2018 Summer Institute in Migration Research Methods

Program Overview 

The 2018 Summer Institute in Migration Research Methods (SIMRM) provided 8 days of training in the use and analysis of migration data at Berkeley from June 17 through June 28, 2018. It targeted early career scholars (graduate students, post-doctoral fellows, and untenured junior faculty five years from PhD). The institute drew local and national experts to train attendees and provide on-site mentorship. Most participant costs were covered thanks to award #78-18-01 from the Russell Sage Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York.

The inaugural institute focused on three topics:

  • Collecting, imputing and analyzing data related to legal status
  • Best practices and new methods for surveying immigrant and mobile populations
  • The use of new data sources (e.g., web scraping, social media data) in migration studies.

Program

Participants

Resources

Presentation Slides from 2018 Session

Legal Status in Migration Studies

Law and Migration

by Dr. Volpp

Professor Volpp goes over Immigration law basics including the admissions of noncitizens, the visa process, the green card process, and refugee/ asylum seekers. 

Introduction to collecting/imputing legal status

by Dr. Bachmeier, Dr. Van Hook

This presentation discusses the approaches to Imputing Immigrants’ Legal Status, What is Combined-Sample Multiple Imputation (CSMI)?, What is the relationship between immigrants’ legal and citizenship status and health insurance coverage?, & A Very Brief Introduction to Stata and Stata’s MI Commands. 

Causual Identification of legal status effects

by ​Dr. Hainmueller

Dr. Hainmueller presents research designs for causal inference and provides examples of randomized experiments, regression discontinuity design, and selection on observables. 

Assessing immigration and enforcement policies

by Dr. Amuedo-Dorantes, Dr. Lofstrom

Studying Mobile or Hidden Populations

Survey methods & immigrants: the pros and cons of different techniques

by Dr. Lee

Using social networks and respondent-driven sampling

by Dr. Verdery

Dr. Verdery outlines how leveraging social networks can be used for sampling and why. He explains what Respondent-Driven Sampling is and how that is used to identify the hidden populations, origins, concepts, and applications.

New computational network methods

by Dr. Feehan

Mixed method techniques: “ethnosurveys”

by Dr. Garip

This presentation thoroughly defines what Ethnosurveys captures, involves, and provides case studies from Data collected from 164 Mexican communities. 

New Data Source

Introduction to web scrapping

by Dr. Scott

This resource dives into what web data is and how can we utilize it to our benefit. It describes how one can use Import.io to extract data from a website and provides additional resources. 

Web scraping, social media, machine learning & the Hate Speech Index

by Ms. Broege

This presentation provides a A Multi-Methodological Approach to Identifying Contemporary Online Hate Speech. It goes through how we can define hate speech, develop a dataset, and develop instruments. 

Visualizing (spatial) data using data on refugee camps

by Dr. Frontiera

Instructors from 2018 session