Improving Metadata Infrastructure for Complex Surveys: Insights from the Fragile Families Challenge.

Researchers rely on metadata systems to prepare data for analysis. As the complexity of data sets increases and the breadth of data analysis practices grow, existing metadata systems can limit the efficiency and quality of data preparation. This article describes the redesign of a metadata system supporting the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study on the basis of the experiences of participants in the Fragile Families Challenge. The authors demonstrate how treating metadata as data (i.e., releasing comprehensive information about variables in a format amenable to both automated and manual processing) can make the task of data preparation less arduous and less error prone for all types of data analysis. The authors hope that their work will facilitate new applications of machine-learning methods to longitudinal surveys and inspire research on data preparation in the social sciences. The authors have open-sourced the tools they created so that others can use and improve them.

Surveys, Records, and the Study of Incarceration in Families.

More than 2 million American children have a parent incarcerated, making the consequences of parental incarceration for families critical to understand. A growing literature documents significant challenges not only among incarcerated men, but also among their spouses, partners, and children. Much remains to be learned about these experiences; however, and the data available for doing so are limited. This analysis takes steps to improve the quality of available data on paternal incarceration by supplementing a leading population-based survey of families with administrative criminal history records from a state criminal justice agency. While this administrative supplement provides only a lower-bound on the extent of criminal justice involvement in our sample, it increases the number of fathers identified with criminal histories by more than 20%. Building upon such a supplement, in our current survey or future ones, stands to improve the identification of justice-involved fathers on a broader scale.

Role of mother's genes and environment in postpartum depression.

Most studies of human molecular genetics and social environment interactions on health have relied heavily on the classic diathesis-stress model that treats genetic variations and environments as being either "risky" or "protective." The biological susceptibility model posits that some individuals have greater genetic reactivity to stress, leading to worse outcomes in poor environments, but better outcomes in rich environments. Using a nontruncated measure of a chronic environmental stressor--socioeconomic status--measured by education, and two polymorphisms (5-HTTLPR and STin2 VNTR) of the serotonin transporter gene (5-HTT), we find strong evidence that some women are genetically more reactive to the environment, resulting in a crossover of risks of postpartum depression for the most reactive groups. We discuss how our approach and findings provide a framework for understanding some of the confusion in the gene-environment interaction literature on stress, 5-HTT, and depression.