ICPSR Grants and Contracts

Dramatically falling death rates led to increased life expectancy in the U.S. between the late 19th century and the early 20th century. The widely accepted explanation is that deaths from infectious diseases (like smallpox and cholera) were on the wane and deaths from degenerative diseases (like heart disease and cancer) were on the rise, but changes in the names of diseases make testing this hypothesis difficult. The study aims to develop a database that systematically standardizes causes of death, groups deaths into categories, and provides information about the quality, reliability, and importance of standardization and classification to understanding long-term trends in death rates.

The database will contain individual death records from Holyoke and Northampton, Massachusetts, from 1850 to 1912, and two alternate cause of death classifications, one based on a standardization of the causes of death given in the original records and the other based on assigning deaths to the early International Classification of Causes of Death (ICD).

The data will also include measurements of how reliable the classifications are, and whether classification makes a significant difference in mortality trends. The database will be made available to the public in a form suitable for use by historical mortality researchers and public users (for example, genealogists). With this data, researchers will be able to better understand the role of controlling infectious disease in lowering overall death rates. The methods used to create the database will also be useful for researchers working in other settings in which the meaning of causes of death may be unclear.

This project will archive, preserve, and disseminate historically and demographically significant data about the United States. Our focus is on longitudinal data describing life histories, especially multi-generation datasets. Recent developments in population-related sciences, such as the bio-demography of aging and the evolutionary biology of reproduction, have renewed interest in data that follow individuals throughout their lives and across generations. There is a rich heritage of such data about the U.S., but it is in grave danger of being lost forever. Many important studies were conducted at a time when data archiving was not a standard practice, and the preservation of digital objects was rarely considered. In addition to archiving and preserving these data, we will translate them into the "Intermediate Data Structure," an emerging standard for historical longitudinal data, which creates standardization and transparency in complex data management tasks and makes these data much easier to use.

This project, a partnership between ICPSR, the University of Michigan School of Education, and the Survey Research Center at U-M's Institute for Social Research, will archive video from the Gates Foundation's Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) initiative. MET gathered video from the classrooms of more than 3,000 teacher volunteers across the country from 2009 to 2011. The videos captured 360-degree views of the classrooms so that teachers and students can be viewed. The videos will be stored at ICPSR and made available initially to MET research partners. Subsequently, the foundation is expected to offer competitive grants to researchers to use the new database.

This project aims to build an alliance between ICPSR, the world's largest social science data archive, and Institutional Repositories to preserve and re-use the legacy of social science data. Over the last 50 years, each improvement in data processing technology resulted in an increase in research data on a variety of social, economic, and political subjects. Through its activities in the Data Preservation Alliance for the Social Sciences, ICPSR has discovered hundreds of social science datasets that could be profitably reanalyzed with current techniques, but many are in danger of being lost forever. Researchers often report that they do not have time to prepare data for archiving, and many legacy studies are in obsolete formats that will require special treatment. By working together, Institutional Repositories, data librarians, and ICPSR can provide both the technical expertise and the personal attention required to save these valuable resources.

This project will address these problems in three ways:
1. We will form partnerships with Institutional Repositories to curate and archive classic social science datasets.
2. We will use these experiences to develop best practices for archiving such materials, which we will publish in a guide for repositories and digital archives. This guide will provide advice on both technical issues, like converting obsolete media and digital preservation, and checklists for discovering important documentation and provenance.
3. We will identify and design services that ICPSR can offer to Institutional Repositories to assist them with specialized tasks in the archiving and dissemination of social science data. We look forward to partnering with Institutional Repositories in the development of a network of distributed digital archives.

The Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research will establish an archive of drug abuse and HIV research data which will primarily include social science and behavioral data. The end goal of the contract will be to: 1) introduce the concept of data sharing to the drug abuse social science researchers, 2) provide technical assistance and financial support to investigators in preparing their data for archiving, 3) inform the field of datasets that are available for secondary analysis and display the utility of this approach for addressing new research questions, 4) provide technical assistance to users of the datasets including organized training and informal site visits, and 5) provide support to principal investigators with high priority National Institute on Drug Abuse data (i.e., longitudinal, HIV/AIDS, health disparities, and comorbities.)

NIDA has funded many datasets in the social and behavioral sciences and is now pursuing archiving these datasets and making them available to other researchers in the field. ICPSR will provide the services of data archiving, technical assistance to investigators preparing their data for archiving, technical assistance to investigators accessing and analyzing archived datasets, and training in secondary data use.

This project makes publicly available an existing longitudinal individual-level database, the Liaoning Multi-Generational Panel (LMGP), that comprises 1.3 million triennial observations of more than 230,000 residents of approximately 628 northeast Chinese communities between 1749 and 1909. The data provide socioeconomic, demographic, and other characteristics for individuals, households, and communities, and record demographic outcomes such as marriage, reproduction and death. The data also record specific disabilities for a subset of adult males. Through record linkage, paternal pedigrees may be reconstructed as far back as seven generations, and kin living outside the household may be identified. Recording of community of residence allows for spatial analysis via GIS techniques. The LMGP will be unique among publicly available population databases because of its time span, volume, detail, and completeness of recording, and because it provides longitudinal data not just on individuals, but on their households, descent groups, and communities. Publications by the PI and the collaborators have already established the suitability of the dataset for quantitative analysis by social and behavioral scientists, but exploitation of its full potential awaits use by the research community after its public release.

Possible applications of the dataset include the study of relationships between demographic behavior, family organization, and socioeconomic status across the life course and across generations, the influence of regional and community on demographic outcomes, and development and assessment of quantitative methods for the analysis of complex longitudinal datasets. Methodological research will be undertaken to develop methods to distribute such data that maximize its ease of use and research potential. Specific tasks are to carry out additional cleaning of the existing data and prepare a linked database of community and regional conditions, reformat the data according to ICPSR and other emerging specifications for archived longitudinal data, prepare the documentation needed for users to make use of the data, and carry out outreach and training via presentations at relevant professional meetings and organization of a User's Group. We will also train interested students to use an initial partial early release of the LMGP data at an ongoing ICPSR summer workshop on the Longitudinal Analysis of Historical Data and use this experience to help us produce better training guides and documentation. Such documentation includes Users' Guides (codebooks) describing the variables, Reference Guides that describe the historical and institutional context of the populations and the registration system, and Training Guides that demonstrate through annotated examples how to manipulate and analyze the data.

ICPSR staff will review four NCAA data collections to ensure their completeness, accuracy, readability, respondent confidentiality, and usability for secondary analysis. These four datasets are:

• Longitudinal database of team-level graduation-rates
• Longitudinal database of team-level Academic Progress Rates
• Study of College Outcomes and Recent Experiences (SCORE)
• Growth, Opportunities, Aspirations and Learning of Students (GOALS)

While pertinent information about each of these datasets is expected in electronic form, ICPSR possesses a wide variety of scanning equipment so that it can easily transform any hard-copy documentation into electronic format to accompany the data files. For each collection ICPSR staff will produce a full suite of data and documentation files including raw data (ASCII) files, data definition statements compatible with the popular statistical analysis packages (i.e., SPSS, SAS and Stata) and system files for each of these packages, which will allow immediate access to the data. Complete data documentation (codebooks) in PDF format will include detailed information on each variable (e.g., variable name and label, value labels, question text, universe statements, and missing data definitions) as well as displays of univariate frequency distributions. ICPSR will also make each NCAA dataset available through its online access system, SDA (Survey Documentation and Analysis). This system provides a data exploration tool for researchers to obtain quick access to all variables and documentation within a dataset, perform interactive analyses, and specify and download a customized subset of variables and/or data records for further study.

ICPSR's data archiving operations have been developed over more than forty years, and modified frequently in that period to conform to changing technical and substantive requirements of social science researchers. Upon receipt of any data collection from the NCAA, ICPSR will prepare and retain security copies of all original data files and documentation in its preservation archive. ICPSR then will communicate with staff at NCAA to resolve any problems discovered during the examination and evaluation process. Finally, full descriptions of processed data collections will be added to both the ICPSR and NCAA Web sites and made available for public dissemination through normal ICPSR policies and procedures.

Throughout the data archiving process, ICPSR will work closely with NCAA staff to make certain that the public-use files meet NCAA confidentiality and data quality guidelines. ICPSR will ask NCAA staff to review processed data and documentation files as a final check before they are placed on the ICPSR server for downloading to researchers. After approval, ICPSR will work closely with NCAA staff to make certain that any data available from NCAA directly matches that released in the public-use files. All four collections will be processed and available for download from ICPSR, as directed by the NCAA.

Beginning in 2003, the National Institutes of Health developed an explicit data sharing policy which encouraged scientists whose research is funded by NIH to develop ways to share their research data with the public and, more specifically, their fellow scientists. This policy, coupled with other federal data sharing requirements and the explicit recognition of the synergistic value to science of broad-based data sharing among scientists with similar substantive interests, has led to a substantial and important expansion of structured and unstructured data archives and repositories. The first cycle of funding for this project established the basis for data infrastructure to support demographers housed at population centers and those researchers whose data collections have particular relevance to demographic research. The project proposed here is a continuation of a five year cooperative agreement that provides data archiving, preservation and dissemination, and other data infrastructure services.

The specific aims of this project complement the original agreement's goals, which included (1) data acquisition, curation, dissemination, and preservation, (2) restricted use data sharing, (3) user support and outreach, and (4) improvements in the science of data sharing including disclosure risk evaluation, complex data conceptualization and shared frameworks for data sharing (the legal framework) and data documentation (the Data Documentation Initiative). In this phase of the project, we bring new technologies and data architecture to help reengineer the way we provide these services and to expand the integrated infrastructure support that will help improve the delivery of the parts of the demographic data collection that reside at ICPSR and those that reside in affiliated population centers. The goal is to work toward a legal, technical, and substantive framework in which to share research data in the population sciences. Specifically, with partners at the Carolina Population Center, Minnesota Population Center, Hopkins Population Center, Rand Population Research Center and the Michigan Population Studies Center, we will add new technologies to provide open source methods of data curation and dissemination. The value of shared data resources such as Data Sharing for Demographic Research for health sciences cannot be understated. The analysis of secondary data undergirds many of the important findings on health disparities, fertility and family formation, sources of differential mortality, and determinants of many health behaviors.

This project supports work by the National Archive of Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) in the development of enhanced archival research materials and extraction tools that facilitate the use of the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) study. The current application focuses on core enhancements that will establish a archival framework using the five most recent NHANES panels (1999 to 2008), creating a more uniform data collection and performing a thorough evaluation of historical documentation and related metadata that are not currently part of the NHANES public-use files but could facilitate original research and grant development. NACDA has supported the NHANES since the mid-1980s, but the evolving nature of the study requires we reevaluate our existing archival model. A recent evaluation of data quality has identified specific enhancements that will make the data more accessible for secondary research and introduce it to a broad new community of researchers.

We will implement a focused archival delivery system that will allow us to address four distinct research needs:
1) Enhancements to Data Structure: We will update and standardize the NHANES data to meet current archival standards for biomedical data collections.
2) Enhancements to Documentation: We will significantly enhance the extensive documentation currently available for the NHANES. This will include user-friendly versions of codebooks, crosswalks, and cross-indexing questionnaires and other survey instruments. More importantly, we will create dynamic link-driven online documentation files for the NHANES using XML and DDI compliant file format standards.
3) Enhancements to Biomedical Data Content: We will review the NHANES collection of biomedical, laboratory, and clinical data files and dynamically link the data fields to their associated documentation for straightforward reference. These files represent the strength and core value of the NHANES study but are difficult for researchers new to biomedical and biosocial research to use effectively.
4) Enhancements to Value Added Support Services: We will provide the NHANES a full suite of support tools and value added products. Included in this suite of tools will be analysis-ready system files, the capacity to use the NHANES within our Web-based analysis system, and the studies' inclusion in our dynamic online bibliography that is searchable and has stable links to all electronically available publications. This work addresses the organization of research data to provide access to and information on biological and medical indicators of health and make it more accessible to social scientists. The project will help researchers develop original research that studies the impacts of medical tests, obesity and other health factors on the lives of individuals and how their demographic, economic and educational characteristics impact health outcomes.

This project will provide extremely valuable specialized training in historical demographic techniques for analyzing longitudinal data to students and researchers working in a variety of demographic sub-fields. The rational for the project is simple: Historical demography has a long history of important contributions to the theory, methods, and practice of population studies, especially in the use of longitudinal data. Historical demographers are currently making important contributions to mainstream demographic research in fertility, mortality, family systems, aging, and migration. Indeed, the size, scope, and temporal and geographic coverage of databases currently available and under construction are unprecedented. Since historical data are often longitudinal and multi-level, they raise subtle methodological problems.

Meaningful analysis often requires specialized methodologies, such as family reconstitution and back projection that are unique to historical research. Since they are based on fundamental principles of demographic theory, students trained in these methods are both prepared for historical research and better able to use complex contemporary sources. Historical data can be a perfect model for analysis of demographic processes. The number of observed covariates is usually limited, and historical demographers have excelled in creatively using longitudinal and genealogical information to construct contextual and time-varying covariates. The longitudinal analysis techniques students learn will provide a roadmap for use with any dataset with a time dimension, including many large contemporary datasets collected through NIH funding.

This program will offer both formal courses and opportunities for practical experience with active researchers. Students will be introduced to datasets and advanced statistical techniques at the forefront of current research. This project will continue an interdisciplinary project that trains students, researchers and faculty in the use and analysis of historical longitudinal demographic data. This program will enable and enhance demographic research using advanced statistical techniques in fertility, mortality, family systems, aging, and migration, using new and existing historical and contemporary datasets, many of them collected through NIH funding mechanisms.

The mission of the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data (NACJD) is to facilitate research in criminal justice and criminology, through the preservation, enhancement, and sharing of computerized data resources; through the production of original research based on archived data; and through specialized training workshops in quantitative analysis of crime and justice data.

This project is working to transform teaching in the social sciences by infusing quantitative literacy throughout the curriculum and by providing undergraduates opportunities to engage in active research experiences using the most advanced social science data. The primary project activities are creating, disseminating, and assessing teaching materials that make it easy for instructors to integrate data analysis in non-methodology courses. The goal is to reduce the "quantitative reasoning gap" between what students learn in early courses and the importance of empirical research in the social sciences. The partners in this project are building upon two extant sources of data (1) the Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN), which distributes teaching modules based on U.S. Census data, and (2) the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the world's largest social science data archive.

A second goal of the project is to recruit experienced faculty members to develop new tools for assessing student learning and to conduct assessments in their classes. These assessment tools are intended for distribution with existing and new teaching materials. New software and teaching strategies are being developed to simplify complex data for presentation to undergraduates.

A third goal is to provide training for faculty members to introduce them to the characteristics of new data sets, relevant statistical techniques, teaching strategies, and assessment procedures. Much of the dissemination to end users is taking place through the use of cost-effective Webinars. The communication resources of the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, the National Numeracy Network, and the approximately 700 colleges, universities, and research institutions who are members of ICPSR are to be mobilized to disseminate information about new teaching materials. Web sites are to be enhanced to help faculty form teaching communities within disciplines. This approach is expected to help bring about a transformative change in the ways that undergraduates encounter and understand the role of research in the social sciences.

The Quantitative Social Science Digital Library (QSSDL) Pathway provides a portal to materials and modules that integrate quantitative analysis with the teaching of the social sciences. QSSDL is a partnership of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and the Social Science Data Analysis Network (SSDAN), both at the University of Michigan, and the American Sociological Association, the American Political Science Association, and the Association of American Geographers.

Quantitative analysis has long played a key role in social science research. Influential voices have been calling for ways make data analysis a staple feature in a large variety of courses in the social sciences, including introductory courses. This pathway is designed to help instructors find high quality teaching materials and datasets for student exercises and research. It is building on the rapid acceleration in the availability of data, the creation of new educational tools, and growing interest by instructors in making innovative use of digital resources for instruction.

The integration of this social science pathway into the portfolio of NSDL Pathway projects adds a new resource to the existing networked infrastructure of repositories and professional associations. Experts in the Science Education Resource Center (SERC) at Carleton College are providing pedagogical, assessment, and evaluation services. In particular, SERC is conducting evaluations that include pre- and post-intervention assessments of faculty use of QSSDL resources on ten selected campuses, and QSSDL teaching materials are being linked to the "Pedagogy in Action" server at SERC. The QSSDL Pathway helps individuals who create resources by providing archiving and preservation services for those lacking adequate institutional support. This project also builds on ICPSR's long and successful model of sustainability, which is based on a diverse portfolio of memberships held by colleges and universities, research grants, and contracts.

ICPSR is working on the third phase of curriculum development for Digital Preservation Management: Effective Short-Term Strategies for Long-Term Problems, a project to continue to develop and build on the core curriculum of this popular continuing education program. The workshop curriculum provides the means for an organization to develop feasible action plans that address organizational (the what), technological (the how), and resource (the how much) requirements for digital preservation.

In addition to continuing the popular five-day workshops, this two-year project is developing one-day and two-day advanced workshops on key organizational topics and challenges for digital preservation, such as managing preservation metadata, tools and workflow, and legal issues associated with digital preservation. The project augments and enhances the award-winning online tutorial developed for the workshop series on the fundamentals of digital preservation, including an ongoing compilation of case studies and exemplars. The project extends the potential reach and impact of the curriculum by increasing the base of experienced workshop instructors through the establishment and promulgation of a train-the-trainers program.

The curriculum emphasizes short-term risk management strategies while research and development go forward in creating longer-term solutions, including formal standards and common practice. Topics covered include: program planning, gap analysis, risk assessment, resource requirements, legal issues, digital object management (e.g., metadata, content formats and standards), archival storage, preservation planning, disaster preparedness, bridging preservation and access, and technology responsiveness. The workshops stress the importance of leveraging both managerial and technical perspectives in developing institutional programs for digital preservation.

The core workshop curriculum of this successful continuing education program was developed in two phases at Cornell University Library with NEH support. Continuity in the transition of the workshop program to Michigan will be ensured by the involvement of the two developers of the curriculum who are serving as the principal investigator at ICPSR and the chair of the advisory board for Phase 3.

This project is the renewal of the grant that maintains and expands the Health and Medical Care Archive (HMCA). This project will provide data preparation and archiving services to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and extend the work supported by grant #050700, awarded in March of 2005. Through this renewal, the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) will continue and enhance a set of activities that, over the past several years, has brought into the public domain a significant number of empirical data collections on health care and health care policy for research use. These activities include: a) the acquisition, preservation, processing, and dissemination of new data collections in HMCA; b) updating existing collections to enhance their usability; c) a continued formal affiliation with the foundation through an associate membership in ICPSR; d) conference participation, which enables HMCA staff to interact directly with researchers about the products and services the archive can provide to the health care community; e) a comprehensive set of training opportunities to expose more researchers to available datasets; f) increased interaction with RWJF staff and scholar groups such as the New Connections Initiative for which access to secondary data collections is a key component; and g) a new emphasis on outreach to the health research community by making the entire HMCA collection of datasets publicly accessible to all users.

The Fenway Institute at Fenway Community Health has become the first community-based organization to be awarded a Population Research Development Grant by the federal government and the first federally funded research center to focus specifically on sexual minority population research. This grant supports the creation of technical resources and compiling of data with the goals of producing cutting-edge research on lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities and training the next generation of LGBT scholars. Priority areas are behavioral research on the transmission of HIV; characteristics and quality of life of LGBT families and households; and demographic aspects of LGBT health, morbidity, disability and mortality. The Fenway Institute will provide leadership to develop a sustainable LGBT Health Population Research Center, coordinating and guiding all aspects of the program. ICPSR will work with Fenway to develop a special topic archive, collecting available data related to LGBT population groups and demographic research from a broad variety of sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, state and local governments, and research programs at universities and medical institutions.

The mission of the National Archive on Computerized Data on Aging (NACDA) is to contribute to the intellectual vitality of the gerontological sciences. We accomplish this through the activities of the project staff under the guidance of established researchers who lead the project team, and a growing body of NACDA Research Affiliates drawn from the broader research community guiding NACDA acquisition goals. NACDA intends to accomplish four specific aims over the next five-year project period.

First, NACDA will acquire and preserve datasets of scientific importance to the gerontological research community especially in the areas of longitudinal data, international data, data on minority aging, historical data, and data that are otherwise not readily available. This will require a focused effort to encourage researchers to share and archive their data for use by the wider scientific community. NACDA's activities in training, and the provision of resources and tools have nurtured the culture of data sharing and archiving within the social science community and facilitated its growth.

Second, NACDA will distribute data and documentation to researchers in a form that will facilitate their use, and will do so in an efficient and cost-effective manner. This will involve the creation of data and documentation products that can be used more easily than the versions created by the original data producer and continued leadership in the use of new modes of data storage and transmission. New technologies and presentation strategies such as our online bibliography, variable level search capacity, and ongoing Web enhancements will significantly improve the vitality of our data in the coming years.

Third, NACDA will provide support and assistance to NIA-funded researchers who are producing data, in order to facilitate their data sharing activities and the long-term preservation of the data. NACDA will continue to be an active participant in the research process, particularly in the realm of developing tools, training and support for the preparation of data for secondary users. During the next five years, we will enhance these services to make the process easier, and will implement innovative solutions that recognize the diversity of approaches that researchers are using to share their data.

Fourth, NACDA will provide user support and technical services to facilitate secondary data analysis in gerontology. As an aspect of this goal, we see the integration of search and analysis tools within our Web site as enhancing the ability of researchers to utilize the array of data contained in the archive. As part of this specific aim, NACDA will retrofit its existing collection to make available ready to use system files for popular analysis software packages.

This project will continue a long-term interdisciplinary project that studies the relationship between population, agricultural land use, and environment in the Great Plains of the U.S. Earlier phases of this project have led to the development of databases and an interdisciplinary research team, and to the publication of important research findings. It has also revealed rich opportunities for continued research. Building on a large database created in earlier phases of the project, the proposed research will develop a sample of land use and land cover (LULC) data across the region based on interpreted aerial photography and satellite imagery, for the time period from the 1930s through 2005. This deep time series of LULC data will enable us to develop specific hypotheses and to investigate the role of scale in each. The key thesis asserts that a substantial portion of the Great Plains region has never been converted from grassland to cropland. The LULC data will allow us to test whether the spatial location of agriculture has remained fixed, despite the tremendous adjustment of farm size in the region since the 1940s. The new data will also be used for other analyses, including land use change associated with irrigation, demographic change and the abundance and diversity of wildlife. The LULC data will also enhance a body of research that relates the history of family formation and population dynamics to variations in the scale of environmental impacts and change. The research will also build on a newly created set of biogeochemical models for the entire region to produce region-wide and sub-regional long-term carbon and nitrogen budgets. The nutrient budget research will allow the investigators to study issues of scale in human-environment interactions by exploring the relative impact of changes in the environment that are driven by local population change (such as urbanization and suburbanization), as opposed to global changes that drive markets (for example those that spur the growth of livestock production or irrigated agriculture).

This grant is a renewal of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Data Archive, which is funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and located at ICPSR. This award continues the core functions of the archive: to provide immediate and reliable access to substance abuse and mental health research data from a centralized location; to provide the data in a various formats, including online analysis; to ensure that the identity of respondents in data collections held by the archive are protected, including conducting disclosure analyses; to provide user support; and to provide training and dissemination about the project through various mechanisms, including workshops and presentations at professional conferences. New work conducted under the award will include developing a mechanism for distributing restricted-use files, such as analysis through a Web portal (e.g., ICPSR's Virtual Data Enclave, VDE) or through online analysis without the option for microdata download.

The Agency of Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has funded a series of R21 and R24 grants to expand and enhance the existing body of knowledge and evidence on care for complex patients. The Abt team understands the challenges facing AHRQ in meeting the goals of the Prevention/Care Management Portfolio at this critical time in the transformation of the health care system and is ready to assist AHRQ. Abt Associates offers an outstanding team to support AHRQ’s efforts to facilitate sharing among the R21 and R24 research grantees with each other and other researchers via the Learning Network and creation of public use datasets. Technical assistance (TA) to the AHRQ grantees in the creation of public use data sets will be provided by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) via a subcontract with Abt Associates.

ICPSR shall do the following:

1. Develop and implement a plan for a technical assistance program for 2008 (non-ARRA R21) and 2010 (ARRA R21 and R24) grantees. The plan should reflect the unique needs of the researchers. For example, the infrastructure development (R24) grants will share a requirement that they establish and follow through specific plans to make any new datasets available to future researchers, even those outside of the original institution. This particular feat has proved extremely challenging to researchers and funders in the past. We foresee a tremendous advantage to the program of grants if there can be technical assistance to aid grantees in finding solutions to common technical problems with data and in particular with solutions to the building of public-access datasets, including important protections for personal data. The plan also should include details on how grantees will request technical assistance, what technical assistance will be provide to all grantees (content and format), and the level of technical assistance that will be available to grantees.
2. Develop and implement a dissemination plan including the 2008 R21, the 2010 R21and the R24 grantees. The plan should include: development of materials targeted to researchers and policy-makers to describe study results (from R21 grants) as well as the newly created data sets, and a marketing plan to advertise the availability of the newly created public use data sets and increase use of the data sets.
3. Develop and implement an evaluation plan. The plan should include outcomes of interest, data collection strategies, timeline for data collection, analysis plan, and format for the final report.
4. Develop and implement a marketing plan to insure the research products of the ARRA grants designed to evaluate health care delivery for complex patients in coordination with partners at Abt and the TOO at the Agency of Health Care Research and Quality.

Little educational material is freely available to serve the needs of basic research methods courses and those available in genres such as econometrics may require substantial mathematical prerequisites. The creation of accessible problem sets and and lecture notes is time intensive, but methods courses requiring such preparation are becoming more widespread across all types of institutions. OPOSSEM, the Online Portal of Social Science Education and Methodology, solves these problems by providing various resources for teaching social science research methods for edcuators in secondary, undergraduate, and postgraduate settings. The web portal is hosted by the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), which provides for its long term longevity.

This project, which develops this portal, has substantial intellectual merit. It has the potential to transform methodological instruction in the social sciences by adopting cutting edge and broadly available technologies and methodologies to promote the formation of educational networks and communities among secondary, undergraduate, and graduate instructors.

This project also has substantial broader impacts. First, project materials will be used as part of a pilot project by Native American students at the Ihanktowan Community College on the Yankton Sioux Tribe Reservation. These students will be provided with resources through this project that may encourage them to consider the social sciences as a major or graduate pursuit. Second, the portal will provide resources that will strengthen undergraduate training in the social sciences. This will result in the pool of potential graduate students in these fields to be better prepared to undertake graduate study. Third and finally, the project reaches out to secondary school teachers in both the social sciences and the mathematical sciences. Many mathematically oriented high school students lean to the natural sciences because they see applications to those sciences in their math and science textbooks. Some of these students may be encouraged to consider the social sciences if they are exposed to similar examples in those sciences. The portal will make this more likely.

This project continues the work of the AERA Grants Program, which provides competitive research grants to both doctoral students and education research scientists who conduct secondary analyses of large-scale national and international data sets from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). The project also will carry out two new strands of work: (1) through a partnership with the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, managed by the Urban Institute, the project enables access to and use of state longitudinal data bases for scientific research on student learning, performance, and achievement in STEM; and (2) a programmatic component to foster secondary analysis of data emerging from NSF-funded investigator-initiated STEM projects that have opportunities for further discovery will be explored.

The AERA Grants Program seeks to increase the capacity of the STEM education field to conduct high quality research using large-scale data sets through its grants, the findings from workshops, and the publications resulting from "think tank" activities that explore critical issues in STEM education research.

ICPSR will provide expertise with the Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) Cache Manager component of the private LOCKSS network, as well as assist in the packaging process, consult on strategies for implementing tools for automating the auditing system, and deploy and manage the LOCKSS instances located at ICPSR. Additionally, ICPSR's Digital Preservation Officer, Nancy McGovern, who will have Primary Investigator responsibility for the project at ICPSR, will consult with the overall project team to ensure that the auditing system and policy schema are in harmony with established Trustworthy Repositories Audit and Certification (TRAC) standards and policies.

ICPSR will be responsible for the following set of tasks as part of the Child Care and Early Education Research Connections cooperative agreement:

Web site infrastructure (IWS and RDB): ICPSR will be responsible for housing, installing, configuring, maintaining, evaluating, and planning the enhancement of the Web site infrastructure on which the Interactive Web Site (IWS) and Research Data Base (RDB) rely. This will include hardware, network, system software (Linux), Web server applications (Apache, Cocoon, Tomcat), the relational database (Oracle) infrastructure developed during the first 5 years of the project and extending to new technologies incorporated in the second 5 years. ICPSR will be responsible for infrastructure supporting two broad functions, the Manage function through which project staff manage content for the Web site, and the Discover function through which users find the information they need.

Web site design (IWS and RDB): ICPSR will be responsible for maintaining and enhancing the reliability and usability of the Research Connections Web site. Enhancements will include Web design features such as the appearance, navigation, search-browse, and rich linkage elements of the site. These will require changes to both the Interactive Web Site (IWS) and the underlying Research Data Base (RDB).

ICPSR will also work on developing and implementing enhancements that increase the ease of use and the overall functional appeal of the IWS such as the ability to browse the collection through a topical classification system, better use of the thesaurus in searching, and more Web 2.0 (user-generated site content) features.

Also planned are fundamental changes to the underlying architecture of the RDB to bring it more in line with international and archival community standards, such as FEDORA. ICPSR will conduct a review of the current full text search tools and experiment with ways to improve search result relevancy, possibly leading to significant changes in how searching is done.

The exact feature list and task priorities will be set in consultation with NCCP and the project Steering Committee.

Archive of Datasets (AD): ICPSR will acquire, process, document, archive, and disseminate research data relevant to child care and early education policy for use in secondary data analysis. Research Connections will continue to maintain a list of large-scale surveys and key administrative data that should be considered for inclusion in the AD. This list will continue to be reviewed and revised. Priorities for acquiring data and the level of processing that datasets will receive will be set in conjunction with NCCP, OPRE and the appropriate committee of the project's Advisory Council.

ICPSR will generate high-quality metadata that will be used to describe, index and search the holdings. Data holdings will be formatted for easy download and subsetting. Many collections will be setup for on-line analysis and quick reporting. A process for providing access to restricted-use data, audio and video material is in place and will be further refined based on feedback from users and the relevant stake holders.

Technical Assistance (TA): The IWS already contains a number of elements supporting the TA objective: email links for users to ask questions, report problems, or give feedback, tutorials explaining key concepts of understanding research, data preparation, and data usage, user guides explaining key aspects of complex data collections, sample setups for loading and using data in statistical packages, listservs and bulletin boards to allow theme or dataset oriented collaboration. Where indicated these tools will be refined. Additional tutorials and user guides are planned, as well as a more user friendly on-line analysis interface.

ICPSR will also contribute to the TA component by responding to electronic and telephone questions related to the use and preparation of datasets, through in-person activities such as attending conferences, planning and presenting mini workshops on relevant datasets at conferences. ICPSR will continue to plan and host a multi-day, intensive workshop, currently presented in Ann Arbor, MI each summer, on a major topic covered that can be analyzed using data available through the AD.

ICPSR will reach out to OPRE grantees whose projects involve the production of a research dataset to assist them in preparing their data for dissemination and long-term preservation through Research Connections. AD staff will contact OPRE grantees as soon as possible and throughout the life cycle of the research to provide support aimed at facilitating the eventual deposit in the Research Connections Archive of Datasets.

This project will be undertaken by an interdisciplinary team from four institutions: the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS), Harvard Medical School (HMS), the University of Michigan (UM), and Columbia University (CU). The team has unparalleled expertise in research on military mental health (USUHS), general population psychiatric epidemiology (HMS), large-scale epidemiological data collection (UM), and neurobiological-clinical research on suicidal behaviors (CU). We will do a multi-phase epidemiological study that considers diverse psychosocial and neurobiological risk and protective factors for suicidal behaviors and secondary outcomes in order to make evidence-based recommendations for implementation of army suicide prevention interventions. An enriched version of the Army Suicide Event Report (ASER) system will be developed to define the primary outcomes incorporating information from the Department of Defense Medical Mortality Registry (MMR) and Total Army Injury and Health Outcomes Database (TAIHOD). Our study design will include both a retrospective case-control component for quick efficient hypothesis testing and a prospective survey component to predict subsequent suicidal behaviors and secondary outcomes (onset, persistence, worsening of DSM-IV disorders, suicide ideation, suicide plans). We will also use data from the ongoing Pre- and Post-Deployment Health Reassessment Program (PDHRP) surveys as secondary outcomes. The case-control survey will study soldiers who made nonfatal attempts and relatives of soldiers who committed suicide in a psychological autopsy framework. Parallel data will be collected from carefully matched controls. Blood samples and, in the case of nonfatal attempters and their controls, saliva samples will be collected to allow neurobiological risk and protective factors to be studied. The survey component will include active duty personnel across all phases of army service. Survey reports will be linked to subsequent ASER records and PDHRP reports to study prospective associations of predictors with suicidal behaviors and secondary outcomes. A number of innovative measurement, design and analysis features will be used to increase chances of discovering effective intervention possibilities. The problem of army suicide is one of great importance because an effective military force requires its members to be not only physically healthy but also mentally healthy. The relevance of a current study of army suicide is heightened by the alarming rise in the suicide rate of U.S. Army personnel over the past five years. The research proposed here has the potential to be of great value in helping the Army select optimally effective interventions to address this problem.

Description The Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research (MCUAAAR) is one of six resource centers for minority aging research (RCMAR). The overall objective of the Center is to foster high quality scholarly and empirical training, research, and interventions focused upon health promotion and health among older racial and ethnic minority populations. This application builds upon the work and expertise of faculty and students at the University of Michigan and Wayne State University to empirically investigate African American health inequalities over the life-course.

The central goal of this project is to produce a harmonized dataset of U.S. family and fertility surveys spanning the 1955-2002 period, including the 1955 and 1960 Growth of American Families (GAF); the 1965, 1970, and 1975 National Fertility Survey (NFS); and the 1973, 1976, 1982, 1988, 1995, and 2002 National Survey of Family Growth (Cycles 1-6 of the NSFG). This new Integrated Fertility Survey Series (IFSS) and its associated data products will facilitate analyses across nearly a 50-year period, yielding new insights into changes in fertility and the family. The past five decades have witnessed marked changes in family and fertility patterns. While scientists from a broad range of disciplines have produced a large body of research on these topics, the ability to make comparisons over time -- a central task for understanding family change -- has been inhibited by difficulties in using multiple datasets to make time-series comparisons (e.g., changes in universe, weighting procedures, imputation protocols, question wording, variable availability). This is especially true when attempting to include surveys from the earlier years (i.e., 1950s and 1960s). Yet these early surveys, used in combination with later ones, would provide vital benchmarks for documenting and understanding transformations in fertility and the family. Our project has four goals: (1) to prepare clean, standardized electronic data files and documentation for eleven fertility surveys and to archive and document the files at a single source site using Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) archival standards; (2) to produce a harmonized data file with metadata; (3) to create online data analysis files with an analytic interface; and, (4) to provide user training in the use of the harmonized data file and other data products created by the project.

As an addition to the Integrating U.S. Fertility Surveys project, the purpose of this supplement is to increase the eventual use and value of these data by augmenting the documentation of harmonized variables beyond that proposed in the parent grant. This effort will enhance the interpretability of analyses, acceleterate the tempo of scientific advance, and lead to new research.

ICPSR holds the physical and digital materials assoicated with the Cornell Sutdy of Occupational Retirement, a 1952 survey of more than 4,000 individuals. Four follow-up studies were conducted every one to two years. The archive is comprised of punched cards and documentation that were collected and analyzed in the 1950s and 1960s, painting a broad-based picture of retirement in the 1950s. The data represent a unique, large-scale data source that has never been made publically available to demographers, sociologists, and economists, who could now investigate state-of-the-art research questions and apply advanced multivariate models to these data.
The aims of ICPSR's portion of this project, under the auspices of the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging, are to a) conduct a complete inventory of the physical and digital archives, b) read all the punched cards and convert the data to modern, tab-delimited format to prevent future loss/obsolescence, and c) provide pilot data to seed an application to the National Institute on Aging.