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Tracking Lives and Livelihoods through the Pandemic

How have the lives of residents of Delhi and other areas in the National Capital Region (NCR) changed over the past two years since the advent of COVID?  NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NCAER-NDIC) team discussed results from the Delhi Metropolitan Area Study (DMAS), which interviewed residents from Delhi-NCR in 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, and has continued to follow their lives since then, as they have struggled to protect their health and livelihoods, and to educate their children through the biggest global crisis of our generation. 

 The NCAER-NDIC team interviewed over 5,200 households in NCR, with samples drawn from Delhi as well as districts in the neighbouring States of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh. The DMAS survey was initiated in early 2019 and continued until November 2021, allowing us to assess the lives of our respondents before and after COVID-19, and the changes brought about by the pandemic. These households have lived through the difficulties and challenges caused by COVID-19 infections and the lockdowns designed to control the spread of the disease.

This webinar discussed the findings on:

  • Experience of COVID-19 infection and its severity;
  • COVID-19 vaccinations;
  • Management of non-communicable diseases during the pandemic;
  • Impact of school closure on education and access to digital learning;
  • Changes in employment patterns and financial recovery;
  • Trends in food consumption and role of social policies; and
  • Perceptions regarding the decision to impose the nationwide lockdown during the early phase of the pandemic.

 The NCAER press note on DMAS findings is available on this webpage.          

Sonalde Desai is a Professor at NCAER with a joint appointment as Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She directs the NCAER-National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), which has been established by NCAER in collaboration with its consortium partners, University of Maryland and University of Michigan. She is an internationally known demographer whose work deals primarily with human development in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities. At present, Sonalde Desai is leading the India Human Development Survey (IHDS), India’s only nationally representative panel study conducted in two rounds in 2004–05 and 2011–12. Preparations are currently on for the next round of IHDS.   

Santanu Pramanik is a Senior Fellow at NCAER and the Deputy Director of the National Data Innovation Centre. He is a Statistician and Survey Methodologist by training. His research interests encompass survey methods, data quality, remote monitoring of data collection activities, randomised controlled trials, small area estimation, and the application of these methods across different substantive domains, including vaccination, health insurance and healthcare expenditure, and family planning. He has earlier worked as a Research Scientist at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), and as a Survey Statistician at National Opinion Research Center, an independent affiliate of the University of Chicago.
The other team members who partcipated in the conversation include Reem Ashraf, Ruchi Jain, Abhinav Motheram, Debasis Barik, Manjistha Banerji, and Pallavi Choudhuri.

Data Talks: Employment Decline and Recovery during the Pandemic (Fourth Seminar)

The NCAER National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC) held a seminar on “Employment Decline and Recovery during the Pandemic”, on October 7, 2021. This webinar was the fourth in a series of thought-provoking discussions on research methodologies organised by NDIC, in which distinguished speakers in the field share their views. The participants in the discussion included Sonalde Desai, NCAER and the University of Maryland; Ankur Sarin, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Rahul Lahoti, ETH, Zurich and Azim Premji University; and Kaushik Krishnan, Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy. Santanu Pramanik, Senior Fellow and the Deputy Director of the National Data Innovation Centre at NCAER, moderated the session.

Over the last 18 months, the pandemic has taken its toll on the lives and livelihoods of individuals around the globe. Unfortunately, the social distancing requirements have also made it difficult for us to measure the impact of this catastrophe. The speakers in this webinar represented research projects with diverse goals and methodologies; a conversation among them is designed to understand the employment impact of the pandemic and recovery using different methods of data collection. This enriching discussion offered a unique opportunity for exploring the short- and long-term economic effects on different segments of the Indian population from a holistic perspective.

Sonalde Desai presented on “Employment Vulnerability during the Pandemic”.

Desai is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Professor at NCAER, and Director of NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre. She is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social inequalities in developing countries, focusing on gender and class inequalities in human development. She leads the India Human Development Survey and has been elected as the President of the Population Association of America for 2022.

Ankur Sarin spoke on “Vulnerabilities in Rural India: Surveys by Field-based Organisations”.

Sarin is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. A shared theme in his research is attention to the consequences of inequalities and instruments used to counter them. These include public policies, social enterprises, and movements. In his recent work, he has tried to use field-based research to study and facilitate the fulfilment of policy obligations to citizens, especially children. He holds a Ph.D. (Public Policy) from the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago, and a BA (Economics), Bates College.

Rahul Lahoti presented on “Lessons and Challenges from Measuring Employment and Incomes during the Pandemic.”

Lahoti is a researcher at ETH, Zurich, and Faculty Fellow at Center for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University. His research focuses on gender, labour markets, poverty, and inequality. He was involved in three phone surveys during the pandemic and has analysed secondary data to understand the distributional impacts of the pandemic on employment and income. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen, Germany, and a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University, New York.

Kaushik Krishnan presented on “Employment during the lockdowns as captured by the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey (CPHS)”.

Krishnan works in the Household Survey division of CMIE. His primary responsibility is to deliver record-level data from the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey to researchers. He holds an LLM and Ph.D. in Economics from UC Berkeley.

 

Data Talks: Using Life History Calendars to Improve Measurement of Lifetime Experience with Trauma and Psychiatric Disorders (Third Seminar).

Using Life History Calendars to Improve Measurement of Lifetime Experience with Trauma and Psychiatric Disorders

The third webinar in the NCAER Seminar series on Data Collection Methodology was organised by the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre on August 25, 2021. The webinar is part of a series of thought-provoking discussions on research methodologies in which distinguished speakers in the field share their views and one or more discussants reflect on them from an Indian perspective. The first seminar in this series held in March was presented by Stanley Presser, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland while the second seminar hosted in the month of June was delivered by Frauke Kreuter, Professor of Statistics and Data Science for the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) and Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland.

In this third webinar NCAER-NDIC hosted William G. Axinn, Professor of Survey Research,Population Studies at the University of Michigan,and Stephanie Chardoul, Director of Survey Research Operations (SRO) at the University of Michigan. P. Arokiasamy, retired Professor at the International Institutefor Population Sciences was the discussant for the talk. It was held virtually.

Panellists:

Accurate lifetime measurement of the general population’s experience with health disorders poses a significant challenge. However, these lifetime measures are crucially important to establish population prevalence and to enable population-level research. The study presented in this webinar focuses on psychiatric disorders, specifically alcohol use disorder (AUD), major depressive disorder (MDD), generalised anxiety disorder (GAD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and uses life history calendars (LHCs) to dramatically improve lifetime measures of these disorders. It features a large-scale general population experiment using WHO’s Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) to measure AUD, MDD, GAD, and PTSD. Respondents for this study were randomly assigned to receive an integrated LHC and CIDI interview and a CIDI interview with no LHC. The study brings forth that the careful use of the LHC increases rates of both screening and diagnosis for the disorders, and produces greater reporting of exposure to potentially traumatic experiences. The LHC also produces accurate reports of age of onset, which is valuable for analyses of causes, consequences, and service needs related to mental health.

William G. Axinn is Professor of survey research, population studies, sociology and public policy at the University of Michigan. Axinn is a social demographer studying community, intergenerational, and social psychological influences on marriage, childbearing, reproductive health, mental health and the natural environment. He is director of the Chitwan Valley Family Study (CVFS), a 25-year, mixed method, whole-family longitudinal study in Nepal. He is also co-investigator on multiple different data collection projects related to family change and reproductive health in the US

Stephanie Chardoul is the Director of Survey Research Operations (SRO) at the University of Michigan’s Survey Research Center (SRC). During her tenure at SRC, she has been the Manager of the Survey Services Laboratory (telephone facility), Senior Survey Director, Director of the Project Design and Management Group, and Director of Proposals. Her substantive interests include cross-cultural survey methods, building survey research infrastructure, and mental health. Stephanie has been a member of the Data Collection Coordinating Centre for the long-running World Mental Health Survey Initiative, and is the Director of the WHO Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI) Training Centre.

Perianayagam Arokiasamy served as faculty for over three decades at the International Institute for Population Sciences, Mumbai. His subject areas of teaching and research expertise cover demography, public health, ageing and global health, development studies and large-scale health survey research. As the lead Principal Investigator, he directed several surveys and research studies including LASI Wave 1, SAGE India wave 1, 2, and 3, WHO-World Health Survey, NFHS-3 (2004-09).

Data Talks: Combining Data from Multiple Sources: Potential and Challenges of Data Linkages (Second Seminar).

The second webinar in the NCAER Seminar series on Data Collection Methodology organised by the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre was held virtually on June 24, 2021. The webinar is part of a series of thought-provoking discussions on research methodologies in which distinguished speakers in the field will share their views and one or more discussants will reflect on them from an Indian perspective. This talk was delivered by Frauke Kreuter, Professor of Statistics and Data Science for the Social Sciences and Humanities at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (Germany) and Professor at the Joint Program in Survey Methodology at the University of Maryland. K.S. James from the International Institute for Population Sciences and Soumya Bhaduri from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) were the discussants.

Data Talks: Data Collection vs Data Construction: How Methodology and Substance are Inextricably Interwoven (First Seminar)

Data Collection vs Data Construction: How Methodology and Substance are Inextricably Interwoven

The first in a new NCAER seminar series on Data Collection Methodology was organised by the NCAER National Data Innovation Centre on March 18, 2021. This first seminar, presented by Stanley Presser, Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, is part of a series of provocative discussions on data collection methodologies in which distinguished speakers in the field share their views and one or more discussants reflect on them from an Indian perspective. Data Journalist Rukmini S. was be the discussant for this seminar. This first seminar was held virtually.

Professor Presser argued that data collection is a misleading metaphor because data are constructed not collected. Hence, methodology and substance are inseparable. The implication is to upend the distinction between “results” and their “interpretation”. He illustrated the argument by two examples of social change in the United States, one involving volunteering activities and the other, attendance at religious services.

professor Presser is interested in the interface between social psychology and survey measurement. His research focuses on questionnaire design and testing, the accuracy of survey responses, non-response, and ethical issues stemming from the use of human subjects. His journey as a social science researcher exemplifies the title of his talk: how methodology and substance are inextricably interwoven. His books on the subject, as co-author and Chief Editor, include Questions and Answers in Attitude Surveys (with Howard Schuman), Survey Questions (with Jean Converse), and Methods for Testing and Evaluating Survey Questionnaires (as Chief Editor). He has served as Editor of Public Opinion Quarterly, and as President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and is an elected fellow of the American Statistical Association. He was Director of the Maryland Survey Research Center from 1989 to 2000.


Rukmini S. is one of India’s few data journalists and was the first Data Editor of an Indian publication while at The Hindu. She was most recently Editor—Data and Innovation at HuffPost India. Rukmini writes mainly on gender, crime, law, caste, inequality and is passionate about engaging storytelling. She studied in Mumbai and London, worked in Delhi, and now lives and works in Chennai