What the heck am I doing?

Since my blog has gone viral (thanks Mom) and millions of people stream to this site to read my eloquent words, a few have asked what I'm doing and why. Here's a quick overview.

Parts of the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, have very poor systems of vital registration (birth certificates, death certificates, and the government records created by those). Governments, NGOs and other planners need good estimates of vital rates to figure out how to spend limited resources. For example, where will you build the next school? What sort of public health intervention would give you the most bang for the buck and where should you put it? So in the absence of death registration they have turned to national censuses and representative surveys to give them an idea of mortality rates. Examples include the Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) that are run throughout the world and many national censuses, including the one run by StatsSA. In these questionnaires they ask people dates of birth and death for their parents, siblings, children, and other household members. This is called an indirect method of mortality estimation because you do not observe deaths per se, you observe living people's memories of deaths. The answers people give are then more likely to have errors than a database of death certificates would have. And you can get biased results because the chances of dying for any individual are likely correlated to their family members' chances of dying, especially during an AIDS epidemic. It is possible your survey could miss entire households who have died or their survivors have moved somewhere else. So there are some sources of error and bias in these standard questions.

Furthermore, demographers (like me) use these data to estimate mortality rates with special techniques that have been developed in the past 30 years. How well do these techniques work? We are not exactly sure.

So we are conducting a survey using the same types of questions to households located in a demographic surveillance site called Agincourt. (Is your mother alive? When was she born? When did she die? etc.) The Agincourt DSS has tracked the migration, fertility and mortality of a bounded population since 1993. They have unusually high-quality data. We use their data as the "gold standard" of mortality estimates in this place. We will compare our results to their results and see just how much error or bias could be expected from a census or survey in this region.

As for my part in all this? I'm the project site manager for the project. As you probably read below, I am here to coordinate the data collection that is actually carried out by my teams of field workers. The questions are asked in Shangaan, so I am not of any use as far as interviewing. I do provide them with the maps, questionnaires, etc. that they need and I coordinate all the logistical issues that must be coordinated if our study is to have any scientific validity.

This work is related to my dissertation research, so I hope that this data collection will be useful as I try to get a PhD in the next few years. It's also a really interesting professional and personal experience.

I think I can say I would love living around here, actually, if not for the fact that my lovely wife, annoying but sweet dog and all my family were back in the states. So, come for a visit and I'll show you around this place. You have until September 5 to get here. Just don't all come at once, since I can't host the entire Internet in my half of a rented house.