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Our Presentations & Trainings

Research Connections participates in conferences and meetings related to child care and early education -- through presentations, posters, exhibits. We also host data trainings and workshops and provide technical assistance.

Here's where to find us in the coming months.

1) Summer Data Workshop: Using Administrative Data to Conduct Research on Public Early Childhood Programs, June 2-4, 2010

The goal of this Research Connections workshop, part of the ICPSR Summer Program series, is for participants to become comfortable with the methods used to analyze administrative data. This includes diagnosing problems with the data, cleaning the data, unduplicating and linking administrative data and survey data, and analyzing it.  The workshop will focus substantively on the data required to understand the utilization of early childhood programs, including subsidized child care, Head Start, and the data needed to understand family circumstances, including TANF and UI wage data. This workshop is designed to address the growing interest in using early childhood data.  States are anticipating major new federal investments in education data to strengthen the availability and quality of interoperable early childhood data systems that link with K-12 data, and enhanced capacity to use data to improve children's school readiness and reduce disparities in early learning opportunities and outcomes.  The aim of this workshop is to teach skills necessary to competently use these evolving data systems.

The workshop objectives include:
-Converting data from a government source into something that can be analyzed in a typical statistical package.  Skills taught will include secure transporting of the data, checking that all the data has been properly received, cleaning the data, and then finally preparing the final datasets.
-Introducing concepts of record-linkage.
-Introduce concepts of linking survey data to administrative data.
-Summarizing transaction data into summary records.
-Reviewing approaches to analyzing these data to answer common questions. We will explore point-in-time and longitudinal questions about subsidy use and its effects. This section draws on the experience of various members of the research team of the multi-state study, Employment Outcomes for Low-Income Families Receiving Child Care Subsidies in Illinois, Maryland, and Texas (2009).
    Participants are encouraged to bring their own datasets on which to learn.  Synthesized datasets will also be available for practice.

    The workshop is free, but enrollment is limited.  All applications must include a vita and cover letter summarizing research interests and experiences. Admitted graduate students, post-doctoral scholars and junior faculty/researchers will be considered for one of a limited number of stipends to help with travel and housing costs.  To be considered for one of these awards, applicants must also submit a letter of support from a senior faculty member, supervisor, mentor, or advisor.

    Applications are available at http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/sumprog/

    Deadline to apply is April 16, 2010.

    Instructors:
    -Robert Goerge, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago
    -Lucy Bilaver, Chapin Hall at the University of Chicago
    -Daniel Schroeder, Ray Marshall Center University of Texas at Austin

    2010-03-11

    2) Data User Training for the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, August 4-6, 2010

     This workshop is designed to train researchers to access, analyze, and use the datasets of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) -- a longitudinal, comprehensive study of the development of children in the context of their families and out-of-home environments -- which collected data from 1991 to 2007. Covered topics include the conceptual framework of the study, its methodological design, documentation of research instruments, and documentation of the psychometric properties of a large subset of variables included in the analytical datasets and with the raw datasets. Participants will learn about the most appropriate variables for their analyses and about cutting-edge analytical methods. The expected outcome of the course is for participants to be able to independently use and train others to use the SECCYD databases for original scholarship and publication. Participants are expected to have a basic understanding of secondary data, fundamental data analysis skills in SPSS,SAS, or Stata, and a substantive interest in early child care and youth development. Applications are due May 14, 2010.

    Register Today

    2009-03-08

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