Conferences and Workshops

DUPRI Research Scholar Terrie Moffit, Co-hosts Signe Hald Andersen lecture on September 17, at 4pm,, Suite 401, Grey House, Erwin Mill Complex, 2020 West Main Street, Durham, NC  

Magdalena Cerdá, DrPH MPH, is the Director of the NYU Center for Opioid Epidemiology and Policy, and Associate Professor in the Department of Population Health at NYU Langone Health. In this talk, Dr. Cerdá will present findings from a study where she and colleagues used agent-based models to simulate the potential impact of expanding firearms denial criteria (an approach focused on high-risk groups) and increasing the price of firearms (an approach aimed at the whole population, regardless of risk) on rates of firearm violence. The talk will include a discussion of the implications of high-risk versus population-based approaches to prevention of leading public health problems such as firearm violence.

Over the next few days, people across the nation will engage in numerous celebrations to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a visionary leader of the civil rights movement who transformed the social justice landscape through his commitment to service, community and nonviolence. In a 1966 speech that Dr. King gave to the Second National Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights in Chicago, he said, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.”  Promoting the awareness of health care disparities, addressing current challenges, exploring solutions, and our role in eliminating them are essential to Duke Health’s mission and align with Dr. King’s vision.

These sessions offer the opportunity to dive deeper into topics and target diverse units at Duke: from those that desire a broad understanding of what is possible with data science, and those who wish to use data-science tools (software) without a need for deep understanding of underlying methodology, to those who desire a rigorous technical proficiency of the details and methodology of data science.  Anyone in the Duke community is welcome to join, there is no fee to attend, and no prior experience is necessary.

The Duke Center for Child and Family Policy presents the Sulzberger Colloquium: Romeo & Juliet in the Digital Age: Using Mobile Devices to Track Teen Romance, featuring Marta Tienda, January 30, 12:00 to 1:30 PM, Sanford Building, Rhodes Conference Room. Lunch will be served. Please register so that we order enough catering for all attendees. Once deemed frivolous, transitory experiences, adolescent romantic relationships are now recognized as key milestones in adolescent development and precursors to healthy adult partnerships. Mobile technologies are appealing for administering surveys to youth because they align with their communication habits and can capture relationship dynamics prospectively. The mDiary Study of Romantic Relationships provides substantive insights about the complexity and fluidity of teen romantic liaisons as well as methodological lessons for survey researchers.

Dr. Fu leads and coordinates the development and implementation of the World Bank's development data agenda. She has been an active leader of the global statistical community, having served or currently serving as a member of the U.N. Secretary-General's Independent Expert Advisory Group on Data Revolution for Sustainable Development; as a Council Member of the International Statistical Institute; and Co-Chair of the Global Steering Committee of the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics, among others.

Research on the "retreat from marriage" rarely focuses explicitly on marriage intentions and their relationship with marriage outcomes.  In this paper, we extend the small body of research on marriage intentions in several ways in an effort to better understand the trend toward later and less marriage in Japan.  Using two different sources of nationally representative data, we show that, although intentions to remain unmarried have increased over the past 35 years, the large majority of young Japanese men and women report that they intend to marry at some point.  We articulate several different scenarios that might explain this "marriage paradox" and find varying degrees of empirical support for each.  It is clear that rejection of marriage (predicted by two prominent theoretical frameworks) applies to only a very small proportion of young Japanese men and women.  We also find relatively limited support for provocative media portrayals of a generation of Japanese uninterested in "bothersome" relationships.  The most common pattern we observe in the data is, by far, one of "drifting" into singlehood.  This is a scenario in which young men and women with more or less strongly expressed intentions to marry, but remain unmarried across a period of eight years (the length of the panel survey we examine.)

A growing literature has documented the large and persistent impact of increasing investments in children — from income support programs, to educational investments, to health coverage. Yet, we persistently spend too little on children, especially the poorest. The results are bad for children and bad for our economy. Diane Schanzenbach presents the case for investing more in children and provides policy solutions.