The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has released the National Healthcare Disparities Report, 2005. The report tracks disparities in quality of and access to care for the general population and congressionally designated prioritiy populations. A companion report, National Healthcare Quality Report, 2005, provides an overview of the quality of health care in the U.S.

The NCHS has provided PRI with a CD-ROM containing public-use ASCII data and documentation files (PDF and Word format) for the 2000, 2001, and2002 Multiple Cause of Death Files (MCDF).

The 2000 MCDF was already available on PopNet UNIX and SodaPop. The files for 2001 and 2002 have been pulled from the CD and added to the MCDF PopNet UNIX collection. These files will be prepared for SodaPop in the near future.

The CD-ROM is available for check-out from the PRI Computer Lab, 806 Oswald Tower.

The UCR County-Level Detailed Arrest and Offense Data collection on PopNet UNIX has been updated with revised versions of existing and completely new years of data.

Data for 1999 and 2000 (available previously on UNIX and in SodaPop) were re-released due to the Miami-Dade county code changing from 025 to 086 in the data (to match the documentation).

Data for 2001 and 2002 (available in SodaPop but not on UNIX) were also re-released for this same reason.

Data for 2003 is a completely new addition to the PRI Data Archive Collection.

All of the files above will be prepared for and made available in SodaPop as soon as it is possible. In the interim, for users who wish to access these files on UNIX, see the UCR Raw Data Web Page for file path information.

The Common Core of Data (CCD) collection on PopNet UNIX has been augmented with several years of data as part of collection development.

Public Elementary/Secondary School Universe Survey:
1996-1997, 1997-1998, 1998-1999, 1999-2000, and 2003-2004

and

Local Education Agency (School District Universe) Survey:
1995-1996, 1996-1997, 1997-1998, and 2003-2004

Please note that the later years of the surveys (97+) include SAS data files. Some programming skills will be required to use the record layout for the earlier years of data. The data will be prepared and added to SodaPop to complete the collection.

For file path information, please see the CCD Raw Data Web Page.

The AARP Public Policy Institute has released a report on official and experimental poverty measures, Comparing Poverty Rates by Official and Experimental Measures in the United States (PDF). The report includes discussion of the elderly poor and medical expenditures.

NCES has recently updated its rural education website, Navigating Resources for Rural Schools. The site starts with a basic overview of how locale is defined in various NCES data collections. The section on students shows tables on enrollment and participation rates, assessment, progress through school, and expenditures and revenues per student. The section on teachers includes statistics on their credentials, salaries, attrition, and student/teacher ratios. Course offerings are found with school discipline, technology, and other measures in the section on the school environment. Sections on community and financial support provide data on parents’ satisfaction and engagement with schools, as well as customary measures of fiscal resources.

The PRI Library has received a job announcement from the Library of Congress for an analyst in Gerontology.

The announcement is posted on PRI’s jobs page at

http://athens.pop.psu.edu/allen/JobAnn.cfm?JobID=107

For a complete listing of job postings we have received, see

http://athens.pop.psu.edu/allen/JobAnnList.cfm

A new publication from the Population Council, Ethical Approaches to Gathering Information from Children and Adolescents in International Settings: Guidelines and Resources (PDF), provides guidance for investigators gathering and analyzing information about children and adolescents. The focus of the publication is on HIV/AIDS program evalutation in international settings.

The 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL) is the first assessment of the nation’s progress in adult literacy since the 1992 National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). The 2003 NAAL is a complex assessment with several components and various types of data. The primary purpose of this publication is to describe this assessment’s key features and data types. The publication reviews key elements carried over from the 1992 assessment, including a “functional” view of adult literacy and three distinct literacy areas (prose, document, and quantitative). It also introduces critical new aspects of the 2003 assessment, including new performance levels that are used to report results and new components that provide expanded data about the least-literate adults and the role of basic skills in adult literacy performance.

This methodology report provides technical information about the development, design, and conduct of the fifth grade data collection of the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (ECLS-K). Detailed information on the development of the instruments, sample design, data collection methods, data preparation and editing, response rates, and weighting and variance estimation is included.