Technology
Calvin team maps health care for low-income patients
 | In summer 2007, Dr. Fred De Jong and social work student Lauren Vander Plas (at left) completed a significant report for the Grand Rapids Healthy Communities Access Program (GRHCAP), a federal grant awarded to Cherry Street Health Services as the head of a regional consortium of health care organizations. |
The report’s maps illustrate the depth and breadth of low-income coverage provided by Grand Rapids’ growing clinic network. For example, the green areas in the map detail below show that the low-income patient population living in central Grand Rapids is a substantial proportion of the estimated low-income population in those same areas.
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Methods: Survey Experiments and Resilience
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Some meaty methodological advice on experimentation in surveys is found in the Winter 2007 issue of Political Analysis (the journal of the Methodology Section of the American Political Science Association). In “The Logic of the Survey Experiment Reexamined,” authors Gaines, Kuklinski and Quirk (2006, pages 1-20) offer an overview of the power of survey experiments to identify causal relationships, along with a bundle of caveats scholars should keep in mind when designing, conducting and interpreting survey experiments. (The article is available to the Calvin community through the publisher’s web site).
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Follow the Money: Mapping Campaign Contributions
| What: | Social Science Division Symposium | |
| When: | Tuesday, November 14 @ 3:30PM | |
| Where: | DeVos Communication Center room 170 | |
| Who: | All social science faculty, with other faculty and students welcome. | |
| Speaker: | Neil Carlson, Assistant Director of the Center for Social Research | |
| Topic: | Following the money: mapping flows of campaign contributions. |
The figure below draws on 2004 data including presidential campaigns, mapping interstate flows for 48 states. Most Republican funds propagated indirectly through Washington DC, which is not mapped in this case, though such mapping is feasible. The map was produced by Waldo Tobler's Flow Mapper tool.
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Studying urban sprawl from space
Discover magazine led me to a great find, a new satellite imagery study of urban sprawl in the US by a University of Toronto team led by economist Matthew Turner. The study surprisingly finds less sprawl than expected overall, but major differences among metropolitan areas. Miami is compact, Pittsburgh sprawls. Inter-city differences are explained by differences in “ground water availability, temperate climate, rugged terrain, decentralized employment, early public transport infrastructure, uncertainty about metropolitan growth, and unincorporated land in the urban fringe.” See the working paper or get a copy of the published version from the Quarterly Journal of Economics on the IDEAS site (the download did not work for me, but the citation and abstract are complete).
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New Alumni Assessment Survey completed
In May 2006, the Center launched a new and improved survey of recent Calvin alumni to improve assessment of Calvin departments and academic programs. The survey data was collected entirely through the Internet, reducing costs and facilitating the consolidation of custom materials from twelve academic departments and several campus administrative offices. Over 2,000 alumni from the 2002 and 2005 graduating classes and their cohorts were contacted by email and postcard; by late July, 663 alumni had responded (a respectable response rate for Internet-only collection). Two alumni won vouchers for free air travel. As this approach is replicated in coming years, it will enable better analytical comparisons, reduce the load on departments to conduct their own surveys AND reduce the demand on alumni, who might previously have received two or more surveys from Calvin in place of this one. Reports will be distributed to departments in September, with coordination by lead client Jim Bradley, Calvin’s Director of Assessment and Institutional Research.
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