Mortality and Health
Demography
230
University of California, Berkeley
Prof. John Wilmoth, Spring 2009
Welcome to the web page for Demography 230,
Mortality and Health, a graduate-level course being offered at the University of California, Berkeley, during
the Spring semester of 2009. The
instructor is Prof. John Wilmoth. This class will meet twice per week, on
Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9:30 until 11am in the main seminar room (Rm. 100)
of the Department of Demography.
This course will examine patterns of
mortality and health in human populations, giving special emphasis to methods
for analyzing and understanding those patterns. In order to limit the scope of the course, we will emphasize
causes of
variation in health and mortality, rather than consequences of such patterns for other
aspects of society. For example,
we will examine the effects of smoking on health and mortality, but we will not
consider the resulting financial costs of smoking-related illness and death.
A general overview of the course, including preliminary information
about schedules, readings, requirements, etc., is contained in the course syllabus.
READINGS
Hard copies of all readings will be help on
reserve in the Demography library.
Many of the readings will also be posted online (click
here).
HOMEWORKS
All homework assignments will become available
online as soon as they are distributed in class. Solutions will also be posted online after all students have
submitted their individual assignments.
These solutions may sometimes include computer code written in R (this
free software for statistical computing and graphics is highly recommended by
the instructor and easily obtained online via the R Project). A course archive of R code
contains some general functions for constructing life tables, decomposing life
expectancy at birth, etc., for use in doing the problem sets for this course
and/or similar work in other contexts.
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Solutions and
R code |
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Lecture notes:
Standardization and decomposition
Extras:
Multistate Lexis
model of fertility by parity: presentation, handout and exercise, solutions
RESEARCH EXERCISE
Rather than writing a complete research
paper, students are asked to develop some exercise in research methods that
would be interesting and useful for them.
For example, using the same data and addressing the same substantive
issues, a student might explore different methods of data analysis and
presentation. This would perhaps
be the most common approach, but students are invited to propose other designs
for a research exercise.
CONTACT INFORMATION
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Name |
Prof. John R. Wilmoth |
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Office Hours |
Wednesday, 2 – 4pm |
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Telephone |
(510) 642-9688 |
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Fax |
(510) 643-8558 |
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Email |