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About IHDS:

The IHDS is the only nationally representative longitudinal survey in India. It is a unique resource for researchers, policy makers and journalists.  A one-of-a-kind panel study, that has interviewed over 42,152 households in 1,420 villages and 1,042 urban neighborhoods across India. The IHDS has two waves/panels of the dataset. IHDS 1 was conducted in 2005-2006, and IHDS 2 in 2011-2012. There is an 85% re-interview rate between the two surveys. India has experienced two decades of breathtaking transformation and IHDS has documented the concurrent demographic change.  IHDS 3 is slated for release in 2024.

IHDS 1 and 2 were designed to complement existing Indian surveys by bringing together a wide range of topics in a single survey. This breadth permits analyses of associations across a range of social and economic conditions. For example, studying children’s outcomes (e.g., learning, immunizations) requires joint consideration of the role of poverty, family structure, gender relations, community context, and the availability of facilities. Many of these are available in both IHDS surveys and will be available in the forthcoming IHDS 3. IHDS 3 is currently under construction.

IHDS is a collaborative project from the University of Maryland, College Park; the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in Delhi; Indiana University and the University of Michigan.

Expectations and Goals:

By the end of the course, course participants will develop skills to understand and analyze IHDS data. The course is ideal for research scholars, public policy makers and journalists. New wave of IHDS is ongoing, and a better understanding of it will be useful for analyzing change in Indian socioeconomic scenario in the last 20 years.

Workshop Objectives:

1. Introduction of IHDS data and its structure
2. Familiarization with STATA analysis software and its basic features
3. Hands-on experiences with exercises using IHDS in line with requirements of scientific journal articles

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to have a Personal Computer (PC) with stable internet connection. The participants are expected to install STATA software in advance and engage in the class actively.

Structure of the Class

Classes will be held online from 26 to 29 March 2024. Schedule 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM.

Day 1: Introduction to IHDS data

Day 2: Introduction to STATA using IHDS data. Descriptive and bivariate analysis of different modules in IHDS data

Day 3: Replication of a set of studies published using IHDS database.

Day 4: Assignment & Discussions

About the Resource Person

Dr. Arun Balachandran is currently a Post-doctoral Research Scientist at the Columbia Aging Center, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University at New York. He was formerly a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland where he worked with the India Human Development Survey– that develops, administer, and analyze different measures of social and gender empowerment. He received his PhD in demography from the University of Groningen, The Netherlands in 2020. He did his pre-doctoral training at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, India, and has a background in the discipline of economics with a Master’s degree from the Madras School of Economics, India. He worked towards ‘Population Ageing in Europe and Asia: Beyond Traditional Perspectives’ during his PhD, where he developed new measures of population ageing for comparisons across Europe and Asia, with a particular focus on gender. His works has been published in Ageing & Society, Journal of Ageing and Health, SSM-Population Health, Economic & Political Weekly and The Lancet.

His research interests are interdisciplinary and intersects across demography, gender, population ageing, and quantitative methodology. He is a former member of the Early Career Taskforce of the International Union for Scientific Study of Population (IUSSP) and has received the KB Pathak Memorial Award in 2019, given by the Indian Association for the Study of Population, for his methodological innovation in the field of Population and Health. Previously, he has also worked at the Population Council, New Delhi.

Registration Form– https://forms.gle/8emRR8L3ELmgrVh78