Education | Research Themes | Survey Research Center

The proposed project will integrate original survey data with university administrative data to support analyses that address the ways in which STEM doctoral student’s individual characteristics and training environments shape their acquisition of skills and the effects skill acquisition has on scientific and employment outcomes after graduation. We assess skill acquisition using a variety of validated survey instruments to measure analytic skills (data interpretation, analytic thinking) and softer skills such as management and leadership. Administrative data for more than 30 universities maintained by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) provides detailed information on the research teams and collaboration networks in which STEM doctoral students receive the bulk of their training. Linkages between IRIS data and restricted federal data sets maintained by the U.S. Census Bureau provide comprehensive information about doctoral recipients’ employment outcomes and earnings. Linkages between IRIS data and research productivity data including patents, dissertations (ProQuest), and publications (PubMeb and Web of Science) provide multiple sources of information about their scientific outcomes. The research proposed here will provide new insight into the opportunities and barriers to participation and success in STEM graduate training and into the relationship between key features of graduate training and individual level outcomes. In so doing this work will directly address recommendations made in numerous recent reports by National Academy of Science panels that address graduate STEM training and workforce development.

Across the past five decades, data creation investments in the U.S. and Western Europe have spurred dramatic breakthroughs in the social and behavioral sciences. The creation of large scientific studies of human behavior and social experience in the general population form a crucial cornerstone of these investments. Because the data from these studies are so important for the construction and evaluation of public policies and programs to improve the health and wellbeing of the population, NICHD places a high scientific priority on research educational tools that significantly expand the scientific use of such data. The primary limitation of these research education efforts thus far is an exclusive focus on data from the U.S. population. This greatly restricts the ability to test the external validity of key findings, raising the possibility that even within the U.S. population findings from any particular study population may not apply to important sub-populations. Research education on data resources from populations living under circumstances quite different from the U.S. and Western Europe are urgently needed so that social and behavioral scientists can quickly and easily test the breadth of external validity of key findings as well as to advance understanding of these different populations.

We will leverage NICHD’s long-term investment in the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS) in Nepal to achieve this high priority objective. We will implement a series of educational, research tool construction, and continuing education activities designed to significantly increase the quality and quantity of international population science. The CVFS is an excellent international population science training resource, featuring a 24-year whole-family panel study with many important characteristics. These include dynamic measures of child health, contraceptive use, mental health, and community context with both DNA and migrant interviews for all family members. We will use this special resource to launch a new multimedia educational program focused on international population science. The program will feature an integrated set of topical short courses, web-based access to those courses, education on high priority longitudinal research tools, innovative “always available” learning tools, and archived tutorials. The importance of international population research continues to grow as interconnections across populations increase. Dynamics of migration, commerce, digital media use, and violent conflict all increase the need for thorough scientific understanding of population dynamics in far-away settings. Our program will supply training in international population research skills to enable higher quality and quantity of research. The tools can be applied to advance science using repeated cross-sectional surveys, surveillance data, longitudinal panel studies, or random control trial studies. Our educational program will feature illustrations with the NICHD Population Dynamics Branch’s (PDB) highest scientific priorities: studying contraceptive use and non-use, health across the life course, and the role of genetic factors.

The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center for Inequality Dynamics (CID) was founded at the University of Michigan Institute of Social Research in 2019. The mission of CID is to: produce cutting-edge research on social inequality, especially wealth inequality, train the next generation of inequality scholars, and build data infrastructure and increase data accessibility. We pursue these aims as an interdisciplinary group of social scientists working in a collaborative space. Our team includes experts on topics such as wealth and income inequality, economic mobility, economic history, economic sociology, and housing. Together, we examine how between-group inequalities are shaped by geographic, political, and institutional contexts.

This project will continue the collection of data on children in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) that is currently funded under NICHD Grant R01HD52646. The existing grant supported the PSID Child Development Supplement, which followed a cohort of children in PSID families who were 0?12 years of age in 1997 through three waves of data collection and focused on understanding the socio-demographic, psychological, and economic aspects of childhood in an on-going nationally-representative longitudinal study of families. By 2014, all of the children in the original cohort will have reached adulthood, and a new generation of children will have replaced them in PSID families. Our goal is to collect information in 2014 on all children aged 0?17 years in this new generation, shifting the orientation from a cohort study to one that obtains information on the childhood experiences of all children in PSID families, who will become primary respondents in the Core PSID when they form their own economically-independent households. These new data will support studies of health, development, and well-being in childhood; the relationship between children?s characteristics and contemporaneous family decisionmaking and behavior; and the effects of childhood factors on subsequent social, demographic, economic, and health outcomes over the entire lifecourse for these individuals as they are followed into the future as part of PSID. The specific aims are to: (1) Design and field a new PSID Child Development Supplement (CDS) in 2014, collecting data on approximately 6,800 children aged 0?17 years through interviews with primary caregivers (typically the mother) and with older children themselves (aged 9?17 years); (2) Collect weekday and weekend time diaries and obtain saliva samples (for subsequent genetic analysis) for all children and their primary caregivers; and (3) Process, document, and distribute the new CDS data, with scale composites, time diary recodes, and links to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Common Core of Data (CCD) and Private School Survey (PSS). The new CDS will provide rich data on a large, nationally-representative sample of children that includes an over-sample of African American children and a representative sample of immigrant children. CDS data will be available free of charge through the PSID Online Data Center, which provides customized extracts and codebooks using a cross-year index of variables across all waves as well as other variable-selection options.

The University of Michigan Youth Policy Lab is a partnership between Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research. The Youth Policy Lab helps community and government agencies make better decisions by measuring what really works. We are data experts who believe that the government can and must do better for the people of Michigan. We’re also parents and community members who dream of a brighter future for all of our children. At the Youth Policy Lab, we’re working to make that dream a reality by strengthening programs that address some of our most pressing social challenges.

We recognize that the wellbeing of youth is intricately linked to the wellbeing of families and communities, so we engage in work that impacts all age ranges. Using rigorous evaluation design and data analysis, we’re working closely with our partners to build a future where public investments are based on strong evidence, so all Michiganders have a pathway to prosperity.

Five core values provide the foundation for YPL’s work:

Quality: We are dedicated to the highest quality data analysis and evaluation.
Partnership: We put our partners’ priorities at the center of our work.
Empowerment: We help partners get comfortable using data to improve their work.
Equity: We believe that everyone deserves a fair chance at a good life.
Outcomes: We measure outcomes so that programs and policies are based on evidence of what really works.

Samples of YPL projects:

The Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) is a consortium based at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research (ISR) IRIS is designed to transform the successful Universities: Measuring the Impacts of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Science (UMETRICS) initiative developed by the Committee on Institutional Cooperation into a permanent national resource by creating a secure professional data platform for the research community and university administrators.

IRIS will extend UMETRICS by developing national and international partnerships to:

Collect, improve, protect, and use big data on the dynamics of science and the economy
Validate and disseminate new metrics on the economic and social effects of research
Support university members who pursue credible advocacy using those indicators
Partner with universities to design data products anchored in rigorous research findings
Develop an interdisciplinary research community that applies IRIS data to address pressing social science and policy questions

IRIS will be the global source for safe, secure, comprehensive, and accessible data to document and improve the value of public and private investments in discovery, innovation, and education. Trusted data and rigorous evidence will support effective policy and advocacy to increase the productivity, value, and impact of universities and other organizations whose contributions to knowledge create economic growth and improve the quality of human life.

Catherine Armstrong Asher is an Assistant Research Scientist at the Youth Policy Lab at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research. Her research, at the intersection of experimental design, quantitative methods, and education, investigates treatment effect heterogeneity in interventions and policies to help build critical knowledge of what works in education and youth services, for whom, and in what contexts. Her current projects use rigorous designs to understand variation in the effects of complex interventions for elementary students and their families, as well as theory-and simulation-based methodological work to deepen our understanding of when statistical tools fail in intervention research. She completed her PhD Candidate in Education Policy & Program Evaluation and AM in Statistics at Harvard University, where she was an Institute for Education Sciences (IES) pre-doctoral fellow through the Partnering in Education Research program.

Brian Rowan is the Burke A. Hinsdale Collegiate Professor in Education, a research professor at the Survey Research Center, Institute for Social Research, and a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. A sociologist by training (PhD, Stanford University), Rowan’s research has focused on the organization and management of schooling, paying special attention to the measurement and improvement of teaching quality. Over the past 10 years, he has been principal investigator of several large-scale survey and video studies of teaching practice, including the Study of Instructional Improvement, the Description of Reading Instruction in the United States, Understanding Teaching Quality, the Measures of Effective Teaching-Extension project, and the Pilot of Educator Effectiveness Tools in Michigan. His current research includes a randomized field trial of an early grades reading intervention, an evaluation of a high school instructional improvement program (known as Excellence for All initiative), and a study of online high schools in Florida. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Education and past recipient of the William J. Davis award for outstanding scholarship in the field of educational administration. He also has served on the editorial boards of top scientific journals in the field and consulted widely with U.S. federal government and U.S. private research organizations. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1991, he was a senior research director at Far West Laboratory for Educational Research and Development, in San Francisco, California, and chairperson of the Department of Educational Administration at Michigan State University.

Robin Tepper Jacob is a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research’s Survey Research Center and the School of Education at the University of Michigan. She has a decade and a half of experience conducting rigorous evaluations of educational interventions, with a special interest in how policies and programs can affect the life trajectories of low-income youth. She has expertise in survey design and implementation, the design and implementation of randomized trials and quasi-experimental methods for program evaluation. Her work in low-income schools has focused on interventions that were designed to target a wide range of outcomes including: school readiness, early literacy skills, mathematics achievement, executive functioning, social-emotional skills and health related outcomes. Before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan, she worked for Abt Associate Inc. in Cambridge, MA where she served as the Deputy Project Director for the Reading First Impact Study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Jacob earned her Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball is the Jessie Jean Storey-Fry Distinguished University Professor of Education at the University of Michigan, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She currently serves as dean of the School of Education and as director of TeachingWorks. She taught elementary school for more than 15 years, and continues to teach mathematics to elementary students every summer. Her research focuses on the practice of mathematics instruction, and on the improvement of teacher training and development. She is an expert on teacher education, with a particular interest in how professional training and experience combine to equip beginning teachers with the skills and knowledge needed for responsible practice. Ball has authored or co-authored more than 150 publications and has lectured and made numerous major presentations around the world. Her research has been recognized with several awards and honors, and she has served on several national and international commissions and panels focused on policy initiatives and the improvement of education, including the National Mathematics Advisory Panel and the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education. She serves on the National Science Board and the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Board of Trustees, and chairs the Spencer Foundation Board of Directors. Ball has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Education, and is a fellow of the American Mathematics Society and the American Educational Research Association.

Collaborative Research: Impacts of Hard/Soft Skills on STEM Workforce Trajectories