Carolina Population Center

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PROJECT SUMMARY/ABSTRACT The Carolina Population Center requests infrastructure support that will advance population dynamics research at CPC by increasing research impact, innovation, and productivity, supporting the development of junior scientists, and reducing the administrative burden on scientists. Infrastructure support will advance science in three primary research areas: Sexuality, Reproduction, Fertility, and Families; Population, Health, and the Environment; and Inequality, Mobility, Disparities, and Well-Being. Much of the research at CPC draws on large publicly available longitudinal data sets that our faculty have designed and collected, including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, the China Health and Nutrition Survey, newer surveys associated with the Transfer Project, and the Study of the Tsunami Aftermath and Recovery, all of which will continue to be important in work related to our primary research areas over the next five years. These projects embody several themes that have guided research at CPC since the Center's inception. These themes, which will continue to shape our work, are the importance of life course processes and longitudinal data, multi-level processes and measurement of context, interventions and natural experiments as means of learning about causal processes, and the relevance of sociodemographic variables such as age, gender, race- ethnicity, and socioeconomic status for disparities in health and well-being. By embedding these themes, our projects provide data that enable us to address barriers that otherwise impede progress in the population sciences generally, and in our primary research areas in particular. We request support for three cores which in combination will provide an institutional infrastructure that will push populations dynamics research forward by empowering CPC faculty to tackle challenging questions using state of the art measurement techniques and methods. The Administrative Core plans activities that maintain a stimulating intellectual community, streamlines administrative processes so that scientists can focus on research, coordinates activities of the Cores so that services are offered efficiently, and communicates information about research and data more broadly. The Development Core supports early stage investigators and other faculty with exciting new ideas through multiple mechanisms: workshops, access to technical expertise in measurement, and seed grants. The Research Services Core enables scientists to address complex and important population research issues by providing access to state-of-the-art research tools and professional support for programming, survey development, and analysis.