Work in Progress Day
Fieldwork report
Reports from students on overseas courses
Work in Progress Day
The annual PhD Work in Progress Day was held on 23 September 2013 and attended by staff and students. ADSRI PhD Candidates gave 15 presentations on their research, followed by a short question and answer session.
Fieldwork report from Ha Dao
Ha Dao has recently returned from fieldwork in Vietnam. Her PhD topic is 'Impacts of out-migration on gender relations and parenting in mother-migrant/father-stay-at-home families in Vietnam'. Here she shares some of her experience.
Thanks to a grant from ADSRI and the support and guidance of my supervisory panel, I have successfully spent 5 months in the field collecting data. This period was full of difficulties: getting approvals from local authorities; finding participants; persuading them to be interviewed; and dealing with unexpected weather. However, these difficulties have taught me valuable lessons which I don’t think that I could have learnt anywhere else. One of the most important lessons I learnt was that in the field you should be flexible and shouldn’t wait for things to come to you. This is because I wasted some weeks just waiting for some migrant wives who did not answer my calls or missed appointments. Later, I decided to drop them from my sample and successfully chose new participants.
Finally, I want to say that talking and listening to real stories made me feel more confident and excited about my studies. I have worked more productively than ever to create a worthwhile thesis with numbers from secondary data sets and stories from fieldwork.
The photo was taken on a wet day in July 2013 when my informant and I tried to cross by boat to the other side of the river to get to some houses of participants. This was the only way to get there.
Reports from students on overseas courses
Helen Moyle
Helen Moyle, PhD Candidate in ADSRI, reports on the summer school course, 'Longitudinal Analysis of Historical Demographic Data’ she attended in the USA during July and August 2013.
I was very fortunate to be selected to attend the 4 week summer school course in 'Longitudinal Analysis of Historical Demographic Data’ at the ICPSR (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I was one of 25 students participating in the course from a diverse range of countries including USA, Canada, South Africa, Netherlands, Sweden, Estonia, Poland, Spain, China, Taiwan and the UK. The course was very intensive.
We had three sets of lectures every day: Historical Demography, Event History Analysis and Database Management. This was followed by a computer assignment that had to be submitted by the end of each day and we were given several articles to read each night. We also had to produce a poster on a research topic, in collaboration with 2 other students. This involved preparing and submitting a number of preparatory papers. The lecturers were first class and very helpful with all our questions and problems.
Ann Arbor was a very pleasant town of about 100,000 people with wide tree-lined streets and 19th century buildings. I learned an enormous amount from the course, both from the lecturers and the other students. I would recommend a summer school course to anyone who is thinking about it – the pace is fast and there is a lot of work, but the rewards are great.
Pilar Rioseco
Pilar Rioseco, PhD Candidate in ADSRI, attended the 20th annual RAND Summer Institute at the RAND corporation Headquarters in Santa Monica, California. The Summer Institute, held 8-12 July 2013, consisted of two conferences addressing important issues in ageing research and a workshop on the Health and Retirement Study Family of Data Sets. The conferences consisted of a 'Mini-Medical School for Social Scientist' and a 'Demography, Economics, Psychology, and Epidemiology of Ageing' conference, which included presentations from leading academics in ageing research. The Summer Institute provided great opportunities for interesting discussion and networking with academics and research students in the field. Pilar was awarded a scholarship by RAND to attend the Summer Institute. For further information about about RAND and program, visit http://www.rand.org/labor/aging/rsi.html.
Hasnani Rangkuti
Hasnani Rangkuti, PhD Candidate in ADSRI, took part in the summer school held by BIARI- Brown International Advanced Research Institutes at Brown University, Providence, USA for two weeks, 8-22 June, 2013.
The program had four themes and Hasnani participated in the the theme, Population and Development: New approaches to enduring global problems. Participants came from all around the globe. On a daily basis, there were lectures in the morning and group discussions in the afternoon. Prominent presenters shared their ideas with participants during the class section. Each participant had to present their research during group discussions.
Accommodation was in dormitories within walking distance to the school with meals provided by the university refectory.