VID Colloquium
Cohort Analysis in Demographic Research: What’s New?
Yang Yang, University of North Carolina
Date: Thu, 17 May 2011 , Time: 14:00-15:00
A lot of demographic, social, and epidemiologic research is concerned with time-specific phenomena that can be represented in age, period, and cohort effects. Statistical analysis aiming at distinguishing these effects is known to be challenging in many ways and usually deemed conceptually important but empirically intractable. Are there good ways to model these effects to understand the social and biological mechanisms generating the data? In this talk, I provide some useful guidelines on how to conduct cohort analysis in the context of empirical analyses of specific datasets. I first summarize the APC model identification problem. I then describe models, methods, and empirical applications developed recently for APC analysis for three common research designs in demographic research. I finally suggest directions for future methodological development.
About the presenter
Yang Yang is Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology and Lineberger Cancer Center, Faculty Fellow of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include integrative sociodemographic and biological approaches to explaining social differentials in health and longevity, aging and life course trajectories of health and co-morbidity, social behavioral links to cancer biology, and new models and methods for cohort analysis.