As access to high quality data decreases, productive discussions of health policy lose their ability to be grounded in fact. Dr. Elizabeth Boyle has dedicated a career towards collecting and freely disseminating accurate information, but emphasizes that the federal government is reversing course and altering the data landscape. There are cases in which existing data has disappeared from public websites, data collections have been halted, and concerns have emerged about the quality of data that continue to be released.
In this HUP webinar, Professor Boyle will provide an overview of this new data environment and its implications for public health--drawing in part on her own experience researching women and children's health. She will also discuss the pros and cons of actions that are being undertaken to mitigate the effects of data loss.
Elizabeth Boyle is a professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Minnesota. Her research addresses questions of how gender relations, national laws, and international treaty obligations influence the health and rights of women and children, particularly in low-resource countries. Much of her work on women and children's health deploys data from multiple nationally representative demographic surveys across time and countries.