|
 DPLS
News
DPLS News contains articles about local, national, and international
data issues.
It is published twice a semester by the library staff.
Editor: Joanne Juhnke, Associate Special Librarian
Contributors:Lu Chou, Senior Special Librarian, Jay
Dougherty, Library Assistant, & Cindy Severt, Senior Special Librarian
September 2002
Table of Contents
A Question of Race
New Studies at DPLS
DPLS Staff News
Addition to DPLS On-Line Archive
IASSIST 2002
Data Quality Act, Greater Accuracy or Reduced Access?
Internet Corner
Measuring America: the Decennial Censuses from 1790-2000
Data Query
Global Forest Watch
Area Resource File
A Question of Race
It’s a demographic survey staple: right after the
questions about age and sex, the question about racial origin. However,
unlike the first two, the “race question” is anything but
cut-and-dried.
 A
recent initiative by University of California regent Ward Connerly has
brought the issue into the spotlight again, less than a year after Census
2000 redistricting results were released. Connerly has proposed a “Racial
Privacy Initiative” that would ban the state of California from
collecting racial data, with certain exemptions for health and criminal
justice agencies.
Academic researchers at California’s universities are among those
concerned, not only that data currently collected by the state would
become unavailable, but that their own research done under university
auspices would be curtailed. The initiative will not appear on the November
2002 ballot due to inadequate verification of signatures, but will likely
be put to the voters in March 2004.
Connerly’s proposal comes on the heels of the newly-configured
racial data collected by the 2000 Census. In response to a movement
in favor of adding a “multi-racial” category to the census
questionnaire, the Census Bureau instead provided the option of checking
more than one category. While the census has collected data on race
since its inception in 1790, respondents have been allowed to self-identify
only since 1970. The 2000 Census was the first time that respondents
could identify with multiple races.
A number of civil rights groups put considerable effort into encouraging
people who identify with minority races to check only a single box,
anticipating that checking multiple boxes might cause losses in how
their groups were counted. Whether or not such efforts affected the
responses, 2.4% of respondents (6.8 million) did in fact claim more
than one racial identity. Ninety-three percent of those reported exactly
two.
The American Sociological Association (ASA) issued a statement in August
in response to these and other public debates on race. Their statement
called for government agencies and academic researchers to continue
collection of data on race and ethnicity. Such data makes it possible
to identify and respond to such issues as discrimination and stratification
in health, housing, and education.
The ASA committee also considered, and accepted, the Human Genome Project’s
declaration that race is not a biologically valid concept. However,
the statement argues that race is definitely worthy of sociological
study since people do in fact attribute racial identity and act on that
basis.
With biology and attribution pointing in opposite directions, we can
count on an ongoing debate as to whether race counts, and how to account
for it.
Table of contents
New Studies at DPLS
· American National Election Studies cumulative
data file, 1948-2000.
· Current Population Survey, October person-household files,
1968-2000.
· Current Population Survey, October uniform files, 1968-2000.
· International Social Survey Program: Social Inequality
III, 1999 [CD-ROM version].
· Marriage and Divorce Data, 1989-1995 [National Center for
Health Statistics].
· National Education Longitudinal Study, 1988: base year
through fourth follow-up [1988-2000].
· National Household Sample Survey, 1998 [Brazil]: public
use file.
· National Longitudinal Surveys of Labor Market Experience,
Youth Cohort: 1979-2000 [main file and work history data].
· Welfare, Children and Families: A Three-city Study, Wave
1, 1999.
· World Development Indicators, 2002.
· Field California Polls, 1999-2001.
· Terrorism Reaction Poll # 2 [September 14-15, 2001].
· Terrorism Reaction Poll # 3 [September 21-22, 2001].
Table of contents
DPLS Staff News
Please join us in welcoming our new student Systems Administrator,
Josh Saunders. A junior majoring in Electrical Engineering, Josh recently
completed the DoIT Student Technical Training Program, an intensive
training curriculum designed to give students the technical and customer
service skills to support information technology within UW-Madison campus
departments. Upon completion of his Bachelor’s degree Josh plans
to go into computer architecture, but, continuing the fine DPLS tradition
of having outside interests, he would eventually like to own a restaurant
and nightclub!
Table of contents
Addition to DPLS On-Line Archive
With the recent controversy surrounding the Catholic Church,
many Catholics as well as non-Catholics are wondering about the social
values and attitudes of priests toward Catholic doctrine and its relation
to the outside world. The American Catholic Priesthood Survey, 1971,
now available on the DPLS web site, reflects the outlook of priests
and resignee priests regarding social policy of the Catholic Church
thirty years ago. Conducted six years after the Catholic Church’s
groundbreaking Vatican II council (1963-1965), which deeply affected
the church’s social outlook, the survey provides a snapshot of
attitudes in the priesthood at that watershed time.
The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) conducted the survey at
the commission of the U.S. Bishops. Five thousand active priests completed
the survey, while a slightly amended form was given to 1,000 priests
who had resigned or taken an absence from the priesthood.
The study was first released to the public in June 1996. Users can view
the documentation and codebooks as PDF files and download the data at
http://dpls.dacc.wisc.edu/catholic/.
Table of contents
IASSIST 2002
The International Association for Social Science Information
Service & Technology (IASSIST) annual conference for 2002 was held
in June at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. The conference theme
was Accelerating Access, Collaboration & Dissemination. With the
help of a scholarship from the Multitype Advisory Library Committee
of the South Central Library System, Lu Chou from DPLS joined the 160
people from 12 countries in attendance.
Many important issues were discussed during the three-day conference.
In the plenary session, “An International Perspective on Confidentiality
and Access to Governmentally Produced Social Science Data,” speakers
from the U.S. Census Bureau and Statistics Canada raised the issue of
balance between providing easy access to government data and protecting
respondents’ identities. Dr. Tom W. Smith from the National Opinion
Research Center emphasized the importance of preserving social science
data by sharing a real story about finding and recovering the 1963 Kennedy
Assassination Study. The Roper Center and ICPSR invited researchers
to re-examine the virtue of polls and media survey datasets, which can
provide timely public opinion data and present rich resources for analyzing
social trends.
At this year’s poster session, the Roper Center unveiled new features
for their iPoll Viewer. The National Archives and Records Administration
(NARA) demonstrated an online search and retrieval utility. The new
Davidson Data Center and Network project at the University of Michigan
in Ann Arbor focused on data in transition economies. Health Canada
has built a dynamic user interface to disseminate Canadian health data
from their web site. Several GIS products combined mapping capabilities
with social science data. And in a well-received debut, the redesigned
IASSIST web site made its appearance at http://www.iassistdata.org/.
DPLS will be hosting the IASSIST conference at the Pyle Center in May
2004. Stay tuned for more news as the conference nears!
Table of contents
Data Quality Act, Greater
Accuracy or Reduced Access?
Public Law 106-554, the Data Quality Act, goes into effect
October 1, 2002. Designed to promote the accuracy of scientific information
used by federal agencies, it requires agencies to post guidelines on
their websites for ensuring the quality of the information and statistics
they disseminate, “including administrative mechanisms allowing
affected persons to seek and obtain correction of information maintained
and disseminated by the agency that does not comply with the guidelines.”
(OMB draft Information Quality Guidelines, http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/inforeg/iqg_draft_guidelines.pdf.)
Under this law if an error were confirmed and not corrected, an agency
would have to remove the information from its website.
In the wake of 9/11 many federal agencies were quick to remove from
their websites information that was thought to be of interest to terrorists.
These removals, combined with the Data Quality Act, appears to indicate
a shift from government agency disclosure to a conservative information
climate.
Even as the Data Quality Act goes into effect, the White House has launched
an effort (HR 5215) to allow statistical agencies to share economic
data. Under current law the Bureau of the Census, the Bureau of Economic
Analysis, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics are prohibited from sharing
economic data. Such segregation has resulted in anomalies and inconsistencies
(not to mention redundancies) with regard to the data collected. The
proposal aims to improve the accuracy of economic statistics, reduce
the burden and cost of statistical programs, and safeguard confidentiality
with a pan-agency disclosure policy. Can a National Statistical Office
be far behind?
Table of contents
Internet Corner
Measuring America: The
Decennial Censuses from 1790 to 2000
In this 149 page report, the Census Bureau traces the history of the
census from the late 18th century to the turn of the millennium. The
report provides questionnaires from each census and shows how the survey
questions reveal gradual socio-economic change in America. There are
also individual histories written for all 22 censuses that include the
historical impact of each census and changes in the way the census was
administered. Methodology for each census is also included. Note: DPLS
has a print copy available in the library.
Measuring America is available at http://www.census.gov/prod/2002pubs/pol02-ma.pdf.
Data Query
A small subset of the World Bank’s World Development
Indicators is available for searching on-line via Data Query. 54 time
series indicators for 207 countries and 18 groups spanning a 5 year
period from 1996 to 2000 are available. Users have several options to
display the data including by index, percentage change, and graphs.
Users can also export the result in standard formats. Sources and definitions
are also available. The full World Development Indicators on CD-ROM
is available at DPLS.
The Data Query web site can be found at http://devdata.worldbank.org/data-query.
Global Forest Watch
The World Research Institute presents Global Forest Watch,
a site dedicated exclusively to data regarding deforestation. The site
includes a large data warehouse from which users can download up to
35 gigabytes of data. A free registration is required for data download.
Map-based analysis is also available for a number of countries and users
can customize maps for Gabon, Cameroon, and Canada. Land-sat 7 satellite
images of forests in Chile, Russia, and Canada can be purchased for
a $50 fee.
Global Forest Watch is available at http://www.globalforestwatch.org/english/index.htm.
Area Resource File
The Area Resource File (ARF) is a database of over 6,000 variables related
to health-care in the United States, specific to the county level. Variables
included range from health facilities, health professions, measures
of resource scarcity, health status, socio-economic characteristics
of health care, and many others.
The ARF website provides a search engine to identify which variables
are included for the years (1976-2000) covered by the data. The data
itself, while not mounted on their web site, is available at DPLS for
UW campus users.
The Area Resource File web site is located at http://www.arfsys.com/main.htm.
Table of contents
|
