CDHA is pioneering four new pilot projects this fall:
Testing Gene-environment Interactions without Measuring the Environmental Factor
PI: Qiongshi Lu, Assistant Professor, Biostatistics & Medical Informatics
Dr. Lu seeks to use this pilot project to address a lack of epidemiological risk factors in major genome-wide association studies. His lab will work to explore if a polygenic score could come to represent these epidemiological/environmental risk factors (E-PGS).
Medicaid Expansions and Formal and Informal Care for the Elderly
PI: Yang Wang, Associate Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs
This study will use two large nationally representative datasets, The American Time Use Survey (ATUS) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), to examine how Medicaid expansion stimulated by the Affordable Care Act has changed how Americans handle informal, home-based care needs, along with demand for traditional nursing homes.
WLS Digitization
PI: Jason Fletcher, Professor, La Follette School of Public Affairs and Nora Cate Schaeffer, Professor, Sociology
In 1957, all 30,000 Wisconsin high school seniors were administered a survey and became the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study’s cohort. This project will digitize those original surveys, leading to a greater data accessibility and allowing for the survey results to be linked to census, geographic, and mortality records, and increasing the utility of the dataset overall.
Understanding the long-term relationship between Community Health and Voter Turnout in the Midwest
PI: Michal Engelman, Associate Professor, Sociology
For the first time in nearly 20 years, Wisconsinites voted for a Republican president in 2016. The shift of older white working-class workers was the headline but doesn’t tell the whole story. This project will link data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, State Voter Files, and other contextual data sources to create a resource that will allow for examining what factors predict voter choices.