Bringing the science (with lots of links)

My dissertation advisor, Sam Clark, is the person who got me involved in this project and got me to Africa. He has a long relationship to this institution where my study is being conducted. Last week he visited for a few weeks for meetings and he and I got to talk about my dissertation.

Sam and I had spoken briefly about this idea before I left and I found it exciting. The idea is sort of at an intersection of demography, sociology, and health. When Sam arrived here we talked more about it and how it could work. Below are my notes from the meeting, summarizing three papers I would write and put together as a dissertation.

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Background: Agincourt in the observed period provides a complex setting for evaluating transition theories. Longitudinal data allow causal analysis. We expect that the complex changes in economy/development, health care provision, epidemiology, social inequality and government policies will make it a difficult test case for transitions theories and could contribute to revisions of classical theoretical frameworks.

1. Describe demographic transition in Agincourt 1993-2008. Compare causes, timing, and effects of Agincourt transitions to classic DTT. Are trends in age-specific fertility and mortality rates statistically identifiable?
   
   
2. Describe changing epidemiology of Agincourt 1993-2008. Evaluate usefulness of epi. transition theory in this setting where it appears noncommunicable diseases are gaining traction at same time there is are epidemics of communicable diseases like HIV and TB. Relate all-cause mortality levels and trends to cause-specific profiles of mortality.
   
   
3. Create a migration typology using model-based clustering as the method for identifying which HHs will migrate in which ways. Show clusters by SES rank. SES index can be improved, probably through principal components analysis, to more closely identify livelihood strategies common to SES categories. Do identified clusters predict HH composition? Migration history? SES? Geographic location?