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ANN ARBOR— This June, the University of Michigan Summer Institute in Survey Research Techniques is offering an innovative class combining online education with traditional classroom instruction.

The class – Introduction to Survey Methodology—is designed for busy professionals and students who cannot spend eight weeks in Ann Arbor but need to develop practical competence in the thriving field of survey research.

“We’re excited about this new offering,” says Jim Lepkowski, Director of the Summer Institute, which is the world’s oldest and largest teaching program in survey methods.   The program has been offered every summer since 1948 by the U-M Survey Research Center, part of the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) .

“This course combines the best of face-to-face and online instruction,” says instructor Palmer Morrel-Samuels, who proposed the new format as a way of expanding the reach of the introductory course and addressing some of the issues surrounding MOOCS (Massive Open Online Courses) in higher education.

According to Lepkowski, the Summer Institute has long been at the forefront of remote learning.  Each summer the Institute partners with the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland to share courses electronically at both locations using simultaneous video transmission between the two campuses.

The new hybrid class will use the same web technology to offer live, online course participation.  Students have the option of registering either for traditional in-classroom instruction or for a hybrid experience in which they will travel to Ann Arbor for three days at the beginning and end of the course, and participate remotely through an interactive online webinar in between.

The online format—called Optimized Web-based Learning, or OWL—has two components to strengthen the connection between students, peers, and instructor: students will be able to participate in online office hours with the instructor and other interested students, and they will have the option of participating asynchronously if their work schedules make it impossible to participate during the live 2-hour lectures and lab sessions.

“Our aim is to provide the convenience and immediacy of online distance learning along with the personal relationship that makes effective teaching so rewarding for students and teachers alike,” says Morrel-Samuels.

For more information about the class, including how to register, visit http://si.isr.umich.edu/

Contact:  Diane Swanbrow, Swanbrow@umich.edu, (734) 647-9069

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ANN ARBOR—More than one in every 10 members of Generation X are enrolled in classes to continue their formal education, according to a new University of Michigan study released today.  In addition, 48 percent of GenXers take continuing education courses, in-service training, and workshops required for professional licenses and certifications.

“This is an impressive level of engagement in lifelong learning,” says Jon D. Miller, author of the latest issue of The Generation X Report.  “It reflects the changing realities of a global economy, driven by science and technology.

Projected to the 80 million young adults in Generation X, Miller says the findings suggest that 1.8 million young adults are studying to earn associate degrees, 1.7 million are seeking baccalaureates, and nearly 2 million are taking courses to earn advanced degrees at the masters, doctoral, or professional level.

Miller directs the Longitudinal Study of American Youth (LSAY) at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).  The study has been funded by the National Science Foundation since 1986, and the current report includes responses from approximately 3,900 study participants who are in their late 30s.

According to Miller, slightly more than 40 percent of GenXers have earned a baccalaureate or higher degree, with those living in cities or suburbs more likely to have a degree than those living in small towns or rural areas.

The study also found that GenXers have earned graduate and professional degrees at a higher rate than any previous generation.  By 2011, two decades after finishing high school, 22 percent of those surveyed had completed at least one advanced degree, and 10 percent had completed a doctorate or professional degree.

The report also examined informal sources of learning among Generation X, analyzing how they acquired information about three important contemporary events:  influenza, the Fukushima nuclear reactor accident, and climate change.

“We found that Generation X adults use a mix of information sources, including traditional print and electronic media, as well as the internet and social media,” says Miller.

“But for all three issues we examined, we found that talking with friends and family was cited as a source of information more frequently than traditional news media.

“While a high proportion of young adults are continuing their formal education, reflecting the changing demands of a global economy, many are also using the full resources of their personal networks and the electronic era to keep up with information on emerging issues.”

Read or download a full copy of The Generation X Report at http://home.isr.umich.edu/files/2013/05/GenX_Vol2Iss3_final.pdf

Contact:
Diane Swanbrow, (734) 647-9069, swanbrow@umich.edu

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The Surveys, conducted by the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) since 1946, monitor consumer attitudes and expectations.

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Most of the April loss was in how consumers viewed future economic prospects, according to Curtin.  In particular, consumers were less optimistic about the ability of the economy to continue to expand without a renewed downturn sometime in the next five years.  The strengths in consumer spending are now attributable to gains in household wealth, including rising home values and stock prices as well as reduced debts.  Indeed, favorable attitudes toward vehicle and home buying conditions continued to point toward improved sales of homes and vehicles during the year ahead.  These improved trends have been particularly strong among upper-income households. View and download the chart and table (Excel files).

“Consumer confidence was not negatively affected by the Boston marathon bombing,” said Curtin. “Although confidence posted significant declines in early April, it began to improve prior to the bombing and gained strength throughout the rest of the month.  Even when consumers were asked to describe in their own words their economic situation and that of the nation as a whole, there were virtually no references to the Boston marathon bombing.  Of course, this does not mean that people did not grieve at the human tragedy, only that consumers did not think the events in Boston would influence national economic prospects.”

 

Rising Home Prices Expected to Continue

Rising home values were reported by the highest number of homeowners since late 2007, although it was still less than half of the 2005 peak of 76%.  The recent rise in home values as well as expected gains during the years ahead were heavily concentrated among households in the upper third of the income distribution.  During the past three months, the upper income households expected an annual gain of 2.8 percent in the value of their home over the next five years, compared with just 0.3 percent by households in the lower third of the income distribution.

Incomes and Jobs Still Top Concern

Just one-in-four consumers in the April survey anticipated a decline in the unemployment rate during the year ahead.  When asked about anticipated income gains, half expected no gain in their household incomes during the year ahead, and half of all consumers thought there was less than a 25 percent chance of an increase in their inflation-adjusted income gain during the next five years.

Consumer Sentiment Index

The Sentiment Index was 76.4 in the April 2013 survey, down from 78.6 in March and equal to last April’s reading. The Expectations Index recorded the largest decline, falling to 67.8 in April from 70.8 in March and 72.3 recorded in the April 2012 survey. The Current Economic Conditions Index was 89.9 in April, slightly below the 90.7 in March but well above the 82.9 recorded last April.

About the Survey

Richard Curtin (Photo by D.C. Goings)

The Survey of Consumers is a rotating panel survey based on a nationally representative sample that gives each household in the coterminous U.S. an equal probability of being selected.  Interviews are conducted throughout the month by telephone. The minimum monthly change required for significance at the 95% level in the Sentiment Index is 4.8 points; for Current and Expectations Index the minimum is 6.0 points. For more information, visit the Surveys of Consumers website at http://new.sca.isr.umich.edu.

Watch a video about the survey:

Contact:
Diane Swanbrow, (734) 647-9069, swanbrow@umich.edu or
Surveys of Consumers, (734) 763-5224 or
Thomson Reuters PR Hotline, (646) 223-7222, ext.1

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ANN ARBOR—Global attitudes about domestic violence have changed dramatically since 2000, according to a new University of Michigan study that analyzes data from 26 low- and middle-income countries.

Nigeria had the largest change, with 65 percent of men and 52 percent of women rejecting domestic violence in 2008, compared with 48 percent and 33 percent, respectively, in 2003.

In the study, published in the current issue of the American Sociological Review, U-M researcher Rachael Pierotti analyzes data on hundreds of thousands of people collected in Demographic and Health Surveys funded by USAID.  Half of the countries surveyed are in sub-Saharan Africa.

“In many countries, men were even more likely to reject violence than women were,” says Pierotti, a graduate student in sociology.

Data on male attitudes was available in 15 of the countries Pierotti studied.  Men were more likely than women to reject domestic violence in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia. (Download excel files detailing changing attitudes in all the nations studied: click here for trends in women’s attitudes, and here for trends in men’s attitudes.)

The survey questions about attitudes toward domestic violence differed slightly from one country to another.  But the most common form was as follows:

“Sometimes a husband is annoyed or angered by things which his wife does.  In your opinion, is a husband justified in hitting or beating his wife:

1. if she goes out without telling him
2. if she neglects the children
3. if she argues with him
4. if she refuses to have sex with him
5. if she burns the food.”

In general, Pierotti found that people were most likely to say that violence was justified if a wife neglected the children and least likely to consider it justifiable if a wife burned the food.

In a few countries, attitudes among both men and women changed in the wrong direction.  In Madagascar and Indonesia, for example, the percentage rejecting domestic violence decreased during the period studied.

Pierotti found that attitudes about the use of domestic violence changed significantly among all age groups.  “Often it’s the case that social change starts with younger people,” she says.  “But in this case, people of all ages became more rejecting of domestic violence.”

She found that those who lived in urban areas, and who had more education, were more likely to reject wife beating than those who live in rural areas and who had relatively less education.  She also found that in many of the countries, those with access to newspapers, radio, and television were more likely to reject wife beating.

“The global spread of ideas about women’s rights and the increasing international attention to the problem of violence against women may be contributing to the striking change in attitudes about this issue,” says Pierotti.  “But more research will be needed in order to confirm if this is really the reason.”

Pierotti is the winner of a Marshall Weinberg Research Fellowship at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) Population Studies Center and this work was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship.

Contact:  Diane Swanbrow, Swanbrow@umich.edu, (734) 647-9069

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Talking about science in a way that people can understand and use is not simple. According to Arthur “Skip” Lupia, scientists fail at this so routinely that many blame their audiences for not understanding the gems they are trying to convey.

But researchers and scientists can become better and more persuasive communicators by understanding how people listen and learn. Lupia, research professor at the Institute for Social Research’s Center for Political Studies and Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, says learning better ways to communicate is particularly important if researchers are to reach listeners who may be distrustful or who may hold different beliefs.

“I’m not talking about spin,” he says. “I’m not talking about manipulation. I’m talking about staying true to the science and conveying it more effectively by understanding some things about how persuasion works.”

Lupia will speak on “Communicating Science in Politicized Environments” from 2:30-3:30 on Tuesday, April 23, in Room 6050, the Institute for Social Research, 426 Thompson Street. See event details. 

One of the first challenges for science communicators is to capture their audiences’ attention. To do this, Lupia says, the information conveyed must be concrete and immediate. In addition, communicators must have some sense of what their audiences care about. “I have to speak to your core values and fears,” he says. “I have to speak to aspirations that you have. And if I’m doing that, I have a shot at winning this battle.”

But in order to persuade listeners, Lupia says, researchers must also have credibility. And that can be the biggest challenge of all. “You might be credible as a scientist, but if you don’t share someone’s values, they might not believe you,” he says. “If you’re in front of people who believe that scientists are part of a conspiracy theory, you’re going to have a tough time leading.”

As a result, in order to speak persuasively about science, researchers must demonstrate both expertise and shared interests with their audiences, Lupia says. Only then will listeners be willing to consider stretching and changing the beliefs they already hold. “We can make presentations that please us. We can make presentations that affirm our values as scientists. And we can blame them if it doesn’t work. But another choice we have is to try to persuade people who are different from us, and that requires a different communicative strategy.”

Related video: “Why We Can’t Trust Our Intuitions: Communication as a Science,” a Sackler Colloquium keynote talk by Arthur Lupia

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The program, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, enlists U-M experts and southeastern Michigan organizations to work with the fellows.

“This year’s program is even bigger than previous programs,” said Barbara Peitsch, who directs the program, which is based at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “We are excited because we are involving entrepreneurs from Libya for the first time. The program offers professional development opportunities for participants, and facilitates people-to-people connections that promote better mutual understanding and respect.”

Participants from Egypt, Israel, Libya, the Palestinian Territories and Tunisia include small business owners, business educators, representatives of nongovernmental organizations and government officials involved in supporting small business development.

Participants take part in a discussion during the entrepreneurial ecosystems session with Jason Owen-Smith, a U-M professor of sociology and organizational studies and ISR researcher. Photo by Eva Menezes.

As part of the program, participants will take part in classroom sessions on entrepreneurial ecosystems, business planning and leadership development with U-M marketing, communication and entrepreneurship experts. (View photos of the participants during a classroom session on ISR’s Facebook page.)

Participants also will be placed in two-week internships in local businesses, including Google and Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor, and Compuware, Green Garage and Detroit Venture Partners in Detroit. The internships were arranged by the Arab American Women’s Business Council, one of U-M’s local community partners.

After spending three weeks in Michigan, the group will travel to Washington, D.C., to participate in the State Department’s Professional Fellows Congress to network with other young leaders in their fields and refine the plans they will implement when they return home.

To follow up on the connections established here, Peitsch will bring two groups of U.S. hosts to the Middle East and North Africa starting in September 2013 for two-week “reverse exchanges” that will include workshops, organizational visits and onsite consulting.

ISR is one of 17 U.S.-based nonprofits and universities that are hosting foreign professionals from more than 50 countries and territories. For more information about the State Department program, visit http://exchanges.state.gov/citizens/profs/professional-fellows.html.

For information about the ISR program, visit www.isr.umich.edu/cps/project_bpeitsch002.html.

Contact:  Diane Swanbrow, Swanbrow@umich.edu, (734) 647-9069

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DATE:  2:30 – 3:30, April 23, 2013

EVENT:  “Communicating Science in Politicized Environments” is the title of a timely presentation by University of Michigan professor Arthur “Skip” Lupia, designed to help researchers learn how to talk about what they do in a way that is understandable and persuasive to non-academics.

Lupia, a research professor the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Hal R. Varian Collegiate Professor of Political Science, has presented his research-based recommendations to a number of other groups, including at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.

David Lampe, Executive Director, Strategic Communications, U-M Office of the Vice President for Research, will introduce Lupia and provide background on aspects of the current political and funding climates that make it so important for scientists to communicate effectively about their research.

This event is free and open to the public.

PLACE:  Institute for Social Research, Room 6050, 426 Thompson Street, Ann Arbor

CONTACT:  Diane Swanbrow, Swanbrow@umich.edu, (734) 647-9069

SPONSOR:  This event is sponsored by the ISR Office of Communications.

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ANN ARBOR — The larger the group, the smaller the chance of forming interracial friendships, according to a University of Michigan study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study, conducted by U-M researchers Siwei Cheng and Yu Xie, examines how the size of a community affects the realization of people’s preferences for friends.  The researchers tested their theoretical model using both simulated and real data on actual friendships among 4, 745 U.S. high school students.

“We found that total school size had a major effect on the likelihood that students would form interracial friendships,” says Xie, a sociologist with the U-M College of Literature, Science and the Arts (LSA), the Institute for Social Research (ISR) and the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

“Large schools promote racial segregation and discourage interracial friendships.”

Their model incorporates the widely-held assumption that people prefer to make friends with others of the same race.  It also incorporates many other preferences that affect friendship formation.  These factors include age, education, hobbies, personality, religious affiliation and political beliefs.

Given these individual preferences, the researchers found that when the size of the social group is small, people have a low likelihood of finding a same-race friend that matches their other preferences.  But as the total size of the group increases, people are more likely to find same-race friends who also satisfy their other preferences.

Cheng, a U-M graduate student in sociology, and Xie, who is also affiliated with Peking University, note that their work has implications for other social relationships, such as dating, marriage, political coalitions, and business affiliations.

“One potential negative social consequence of the internet as a social interaction medium in an ever more globalized world is to encourage social isolation and social segmentation by expanding group size immensely,” they write.

Contact:  Diane Swanbrow, Swanbrow@umich.edu, (734) 647-9069

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The findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, may lead to the development of methods doctors can use to objectively quantify patients’ pain.

Neurologic signatures of physical pain, courtesy Tor Wager, University of Colorado

Currently, pain intensity is usually based on patient self-reports, using an intensity scale from one to 10. Objective measures of pain could confirm those subjective reports and provide clues about how the brain registers different types of pain.

The new research also may set the stage for using brain scans to objectively measure anxiety, depression, anger or other emotional states.

“Right now, there’s no clinically acceptable way to measure pain and other emotions other than to ask a person how they feel,” said Tor Wager of the University of Colorado and lead author of the paper.

“These findings demonstrate that it is possible to accurately predict people’s experience of an incredibly complex psychological state—an emotional response—based on neural activity alone,” said University of Michigan psychologist Ethan Kross, a faculty associate at the U-M Institute for Social Research and a co-author of the study. “They raise the tantalizing possibility that it may be possible to predict the experience of other types of complex emotional responses, for example, depression or anxiety, using similar methods.”

Wager, Kross and colleagues used data-mining techniques to comb through images of brains taken when the subjects were exposed to multiple levels of heat, ranging from pleasantly warm to painfully hot.

“We found a pattern across multiple systems in the brain that is diagnostic of how much pain people feel in response to painful heat,” Wager said.

Neurologic signatures of physical pain, courtesy Tor Wager, University of Colorado

Initially, the researchers expected that pain signatures would be unique to each individual. If that were the case, a person’s pain level could only be predicted based on past images of his or her individual brain. But, instead, they found that the signature was uniform across people. This uniformity allowed researchers to accurately predict how much pain the applied heat caused each person, with no prior brain scans needed as a reference point.

The scientists also demonstrated that the signature was specific to physical pain. Past studies have shown that social pain can look very similar to physical pain in terms of the brain activity it produces. For example, a prior study conducted by Kross, Wager and colleagues showed that the brain activity of people who have just been through a relationship breakup—and who were shown an image of the person who rejected them—is similar to the brain activity of someone feeling physical pain.

But when Wager’s team tested to see if the newly defined neurologic signature for heat pain would also pop up in the data collected earlier from the heartbroken participants, they found that the signature was absent.

“Although social and physical pain are clearly related in terms of the specific areas of the brain they recruit, distinct patterns of neural activity or neural signatures may predict each type of experience,” Kross said.

Finally, the scientists tested to see if the neurologic signature could detect when an analgesic was used to dull the pain. The results showed that the signature registered a decrease in pain in subjects given a painkiller.

The results of the study do not yet allow physicians to quantify physical pain, but they lay the foundation for future work that could produce the first objective tests of pain by doctors and hospitals. To that end, Wager, Kross and colleagues are already testing whether the neurologic signature varies with different types of physical pain.

The research team also included Mathieu Roy and Choong-Wan Woo of the University of Colorado, Lauren Atlas of New York University and Martin Lindquist of Johns Hopkins University

The study was funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation.

Contact: Diane Swanbrow, (734) 647-9069, swanbrow@umich.edu
               Laura Snider, (303) 735-0528, laura.snider@colorado.edu

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The costs of caring for people with dementia in the U.S. are comparable to – if not greater than – those for heart disease and cancer, according to new estimates by researchers at the University of Michigan and nonprofit RAND Corporation.

Annual healthcare costs tied to dementia, including both formal and unpaid care, reach $159-$215 billion – rivaling the most costly major diseases – according to the findings that appear in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“Our findings show why dementia is sometimes described as a ‘slow-motion disaster’ for patients and families,” says co-author Kenneth Langa, M.D., Ph.D., professor of internal medicine at U-M Medical School, research investigator at the Center for Clinical Management Research (CCMR), VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System; and member of the U-M Institute for Social Research, Institute of Gerontology and Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation.

“The majority of the costs associated with dementia — about 80 percent in our study—are due to the long-term daily care and supervision provided by families and nursing homes, often for many years.  Ignoring these long-term care costs that build up steadily day-after-day leads to a huge under-counting of the true burden that dementia imposes on our society.”

Dementia is a loss of brain function that affects memory, thinking, language, judgment, and behavior – the most common form is Alzheimer’s disease.

Researchers found that the direct costs of dementia care, which includes formal costs for nursing homes, Medicare, and out-of-pocket expenses, were estimated at $109 billion in 2010. That compares to direct health expenses of $102 billion for heart disease and $77 billion for cancer in the same year.

Adding informal, unpaid care to the equation as much as doubled the estimated total national costs for dementia care up to nearly $215 billion. Full costs per case of dementia in 2010 were $41,000 to $56,000.

Rates of dementia increase sharply with age and national health expenditures for dementia are likely to double by 2040 as the number of older adults swells in the coming decades due to the aging of the baby-boom generation, authors say.

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