Description: 

The course is designed to teach students all the basics required to acquire and transform raw information into social and economic data. Legal, statistical, computing, and social science aspects of the data "production" process will be treated. Major emphasis will be placed on U.S. Census data that are accessible from the Census Bureau's Research Data Center network. This version of the course has been specially prepared for graduate students who are planning to use RDC-based data or are seriously considering it. RDC-based data products covered include the new Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) micro data; the Longitudinal Business Database (LBD) and its predecessor the Longitudinal Research Database (LRD); internal versions of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), Current Population Survey (CPS), American Community Survey (ACS), American Housing Survey (AHS), and the 1990 and 2000 Decennial Census of Population and Housing; the Employer Business Register (BR and SSEL); the Censuses and Annual Surveys of Manufactures, Mining, Services, Retail Trade, Wholesale Trade, Construction, Transportation, Communications, and Utilities; Business Expenditures Survey; Characteristics of Business Owners; and others. Students will be introduced to the NSF-sponsored Virtual Research Data Center.

Core topics include: Basic statistical principles of populations and sampling frames Acquiring data via samples, censuses, administrative records, and transaction logging Law, economics and statistics of data privacy and confidentiality protection Data linking and integration techniques (probabilistic record linking; multivariate statistical matching) Data imputation techniques Analytic methods for complex linked data sets