Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research

Background: It is widely accepted and acknowledged that data harmonization is crucial: in its absence, the co-analysis of major tranches of high quality extant data is liable to inefficiency or error. However, despite its widespread practice, no formalized/systematic guidelines exist to ensure high quality retrospective data harmonization. Methods: To better understand real-world harmonization practices and facilitate development of formal guidelines, three interrelated initiatives were undertaken between 2006 and 2015. They included a phone survey with 34 major international research initiatives, a series of workshops with experts, and case studies applying the proposed guidelines. Results: A wide range of projects use retrospective harmonization to support their research activities but even when appropriate approaches are used, the terminologies, procedures, technologies and methods adopted vary markedly. The generic guidelines outlined in this article delineate the essentials required and describe an interdependent step-by-step approach to harmonization: 0) define the research question, objectives and protocol; 1) assemble pre-existing knowledge and select studies; 2) define targeted variables and evaluate harmonization potential; 3) process data; 4) estimate quality of the harmonized dataset(s) generated; and 5) disseminate and preserve final harmonization products. Conclusions: This manuscript provides guidelines aiming to encourage rigorous and effective approaches to harmonization which are comprehensively and transparently documented and straightforward to interpret and implement. This can be seen as a key step towards implementing guiding principles analogous to those that are well recognised as being essential in securing the foundational underpinning of systematic reviews and the meta-analysis of clinical trials.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research, one of the oldest and largest archives of digital social science data in the world, would like to make researchers aware of the upcoming new availability of important data in the fields of HIV/AIDS and alcohol and drug addiction. Under five subcontracts approved this spring, ICPSR will provide access to data from the following research projects through its National Addiction & HIV Data Archive Program (NAHDAP), via funding from the National Institute on Drug Abuse: the Center for Education and Drug Abuse Research (CEDAR) at the University of Pittsburgh the Oregon Youth Substance Use (OYSUP) project at the Oregon Research Institute the Older Drug User Study at Kennesaw State University in Georgia the Enhanced Linkage of Drug Abusers to Primary Medical Care project at Boston Medical Center the archiving of two Chicago NIDA-funded epidemiological surveys at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Each one-year subcontract involves the participating studies receiving funds to process and prepare their data for public distribution. At the end of the contracts, the data will be publicly available through the NAHDAP Web site. All of the studies were funded by the National Institutes on Drug Abuse, and will become part of the NAHDAP archive when completed. The data in these studies potentially contain hugely important insights into the dynamics of addiction and HIV. By making them available to the wider research community for secondary analysis, we hope to facilitate significant advancements in these fields. NAHDAP's innovative subcontracting system advances the goal of promoting the wide dissemination of research data on drug and alcohol abuse by providing financial incentives as well as training in data processing to the participating studies. Typically, data would be processed by NAHDAP staff—under these contracts, staff from the participating research centers will be trained in data processing so that data from subsequent research projects can be more easily deposited with ICPSR and disseminated to the public. The hope is that these contracts will help build a sustainable infrastructure of data dissemination, while at the same time making important data available to the research community. NAHDAP is part of the Inter-university Consortium of Political and Social Rearch. Established in 1962, ICPSR is one of the oldest and largest archives of digital social science data. Providing a unique combination of data holdings, user support, and training in quantitative methods, ICPSR is a vital resource for fostering inquiry and furthering the social sciences. ICPSR, a membership-based organization with nearly 700 members, is a unit of the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. More information on NAHDAP is available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NAHDAP.

Recent theoretical, methodological, and technological advances in the spatial sciences create an opportunity for social scientists to address questions about the reciprocal relationship between context (spatial organization, environment, etc.) and individual behavior. This emerging research community has yet to adequately address the new threats to the confidentiality of respondent data in spatially explicit social survey or census data files, however. This paper presents four sometimes conflicting principles for the conduct of ethical and high-quality science using such data: protection of confidentiality, the social-spatial linkage, data sharing, and data preservation. The conflict among these four principles is particularly evident in the display of spatially explicit data through maps combined with the sharing of tabular data files. This paper reviews these two research activities and shows how current practices favor one of the principles over the others and do not satisfactorily resolve the conflict among them. Maps are indispensable for the display of results but also reveal information on the location of respondents and sampling clusters that can then be used in combination with shared data files to identify respondents. The current practice of sharing modified or incomplete data sets or using data enclaves is not ideal for either the advancement of science or the protection of confidentiality. Further basic research and open debate are needed to advance both understanding of and solutions to this dilemma.

Data sharing is increasingly perceived to be beneficial to knowledge production, and is therefore increasingly required by federal funding agencies, private funders, and journals. As qualitative researchers are faced with new expectations to share their data, data repositories and academic libraries are working to address the specific challenges of qualitative research data. This paper describes how data repositories and academic libraries can partner with researchers to support three challenges associated with qualitative data sharing: (1) obtaining informed consent from participants for data sharing and scholarly reuse; (2) ensuring that qualitative data are legally and ethically shared; and (3) sharing data that cannot be deidentified. This paper also describes three continuing challenges of qualitative data sharing that data repositories and academic libraries cannot specifically address-research using qualitative big data, copyright concerns, and risk of decontextualization. While data repositories and academic libraries can't provide easy solutions to these three continuing challenges, they can partner with researchers and connect them with other relevant specialists to examine these challenges. Ultimately, this paper suggests that data repositories and academic libraries can help researchers address some of the challenges associated with ethical and lawful qualitative data sharing.

BACKGROUND: Literature on the socio-economic 'gradient' in health often asserts that income is associated with better health not only for the very poor, but also across the entire income distribution. In addition, changes in the shape of the association between incomes during a period of increasing economic inequality have not been previously studied. The goal of the current study was to estimate and compare the shape of the relationship between income and mortality in the USA for the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s. METHODS: Using income and mortality data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for respondents aged 35-64 years, we used a Bayesian Cox Model with regression splines to model the risk of mortality over three 10-year follow-up periods. To identify whether income was more strongly associated with mortality at different parts of the income distribution, we treated income as a linear spline with an unknown knot location. RESULTS: The shape of the association between income and mortality was quite non-linear, with a much stronger association at lower levels of income. The relationship between income and mortality in the USA was also not invariant across time, with the increased risk of death associated with lower income applying to an increasing proportion of the US population over time (9th percentile of income in 1970-79, 20th percentile in 1980-89 and 32nd percentile in 1990-99). CONCLUSIONS: Our analyses do not support the claim that income is associated with mortality throughout the income distribution, nor is the association between income and mortality the same across periods. Based on our analyses, a focus on the bottom 30% of the income distribution would seem to return the greatest benefits in reducing socio-economic inequalities in health.

This paper demonstrates a method for using historical county-level agricultural land-use data to drive an ecosystem model. Four case study counties from the U.S. Great Plains during the 19th and 20th centuries are used to represent different agroecosystems. The paper also examines the sensitivity of the estimates of county-level ecosystem properties when using different levels of detail in the land-use histories. Using weighted averages of multiple-model runs for grassland, dryland cropping, and irrigated cropping improved prediction over a simple, single-run approach that models the prevailing land use. Model runs with the same land use and environment generally reach similar levels of soil carbon and nitrogen mineralization after ∼50 years, no matter when they began, with faster convergence for irrigated cropland. Model results show that cultivation of grasslands results in large losses of soil carbon and an increase in soil nitrogen mineralization for the first 20–30 years of cultivation, which is followed by low soil carbon loss and nitrogen mineralization 50 years after cultivation started. The recently observed increase in irrigated agriculture in the central and northern Great Plains (2.7 million ha) has resulted in a net carbon storage of 21.3 Tg carbon, while irrigated cotton production has resulted in a net loss of 12.1 Tg carbon.

Methodological details are presented of a survey research technique known as exit or election day polling. Using this technique, major American news organizations collect and analyze voting and attitude data from samples of persons who have just cast ballots. On the basis of the 1980 elections, differences in polling strategies and performance of the exit poll method are examined. How election day survey data are used by journalists is discussed.

Purpose In developing and debating digital repositories, the digital library world has devoted more attention to their missions and roles in supporting access to and stewardship of academic research output than to discussing discipline, or domain, specific digital repositories. This is especially interesting, given that in social science these domain‐specific repositories have been in existence for many decades. The goal of this paper is to juxtapose these two kinds of repositories and to suggest ways that they can help build partnerships between themselves and with the research community. Design/methodology/approach The approach taken in the paper is based on the fundamental idea that all the parties involved share important goals, and that by working together these goals can be advanced successfully. Findings The key message is that by visualizing the role of repositories explicitly in the life cycle of the social science research enterprise, the ways that the partnerships work will be clear. These workings can be seen as a sequence of reciprocal information flows between parties to the process, triggers that signal that one party or another has a task to perform, and hand‐offs of information from one party to another that take place at crucial moments. This approach envisions both cooperation and specialization. Practical implications If followed, the recommendations offered in the paper will allow those implementing various kinds of repositories to work together with others in new ways, thus both enhancing the amount of information preserved and its value for the community. Originality/value This is one of the first times that the mutual possibilities of institutional and domain‐specific repositories have been brought together.

This study examines how social and cognitive factors shape future criminal activity among serious juvenile offenders and assesses how adolescents' cognitive development affects the relative impact of those factors over time. The sample, from the Pathways to Desistance Study, is comprised of youth (aged 14-18 years) in the United States convicted of serious criminal offenses, and the outcome measure is self-reported crime. We rely on data collected when the youth were first interviewed (n = 1088) and 18-24 months later (n = 904). Logistic regression analyses reveal a strong relationship between impulsiveness and criminal behavior, regardless of age. Susceptibility to peer pressure and perceived risk that friends would be arrested were found to predict future criminal activity among younger adolescents, but have little impact at later ages. External factors such as amount of social support and gang membership have varying effects over time.

The relationships among women's experiences of domestic violence, community violence, and their mental health functioning were explored (N = 94). Social contagion theory was used to argue for the link between community violence and family violence. Results revealed that women's experiences of domestic violence were not related to community violence. Furthermore, women's mental health functioning was solely associated with their experiences of domestic violence, not with community violence. Results are discussed in terms of an ecological model of domestic violence and future directions for exploring linkages between neighborhood characteristics and individual experiences.

This article examines the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research recommendations on children as research subjects in the context of the history of American childhood. The Commission's deliberations took place during the post-World War II period of rapid changes in understandings of childhood and adolescence, brought on in part by school children's highly visible roles as risk-taking protagonists in the polio vaccine trials and the civil rights movement; by the children's rights movement and court decisions granting children and adolescents greater autonomy in divorce cases and in delinquency and mental health hearings, among other rights; and finally by a renewed movement for child protection led by parents of disabled children and by polio survivors themselves. The National Commission's final recommendations emphasized the need for parents to approve, for children above age seven to assent to research, and for children in special care (either medical, psychiatric, or because they were orphans or had committed juvenile crimes) generally to be subjects of research only if there was some direct connection between the reasons for their special care and the objectives of the research. Ultimately, in these recommendations, the National Commission charted a middle ground between the children's rights movement, which advocated enhanced self-determination for children, and the disability rights movement, which urged greater protection for children.

Data curation is the process of making a dataset fit-for-use and archivable. It is critical to data-intensive science because it makes complex data pipelines possible, studies reproducible, and data reusable. Yet the complexities of the hands-on, technical, and intellectual work of data curation is frequently overlooked or downplayed. Obscuring the work of data curation not only renders the labor and contributions of data curators invisible but also hides the impact that curators' work has on the later usability, reliability, and reproducibility of data. To better understand the work and impact of data curation, we conducted a close examination of data curation at a large social science data repository, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). We asked: What does curatorial work entail at ICPSR, and what work is more or less visible to different stakeholders and in different contexts? And, how is that curatorial work coordinated across the organization? We triangulated accounts of data curation from interviews and records of curation in Jira tickets to develop a rich and detailed account of curatorial work. While we identified numerous curatorial actions performed by ICPSR curators, we also found that curators rely on a number of craft practices to perform their jobs. The reality of their work practices defies the rote sequence of events implied by many life cycle or workflow models. Further, we show that craft practices are needed to enact data curation best practices and standards. The craft that goes into data curation is often invisible to end users, but it is well recognized by ICPSR curators and their supervisors. Explicitly acknowledging and supporting data curators as craftspeople is important in creating sustainable and successful curatorial infrastructures.

When the effort to curate and preserve data is made at the end of a project, there is little opportunity to leverage ongoing research work to reduce curation costs or conversely, to leverage curation efforts to improve research productivity. In the Sustainable Environment Actionable Data (SEAD) project, we have envisioned a more active approach to data curation and preservation in which these processes occur in parallel with research and generate sufficient short and long-term return on researcher investments for self-interest to drive their adoption. In this paper, we describe the conceptual framework motivating the SEAD project and the suite of data services we have developed and deployed as an initial implementation of this approach. Use cases in which these services can reduce curation effort and aid ongoing research are highlighted and, based on our experience to date, we identify some key architectural features of our approach as well as open challenges to fully realizing the value of this approach in the broad ecosystem of cyberinfrastructure.

<titre>R&#201;SUM&#201;</titre> Les &#233;pid&#233;miologistes et les d&#233;mographes ont pendant longtemps suspect&#233; les conditions de vie et de maladie au cours de l'enfance d'influencer la mortalit&#233; ult&#233;rieure, mais il a &#233;t&#233; difficile de faire la part entre les effets de ces conditions et les autres facteurs s'exer&#231;ant sur la sant&#233;. Les enfants &#233;lev&#233;s dans les familles pauvres connaissent plus fr&#233;quemment que les autres une situation &#233;conomique tr&#232;s difficile au cours de leur &#226;ge adulte mais une mauvaise sant&#233; peut conduire &#224; des difficult&#233;s socio-&#233;conomiques. Un suivi longitudinal des membres d'une communaut&#233; du xixe si&#232;cle permet ici d'identifier les effets de long terme des privations au cours des premi&#232;res ann&#233;es de vie. La taille, appr&#233;ci&#233;e lors du conseil de r&#233;vision, fournit un indice des conditions de nutrition et de morbidit&#233; de l'enfance. Il ressort de l'analyse des relations complexes entre la richesse, la taille, le mariage et la mortalit&#233; tout au long de la vie. L'aisance des parents est corr&#233;l&#233;e avec la taille des enfants qui affecte &#224; son tour la probabilit&#233; qu'un homme se marie. La taille et l'aisance au cours de l'&#226;ge adulte sont fortement corr&#233;l&#233;es &#224; la survie dans la vieillesse en particulier pour les premi&#232;res g&#233;n&#233;rations du si&#232;cle, la relation s'affaiblit pour celles n&#233;es apr&#232;s 1850.

Despite large public investments in facilitating the secondary use of data, there is little information about the specific factors that predict data's reuse. Using data download logs from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), this study examines how data properties, curation decisions, and repository funding models relate to data reuse. We find that datasets deposited by institutions, subject to many curatorial tasks, and whose access and preservation is funded externally, are used more often. Our findings confirm that investments in data collection, curation, and preservation are associated with more data reuse.

Abstract This paper presents findings from an interview study of research data managers in academic data archives. Our study examined policies and professional autonomy with a focus on dilemmas encountered in everyday work by data managers. We found that dilemmas arose at every stage of the research data lifecycle, and legacy data presents particularly vexing challenges. The iFields' emphasis on knowledge organization and representation provides insight into how data, used by scientists, are used to create knowledge. The iFields' disciplinary emphasis also encompasses the sociotechnical complexity of dilemmas that we found arise in research data management. Therefore, we posit that iSchools are positioned to contribute to data science education by teaching about ethics and infrastructure used to collect, organize, and disseminate data through problem‐based learning.

Abstract Many geoscience disciplines utilize complex computational models for advancing understanding and sustainable management of Earth systems. Executing such models and their associated data preprocessing and postprocessing routines can be challenging for a number of reasons including (1) accessing and preprocessing the large volume and variety of data required by the model, (2) postprocessing large data collections generated by the model, and (3) orchestrating data processing tools, each with unique software dependencies, into workflows that can be easily reproduced and reused. To address these challenges, the work reported in this paper leverages the Workflow Structured Object functionality of the Integrated Rule‐Oriented Data System and demonstrates how it can be used to access distributed data, encapsulate hydrologic data processing as workflows, and federate with other community‐driven cyberinfrastructure systems. The approach is demonstrated for a study investigating the impact of drought on populations in the Carolinas region of the United States. The analysis leverages computational modeling along with data from the Terra Populus project and data management and publication services provided by the Sustainable Environment‐Actionable Data project. The work is part of a larger effort under the DataNet Federation Consortium project that aims to demonstrate data and computational interoperability across cyberinfrastructure developed independently by scientific communities.

Data sharing is increasingly perceived to be beneficial to knowledge production, and is therefore increasingly required by federal funding agencies, private funders, and journals. As qualitative researchers are faced with new expectations to share their data, data repositories and academic libraries are working to address the specific challenges of qualitative research data. This paper describes how data repositories and academic libraries can partner with researchers to support three challenges associated with qualitative data sharing: (1) obtaining informed consent from participants for data sharing and scholarly reuse; (2) ensuring that qualitative data are legally and ethically shared; and (3) sharing data that cannot be deidentified. This paper also describes three continuing challenges of qualitative data sharing that data repositories and academic libraries cannot specifically address—research using qualitative big data, copyright concerns, and risk of decontextualization. While data repositories and academic libraries can’t provide easy solutions to these three continuing challenges, they can partner with researchers and connect them with other relevant specialists to examine these challenges. Ultimately, this paper suggests that data repositories and academic libraries can help researchers address some of the challenges associated with ethical and lawful qualitative data sharing.

Understanding the complexity of the historical demographic transition—the secular change from high to low levels of mortality and fertility in Western Europe and the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—has long been a major goal of historical demography. Recent developments in individual-level life-course databases and longitudinal statistical models have allowed scholars to test ever-more complex hypotheses about the causal factors in demographic change and to develop an increasingly fine-grained image of demographic behavior before, during, and after the transition. Such studies are critical for identifying variation, both between and within societies, obscured by secular trends that appear uniform at the macro-level, and for distinguishing the contingent elements of demographic change from the universal elements. The six articles presented in this special issue bring new substantive and methodological insights to the field of historical demography—revealing the responsiveness of pre-transition fertility to changing contexts, tracking the transmission of new fertility practices, exploring the unevenness of mortality and fertility decline, and documenting the changing role of social institutions in family formation.

Tubal ligation provides an effective and reliable method by which women can choose to limit the number of children they will bear. However, because of the irreversibility of the procedure and other potential disadvantages, it is important to understand factors associated with women's choice of this method of birth control. Between May 1999 and August 2000, data were collected from 755 women aged 40 to 60 years from a cross-section of neighborhoods of varying socio-economic make-up in Puebla, Mexico, finding a tubal ligation rate of 42.2%. Multiple logistic regression models were utilized to examine demographic, socio-economic, and reproductive history characteristics in relation to women's choice of tubal ligation. Regression analyses were repeated with participants grouped by age to determine how the timing of availability of tubal ligation related to the decision to undergo the procedure. The results of this study suggest that younger age, more education, use of some forms of birth control, and increased parity were associated with women's decisions to undergo tubal ligation. The statistically significant difference of greater tubal ligation and lower hysterectomy rates across age groups reflect increased access to tubal ligation in Mexico from the early 1970s, supporting the idea that women's choice of tubal ligation was related to access.