The School of Demography at ANU has moved its seminars onto Zoom and so I joined a couple of dozen staff and stuents online on Tuesday 1 September for this presentation by third year PhD student Ms Mengxue Chen.
She presented the three main blocks of work that constitute her PhD research. She’ using three main data sources: the Chinese Disease Surveillance Points 2006-2016, the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey 2005-2014, and the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2005-2018. This last data set is very reminiscent of the Austalian 45 And Up study, with approximately 23,000 individuals starting in middle age.
The first two blocks of work that Mengxue described used more demographic techniques to produce lifespan disparity graphics for subpopulations such as male-female and rural-urban. These curious graphics have reversed axes to ensure that movement up the graph refers to positive health outcomes. I was wondering if it was also possible to put measures of uncertainty on to these point estimates to enhance the graphic further.
The final block of work Mengxue will undertake will consist of a three-level multilevel model to study the social determinants of health that can be estimated from the CLHLS and CHaRLS data sets. I’m looking forward to the resuts of this major analysis, and I wonder if there will be issues with missing data or loss to follow-up that can arise in large-scale longitudinal datasets. One of the other questions for Mengxue to consider was about the effects of internal migration (rural to urban, for example) that might lead, for instance, to the neessity of using time-varying covariates. It’s going to be an exciting year for Mengxue! Congratulations on a great seminar.
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