Relational Databases in the Social and Health Sciences: The View from Demography

Опубликовано 7 сентября 2016, 16:39

There is an ongoing explosion in the amount and complexity of data collected by social and health scientists.  Many of these are temporal data that describe time-evolving populations of individual people and their relationships between each other.  Traditional training in social and health sciences does not contain a ‘data management’ course, and consequently most social and health scientists are under prepared to properly manage, manipulate, and archive the data that they collect.  This has led to significant challenges and provides an opportunity to bring modern data management practices into the main stream of social and health sciences.  This presentation will describe the growing use of relational databases: 1) in long-term studies of social and health issues in the developing world, 2) in building mathematical/computational models of human populations, 3) in the ‘mining’ and analysis of longitudinal population-based data, and 4) in the presentation and dissemination of those data.  The presentation will end with a discussion of what may be needed to encourage social and health scientists to take more interest in data management and adopt more modern methods of managing their data.