Schedule

This syllabus is a living document, and I will update the schedule over the course of the semester.

Tuesday

History of data processing

History of microdata

Using Lynda.com

Thursday

What is a Number?

Comparisons by Subtraction and by Division

Denominators: "At Risk" Populations and Levels of Measurement

General Strategies of Quantitative Research

Navigating the IPUMS website

Exercise 1: Navigating IPUMS Documentation

Readings

Steven Ruggles, “Big Microdata for Population Research” Demography, 2013.

Lynda.com Please view these videos before January 28

Welcome

Lesson 1: Taking a first look at the interface

Week 2: Jan 28-30

Tuesday

Introduction to SPSS

Overview

Data Window

Opening .SAV files

Menus

Data

Analysis

Output window

Syntax window

DESCRIPTIVES command

FREQUENCIES command

Lynda.com

Calculating frequencies

Calculating descriptives

Thursday:

SPSS: CROSSTABS command

Exercise 2: IPUMS Analysis

Readings: Working with syntax files.

Jeromy Anglim’s Blog

Lynda.com

Creating crosstabs

Reading

Margo Anderson, “Quantitative History,” The Sage Handbook of Social Science Methodology, edited by William Outhwaite and Stephen Turner (London: Sage Publications, 2007), 246-63.

Week 3: Feb 4-6

Tuesday

Guest speaker: Prof. Robert McCaa

Big Census Microdata

Research Ethics

Making an extract from IPUMS-International

Select country, census years, variables, SPSS format

Making Crosstabs

Lay-out of variables: row, column, layers

Selecting statistics: row vs column percent.

Reading: Joel E. Cohen, “Make secondary education universal, “ Nature 456,

572-573(4 December 2008). doi:10.1038/456572a.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v456/n7222/full/456572a.html

Thursday

Varieties of Historical Data

Aggregate vs. Microdata: Levels of Analysis

Ecological Analysis

Confidentiality

Ethics

Alternative Machine-Readable Data Sources

Websites

· Published Census Volumes

o https://usa.ipums.org/usa/voliii/tPublished.shtml

o http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial /

· Historical Statistics of the U.S. http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb

· Historical census browser http://mapserver.lib.virginia.edu/

· Social Explorer http://www.socialexplorer.com/

· NHGIS http://www.nhgis.org

Exercise

Social Explorer Exercise

Week 4: Feb 11-13

Tuesday

Introduction to Excel

Percentages, Proportions, Means, Standard Deviation

Google N-Grams

Reading:

Science article

Resources:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/info

Thursday

Statistics: Simple Random Sampling, Sampling Distributions,

Standard Error

Statistics: Difference of Proportions, Independent Samples

Steve’s Magic t-tester

Testing Daniel Scott Smith

Daniel Scott Smith, Parental Power and Marriage Patterns: An Analysis of Historical Trends in Hingham, Massachusetts. Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 35, No. 3. (Aug., 1973), pp. 419-428. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/350578.pdf

Week 5: Feb 18-20

Tuesday

SPSS Data Management

· Recoding Values and Selecting Cases

· Missing Values.

Project planning

Thursday

Aesthetics of table presentation

Measuring Family Structure

Lynda.com

Recoding Variables

Visual Binning

Selecting cases

Reading:

Lutz K. Berkner, The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the Peasant Household: An Eighteenth-Century Austrian Example. American Historical Review 77 (1975), 398-418. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/1868698.pdf

Steven Ruggles, The Transformation of American Family Structure. American Historical Review 99 (1994), 103-128. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2166164.pdf

Week 6: Feb 25-27

Tuesday

IPUMS Extraction System

Review for quiz

Help for missed classes

Readings

IPUMS chapter 5, “Family Interrelationships”

Assignments

Formatted Table Exercise

Thursday

· Quiz number 1

SPSS Data Management

· Creating New Variables (compute, if, do if)

· Identifying first and second generation immigrants

· Splitting and merging: attaching head’s characteristics

· Linking spouses and parents: Attach Characteristics tool

Week 7: Mar 4-6

Tuesday:

Cohort and Period Analysis

· Cross-sectional and longitudinal data

· True Cohorts in Successive Cross-Section

· Synthetic Cohorts and Life-Course Analysis.

· Period and Cohort Measures of Fertility and Mortality.

· Indirect Period Measures of Age at Marriage, Age at Leaving Home, Years of Schooling.

Readings

Patricia Kelly Hall and Steven Ruggles. 2004. “'Restless in the Midst of Their Prosperity': New Evidence on the Internal Migration of Americans, 1850-2000," Journal of American History 91: 829-846. http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3662857.pdf

Thursday

· Family Reconstitution, Selection Biases and Censoring

Readings

Steven Ruggles. 1999. "The Limitations of English Family Reconstitution." Continuity and Change 14: 105-130.

Assignment

Calculation of indirect estimates of years of schooling

Week 8: Mar 11-13

Tuesday

Project planning

Making graphs

Thursday

Project Planning