from a broad range of academic disciplines, but will have particular strengths in demography and public health. Minnesota has outstanding researchers from social science and policy departments who will exploit newly-available demographic data to study topics such as marriage, migration, and family change. The University's top-ranked School of Public Health has unusual strength in large-scale data analysis and improvement and the nearby Mayo Clinic is developing new programs focusing on health data. Accordingly, a large pool of nationally-recognized investigators will take advantage of the recent agreement between the Census Bureau and NCHS and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). The RDC will also serve traditional RDC researchers; economists from the distinguished departments of Economics, Applied Economics, and Industrial Relations--as well as the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank--will focus on analysis of economic microdata.
The availability of an RDC at the University of Minnesota will stimulate original and creative research in an array of academic fields such as sociology, economics, public affairs, and epidemiology. The restricted decennial and economic census data provide powerful resources for studying the long-run restructuring of the American population and economy. Social scientists at the University of Minnesota will be able to address simultaneously the broad sweep of time and the detail of spatial organization. Access to the internal NCHS and AHRQ data will result in a substantial body of new scientific and policy-relevant research into health behavior and disparities, access to and use of medical care, population aging, progress toward public health goals, and many other topics.
Broader Impacts: Because of MPC's history of collaboration with the Census Bureau and NCHS on large-scale data infrastructure projects, the Minnesota RDC will be uniquely positioned to benefit the entire RDC program and to assist the statistical agencies with data improvement projects. The Minnesota RDC will help users across the entire RDC network efficiently use restricted population and health data files, some of which Minnesota investigators helped to create. MPC researchers will continue collaborating with the Census Bureau and NCHS on improving restricted and public-use data and documentation. All RDC projects using Census Bureau restricted data will benefit the Census Bureau by contributing knowledge necessary to improve data collection, processing and dissemination.
One of the most important reasons for establishing an RDC at the University of Minnesota is to make this resource available to graduate students. Many students will be trained in the process of using the RDC--learning how to write successful research proposals, properly safeguard private data, and efficiently analyze the RDC data--by working with faculty members. Students from the University will also have free access to the RDC to pursue their own research projects.
